Stranger in a No Longer Strange Land

In 1999 I took a screenwriting class in London while I was waiting for my job at Goldsmiths College to start. The first part of each class we examined a few screenplays and the techniques and themes the author employed. One theme the instructor liked was the ‘stranger in a strange land’ theme.


Saturday I was walking over the bridge to the market in “Old” La Lima. As school buses with colorful curtains and neatly scrawled sayings like “Dios es mi guia” honked their way over the bridge, a cart being pulled by a gently trotting horse passed me. A man with his wife, perched on the bar between the seat and the handlebars and holding a baby, pedaled by. The smell of smoke from burning cane fields filled the air and the haze blocked the view of the mountains surrounding San Pedro. As I looked over the bridge railing, I saw people with fishing line trying to catch lunch and others washing themselves and their clothes in the muddy river water. The thing that struck me was this no longer seemed “strange” or different.

I remember when I got off the plane in Guayaquil in 1979 for my first overseas job. The first thing that struck me was the odor. There was no real earthy odor. Coming from the Deep South and thinking the smell of the earth and bayous of the Deep South was so much richer than the smells of Indiana lakes and cornfields where I had gone to high school, I thought going farther south, actually crossing the equator, would make the earth smell even stronger. I’m not sure why I thought that way. After my surprise that there wasn’t an overpowering earth smell, everything else was different and strange: from the size of the people to the condition of their cars, from people selling little bags of water to beggars with twisted limbs (I later found out their parents would often bind and twist their limbs from birth, so they could have a career as a beggar). When I later wandered the market of Guayaquil , I gawked at everything: from the hunks of animal flesh hanging in the sun and swarming with flies to men with cages full of brightly feathered parrots. All those things are in the La Lima market, but I don’t really notice any more. I guess it is time for me to come home. Miami airport always strikes me as very strange.