Things that just blow the mind...

No, friends it's not just the fact that today I walked by a man blow torching a dozen legs of some large beast as they rested in the muck and mire of the street. Remind me not to eat there.

And it's not just the phenomenon that I can look out my window at what appears to be a tropical paradise for the intensity of the sunlight, only to open my door to the blistering cold.

Or how about the way that an old women peeing on the corner of a busy intersection attracts zero attention but the white girl who almost trips over her cannot seem to get out of the spotlight.

And it's not even the incident after giving the final exam to some students in class two where myself and two boys (one of whom was the class monitor) were locked in the classroom on the second floor of a building which was basically deserted at that time in the evening and which the only window looked down a frightening two stories to remnants of some long forgotten construction project and shards of glass. Of course not a single one of the other thrity-eight students in the class would answer their phones and every single one of the teachers (aside from me of course) was in a very important meeting and would call me back later. A hair-raising 20 minutes later the benevolence of some stranger, who heard our shouts from the window, freed us to continue our lives. If I ever find out who locked us in...

Nor is it the reality that twists of fate prompt deeper relationships almost within a heartbeat. Today after the exam there was a meeting in the teacher's lounge, no rest for a foreign teacher there, so having nothing to do I headed towards my home past the football field where, low and behold, half of the students that I teach were resting. They, sheepishly, called me to come and sit with them, which I gladly did and had an extremely interesting conversation with about a dozen of my students who I have not had the opportunity to speak to much. Opportunities here seem to lie in wait around every corner, but don't blink or you'll miss them.

It's no single one of those things that blow my mind... it's the combination. And what a combination it is.