Tossing a Coin to Decide Which Utility Service to Pay
My Problems in Barranquilla and the Ones I Have in Petaluma
“We have a real problem,” my wife tells me with a serious face.
I know real problems. I don’t like real problems. And just like that, I have a flashback to when my mom raised us in Barranquilla, Colombia.
As a single mom, she struggled to make ends meet. She had to toss a coin to decide which utility service would get paid, and none of them were ever current, so the decision was more about which one would be less behind.
It is tough to decide whether to pay for the water or the electricity. That would never be a board game. If anything, it would be a sick “Would you rather…?” — “Would you rather be cold or stinky?”
When the electricity fell behind, the utility company would send a technician to our house to cut some hardware, so we had no power and couldn’t easily reconnect it.
After that, my mom would go to a part of the city known as “Miami Caño.”
Miami evokes images of tall palm trees under which attractive men and women would skate while holding cocktails with tiny umbrellas.
But the word “caño” means sewage. *Miami Caño* is a creative way to describe a sketchy area of town…
