Three Guys and a Gal
Wednesday night I went up to the roof to see the stars. The stars of the Andes, the lights of the Andes – gold – trickling through the mountains, lightning in the south.
On Monday, David, our interpreter, told us about the condors of the Andes, great birds with a wingspan of nearly ten feet, birds so enormous, they would steal babies and small children. I guess Disney’s “In Search of the Castaways” – one of my all-time favs – wasn’t that far off.
Anyway, Thursday was a little more crazy than quiet stars on a dark night in South America. Thursday, David and our lawyer arrived five and a half hours late due to a whole variety of complications. They brought one of the French families with them to essentially trade spots with us.
We had just enough time to visit the ATM in the town square as a policeman escorted a convict in handcuffs to the police department – an exercise in humiliation, as David later explained – before walking to the court.
About an hour later, our judge greeted us with many congratulations as we signed papers to legally become Yali’s parents. Yali was so thrilled by the news that he slept through the whole stack of paperwork.
Photocopies, more photocopies, a little more running around, David seamlessly riddling off multiple conversations in English, Spanish, and French in the streets, and a completely redone birth certificate for little Yali where they deliberated several minutes about whether or not to place a hyphen between my maiden name and married name, then…
Back on the road. It was four o’clock. Yali fell asleep.
“Good”, I thought to myself as we once again traversed Rembrandt-worthy mountain backdrops, “we’ll be home by dinnertime.”
Half an hour later… “Coffee? Ten minutes!” David explained, pulling over near a patch of maize and banana trees at a roadstop cafe.
Forty minutes later, he emerged with Oxbear and the two lawyers after a full meal of farmer’s cheese, chorizos, and arepas. My arm was about broken off from the weight of Yali’s head.
We continued.
Traffic stops about every mile through the mountain for construction zones. Just one of them lasted twenty minutes.
“We cannot take my car into Bogota until after 7:30,” David explained then.
I forgot about that whole car system in the capital where you can only drive vehicles during certain hours of the day depending on the number of your car.
We wouldn’t be home by dinnertime.
Just before 7:30 – a baby so sound asleep in my lap an atomic bomb wouldn’t wake him – we dropped by an ATM to pay the lawyer. Nine transactions later – don’t ask me how our bank allowed it – Oxbear emerged with the cash which he counted in stacks in the front seat.
“I’ll keep watch outside,” David told us.
One hour of mucho tráfico later, we finally stumbled into the B&B for the night. To sum up our day, David has been amazing, and Yali is now officially one of the family.