Earings

I just wrote another post, but I have been wanting to share this story for a couple of weeks and keep forgetting...

My first or second week here in La Caya, I stopped into a Colmado (basically a corner store that sells basic food and household goods) right by my technology center. The woman who runs it was there with either her daughter or neice or maybe she was just a neighbor. I'm not really sure. Anyway, we started talking and I told them who I was and what I was doing here and my usual speech about how I'm a peace corps volunteer and I'll be living here for two years, teaching computer and English classes and so on and so forth. Anyway, so they're excited to meet me and I'm excited to meet them and I tell the younger girl, who is probably about my age, that I really like her earings. She grabs them and looks at me astonished like she can't believe I would like something of hers. Then she takes them out of her ears and hands them to me.

I look at her and try to explain to her in my broken spanish that I just wanted to tell her that I like them, not that I wanted them. She understood what I was saying and said it didn't matter, because she wanted me to have them and she had others at her house. I tried to give them back, but she just smiled and said, No, they are yours now.

It was such a small yet great gesture. It made me want to the same for someone else. Being able to give something you have to someone else, because you know it will mean something to them. Even if you too like what you are giving away.

As this girl showed me by giving me her earings, without really saying much about it. It doesn't matter that she didn't have the earings anymore (or whatever it is: a pair of earings, clothes, food), the point is she knew the earings would make someone else happy, and that is what really matters.

A true Dominican value. And one I hope to keep and practice for the rest of my life, no matter where I am.