music at home

I think I wrote about this before...maybe not.  Our little apartment building goes half-way through the block.  That means that all our apartments are perpendicular to the entrance street.  The side street on the west is Fiallo.  There is parking lot, manned 24 hours a day.  The music is unbelievable loud!  Apparently, the attendant lives in an old car parked just inside the wall, and has a tv hot wired into the power pole on the street.  There is also a car wash dude on-site, who has a radio.  They both run their devices at full volume, most of the day and night.  The men in our apartment courtyard have all talked about turning the garden hose from the rooftop on them;using a bbgun (no worries there, no on has a bb gun), and other violent means of getting back at the loud music.  One night in mid-December, I walked around the corner and asked the dude to turn the music down.  He apologized 10 times, and turned it down.

Fast forward to late January.  There is a different parking lot dude there now, and last night I walked around the corner and made the same request.  He immediately turned it down, but wasn't very happy about it.  He's very young, probably not more than 16 years old.  He's dirty, and I'm guessing he's hungry, too.  While it's a job, it probably doesn't pay more than 100 pesos a day (less then $10).  Tonight, I walked around there again, and I could see him tense as I came around the wall.  I gave him a container of chicken stew with rice and some tortillas,leftovers from our dinner (which was pretty danged good!).  He had no idea of what to say.  But, he managed a "gracias".     

All we have to do is try to put ourselves in the place of the other person, sometimes.  The young man had no idea that his music was offending anyone.  I have no idea of what it is like to be hungry and jobless.  Think I'll take him cookies tomorrow.