my lip - day eleven

i have never had a sun blisters on my lip like this before. the amount of pain i get from talking and direct sunlight is tremendous.
my face is almost completely peeled and my hands started just this morning.

yesterday i felt so lost in the streets of LA PAZ with this pain on my lower lip. a drowsiness came over me that i hadn´t experienced. i guess because of this, i had a hard time looking for two simple things: a money exchange booth (which are everywhere) and a large bag to bring back all my gifts to chile for christmas.

i´m going to take it easy and probably head out to copacabana on monday.
hopefully.

last night CESAR´s wife collapsed at her home in COCHABAMBA from stress. when i got home from bumbling around the streets, i found him in a silent panic trying to figure out if he should get on a eight hour bus ride to see his wife. he was loosing it a bit, going from talking about the mafia to how he can´t understand why his son just can´t get his mother to the hospital. i tried to make him understand that his son is only 13 years old and at that age rarely would someone know how to react in those conditions. i have some experience in this because my mother is highly allergic to mangos and celery. on one occasion; i was 18 years old my mother had an attack so severe, that the doctors pronounced her dead from the neck down at one point of their rescue. it was my father and i alone who kept her in a conscious state, until the ambulance arrived. even though this has happened on so many occasions with my mother, still to this day, i can´t get use to it. i can´t imagine poor JESUS, CESAR´s son, trying to cope with seeing his mother in such a state. your grandparents, okay i can understand that, you see them in a state of relative weakness from when you were a child. but your mother? the woman that with all her strength, gave you life, on the floor barely breathing? i don´t know any child that wouldn´t panic when seeing their mother like that.
at one point i started to get frustrated with CESAR because of what he was saying, triggered by his own frustration of not being able to be there with his family. instead of vocalizing this frustration, i politely listened to him rant for a few hours as he vented about the situation. even this morning at 7am, as i was reading in bed, CESAR was sitting on a chair beside me, continuing where he left off last night. albeit, he was a lot calmer this morning and more content knowing that his wife was now okay. i continued to listen politely and tried to assure him that everything was going to be okay.

having hardly known this man, i am now wrapped up in all of his personal life affairs. i don´t really mind, because now i consider him a friend... and i guess that´s what friends do.



to a degree.