You will always find a connection

Greetings to all,

Well i have been back here in Buenos Aires now for about 5 days and all ready i have been having quite the good time.

I think you will enjoy this short story that demonstrates the reality of our worldwide brotherhood and ALL of its implications.

On Wednesday i went out in service with the English group (thats where i belong while im here so from here on out when i refer to the “group” this is what i am talking about). It was such a joy to finally get to see all of my dear friends again. But as is the case here there were a few new faces that i encountered this day. One of them goes by the name of Harmony Paulley. A lovely girl who although being just a visitor here, had decided to join us in service. As i got to know her a little bit i came to learn that much like me on my first visit here, she had come for a relatively short period of time, one month (short by backpacking, world traveling, foreign country moving people standards anyways), she had been drawn to Argentina by reading about it and being fascinated by its charms, and had wanted to study Spanish, and was all and all just looking for an adventure. She also hailed from a place not all that unknown to me…Wisconsin. Thats right everyone i found a cheesehead even down here.

Not getting to the interesting part of the story.

As we were working together in service we are enjoying a quite enjoyable conversation with each other about the many interesting aspects of expat living…yada yada yada. When out of no where she asks me if i like Ethiopian food. Ethiopian food? Who asks such a thing? However the thing that took this normally strange question into the realm of “Twilight Zone Weird” was the fact that only 3 days previous to this i had for the first time in my life experienced Ethiopian cuisine. On my last night in Chicago my good friend the Dutchman (Stephan) and the lovely Leslie who also were on their last night in Chicago, led a group of us to a quaint little place on the north side to enjoy the finest Ethiopian food in all of Chicago. As i am relating this information to her with all the dullness that you can possibly imagine me doing (Think about my best man speech from Suprney’s wedding), she tells me that she knows the story already. How may you ask? She knows Alex and Paula Romero from Glen Ellyn Spanish who were with us at the final goodbye dinner that night. When she told them about her trip down to BsAs (Buenos Aires in case you couldn’t figure that out) they naturally told her about the person they just had dinner with who also was going down to BsAs…e.g. me! And they told her to freak me out she should start asking me about it. Well needless to say i was thoroughly werided out by the whole thing (Thanks Alex).

So what does this needlessly long story demonstrate? That no matter where you go, no matter when in you life you go, no matter who you meet, and no matter how well you think you have escaped from your world, there is always something, or in this case someone, that will find a way to reach out and touch you even if ever so slightly no matter how far you run away.

In laymans terms in six degrees of separation you will always end up back at Kevin Bacon, or in this case Alex and Paula.