Reality Check

A wrong turn that’s all it took for me to start freaking out.

Miami is a city that is always under construction. Thus, updating your GPS every week is a must. If you’re not updating it constantly you’ll be in trouble.

Normally the places I go to, I already know the route, so I don’t think about updating my GPS as often – a price that I soon had to pay for.

When I was in the mall, my father called me to tell me that I had to go an uncle’s house to pick an envelope. No problem right?

So, I turn on the GPS and it says: Warning this GPS has not been updated in six months. I ignored that warning and put the address I was supposed to go to.

As I’m driving, I realize that I have to get on the turnpike and the exit I’m supposed to take doesn’t exist!

I decide to take another exit – which my GPS didn’t have. The minute I got out of the turnpike, I regretted my decision. I had entered Calle 8. Calle 8 is a very long street. Depending on what part of Calle 8 you’re in depends on what kind of neighborhoods you’ll see. Normally, Calle 8 is associated as a sketchy area. A place, where a lot of illegal immigrants or new immigrants live in, I happened to turn into the sketchiest part of Calle 8.

My first instinct was to make sure my car was locked and my cellphone was close enough, so I could call 911 – incase anything were to happen. As I kept on driving to get out of there, I started actually looking at my surroundings. And then it clicked! I was just in a poor zone of Calle 8. Everything was in Spanish (my native tongue) and it looked a lot like the poor-middle class neighborhoods in Nicaragua.

Then I realized, I was slowly giving my back to my home – Nicaragua. I’ve been living in the US for such a long time that the minute I see poverty, I think I’m going to get robbed or something bad is going to happen to me. Yet, Nicaragua is extremely poor and I’ve never felt unsafe.

I’ve been living in a world that is controlled by materialism. And mere thought of poverty, it is quickly associated with crime and danger. But, if that were the case then Nicaragua would be extremely dangerous. Instead, Nicaragua is extremely safe. Calle 8 wasn’t dangerous, it was just a piece of Latin America that had made itself at home in Miami. It wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t dangerous. Sometimes we need that reality check to remember that money isn’t everything and poverty still exists.