I was planning to go to yoga this afternoon, however as I walked out from class an older Panamanian woman, with a young girl, called me over and started asking me question after question; Do you go to school at Habla Ya? Where are you from? How old are you? Is your house close to here? On and on…I got parts of what she was asking. It was raining outside and she wanted to give me a ride. I explained that I lived very close and she immediately knew it was Elva’s house and wanted to come over to say hi.
Unfortunately Elva was not home. This woman kept chittering to me in Spanish at a million miles a minute. God knows how I picked up through her extremely rapid Spanish that she wanted me to go grocery shopping with them. I figured what the hell and hoped in her car…
Grocery shopping was very interesting! The woman was shopping like she was stalking up for the end of the world…15 cartons of milk, more pounds of chick legs that I care to remember, 12 bars of soap…at this point I started to worry.
Was she kidnapping me and this was to be my ration in her basement cell? Was she going to try and make me pay for all this? Was I going to be trafficked into the Panamanian sex trade? Was the girl accompanying her merely a strategically placed prop to lure me in?
I made sure to say to her multiple times, in as best Spanish as I could, that after shopping I needed to go home and speak with Elva as she would be worried about where I was. I would have just left, but I was worried about offending her (due to my overly active imagination concocting an unlikely situation). I am here to write the tale, so yes she did take me back home eventually!
I later learned that Louisa-Marie is in fact a friend of Elva’s, and is a lonely woman who talks a lot because she lives in a big house all alone. In Elva’s words she is very nice but, MUY LOCA!
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