From Nicoya to San Jose on a Mission, 1958
In memory of
Alcides and with love to his brother Javier, who cared for him at a distance as
well as on pilgrimages like this one.
For most of his
life Javier’s brother Alcides had epileptic seizures, but there was no doctor
to help him in Nicoya, and there was no money to go to San Jose until 1958,
when Alcides was twenty and
Javier was twenty-two and had saved six months of his salary from
his first job. Then he, his brother, and their mother set out for San
Jose.
This involved a
horse, an ox-driven cart, a raft, a train, and a taxi over about 95 miles, most
on land and about five miles on water. They had to leave in the morning
because there was a change of tide, when there wasn’t enough water to take the
raft on the river between Puerto Jesus and Punta Arenas. So they first
took two horses from Nicoya for about seven miles through the bush and
hills and mountains to a wider space, where they took an ox-driven cart to
Puerto Jesus. Then they took a raft for four hours to travel about five
miles to Punta Arenas, where they spent the night. The next day they took
the train—electric, not charcoal-fueled--from Punta Arenas to San Jose, where
they took a taxi from the station to Pension Palma. There he asked his
mother and brother to stay inside so they wouldn’t get lost, and he set out to
find a doctor. He found an eye doctor close to the pension and offered to
pay if the eye doctor could help him find a doctor who could help his epileptic
brother. The doctor refused the money but directed Javier to a Doctor
Cuevas, and once everything was arranged, Javier took his brother and their
mother to see this doctor, who gave them three medicines for his brother.
The pills worked like magic. For a year all seizures stopped. When
they started again, Javier telegrammed Dr. Cuevas to find out what to do, and
the doctor told them to wait two days until the body had forgotten that it
“knew” the medicines and knew how to fight against them. Then, after the
body forgot, the medicines would work their magic again.
The next time Javier took his brother to San Jose, they
went by plane—a DC-10--and it took fifteen minutes instead of a day and a half.
This story represents to me part of what I love in
Javier—his spirit and his way of finding a solution. The journey to San
Jose seems almost heroic and mythic to me, but there are other things Javier
has done that also impress me because they show an individual, brave approach—actually
a way of bravely approaching individuals he didn’t know. For example,
finding a parking place near City College was almost impossible and certainly
stressful until one day he noticed an elderly woman out in her yard and saw
that she didn’t have a car parked in her driveway. He explained that he
was a teacher and would pay her $30.00 a month if she would let him park in her
driveway. She was very happy to get the money and to make it look as if
someone was coming and going from her house, and it reduced the stress in
Javier’s life. Also for several years,
he had a break between classes and wanted to rest without having to go
home. He spoke to a janitor who gave him the key to a tiny storage room
where Javier could lie down and rest among the mops, brooms, and brushes.
This “finding a way” goes way back to his childhood, when
in order to see movies (Perils of Nyoka and other wonders) he became the
drummer boy, walking around the square in Nicoya and beating on a drum while
another boy followed behind with a sandwich board giving the address of the man
who showed the movies in his home for the five cents that Javier the drummer
and the sandwich board kid didn’t have to pay because they worked for the
establishment. In 1944, when he was 8 years old, he had a lucrative year. He worked as an altar boy and made more
money than his teacher because he served at marriages, funerals, and every
other rite of passage, and the teacher just taught. Javier made $150 a month. The teacher made $120. But the
priest who hired him moved on, and Javier lost his position as the altar
boy. Once, when he saw a man repairing
bicycles, he told the man that he could do that and showed the man, who then
gave him a job repairing bicycles. He gave the money he made to his
mother. After all, he didn’t need money if he could play drums and get
into movies free. He says that while they were growing up, his
brother got all the attention because of his special needs, so
Javier learned to fend for himself. When he was sent off to high
school in Liberia (Costa Rica), he was only twelve, and he was scared, but
he had no choice because there was no secondary school in Nicoya. He had a partial scholarship, but that paid
only for bed and board. He and his
family had to come up with $10.00 a month at a time when he wasn’t earning $150
as an altar boy. He cried whenever he
was alone. Other people were accompanied by their parents, but he didn’t
have anyone to go with him. His father, who had never married his
mother, had another family and
wasn’t around, and his mother had to stay in their home and run the small
store, the pulpuria, to make enough money to send ten dollars a month for
Javier’s schooling in Liberia as well as to make ends meet at home. So
Javier just found groups and joined them without waiting to be invited.
His anatomy teacher, a doctor, saw that Javier was just scraping by
financially, so he gave Javier a job collecting the fees that patients hadn’t
paid. Soon Javier was able to write home to his mother, “You don’t have
to send $10. Just send $5.” Javier was making half of his tuition
on his own.
Over the years, Javier tried other ways to help his
family in Nicoya. His mother and sisters were washing all clothes and
bedding by hand, so he bought them a washing machine. They became
hysterical because they couldn’t stand change. “No! No! Take
it away!” they all cried. But Javier begged them to give it a chance, and
a few days later, when he offered to take it away, they said they’d keep it after
all. They also screamed in protest when he bought them a TV, but
sometimes he’d come home and feel the warmth of a TV recently turned off.
When he sent money to his mother, she bought a second house. After the
death of his second sister, the math wizard who had taught him algebra when he
was a little boy, he found out that she had fifty-thousand dollars in her bank
account. She hadn’t left the house for years, but she’d done business!
Later it was clear that Javier was blessed. When he
had a wife and four children to support, he went for an interview at Los Gatos,
and the director turned out to be a Mormon missionary who had served in Costa
Rica. Once he found out that Javier was from that country, he conducted
the whole interview in Spanish and offered Javier a job on the spot. He
also got Javier credited for previous teaching, and with that extra sum of
$5,000, Javier made a down payment (25% of the cost-$20,000!) on a house in
Fremont, one of the homes where he now lives.
The second year at Los Gatos, when the Mormon director couldn’t
offer Javier any classes, he contacted the director at Terra Linda and told him
about Javier and what a good teacher he was. Before Javier arrived at
Terra Linda, he had already been hired. Then, a couple of years later,
there was one full-time position open for a Spanish instructor at City College
and 122 applicants. Javier got the job!
He says his
philosophy in life is “Sé
amable, y pone mucho esfuerzo.” Be kind and try hard. He seems to
live by his philosophy.
Alcides, Javier's
brother, passed on October 31, 2016.
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