A Cut and a Communist

A Cut and a Communist           February 2, 2017 This first blog post of 2017 just flew off my laptop.  It's a bit out of  sequence, since I haven't yet written about the start of our adventure  in NYC.  Hold on, that one will appear.  But, yesterday I had an  interesting experience at Barcelo, the fancy hotel where Bruce & I  stayed for our first night in Guatemala City.  It's the kind of place  where we never stay - unless we're arriving in a third world country  at 9pm, and the hotel offers shuttle service from the airport.   With "resort" services at our disposal, however, we decided to take  a swim in the beautiful outdoor pool yesterday morning before we  checked out.  When I reached down to remove what I had thought  might be a small pebble on the floor of the hot tub,I cut my finger on  the grout around a water hole. It was not a deep cut but it bled quite a  lot and I immediately warned the life guard about the danger.  Of  course, he leapt to my rescue.  In a flash Sergio, a paramedic, was at  my service, nattily dressed in a formal suit and tie, with a big bag of  medical supplies in tow.  Attending him was a tall, handsome young  man named, oddly enough, Lenin (first name).  Both men were  wearing name tags.   Sergio carefully dabbed a solution that was reddish brown and stingy  on my finger.  He followed up with a spray solution and an abundance  of band-aids. While all of this was going on, Bruce & I couldn't help but tell them  about our paramedic son.  I knew that Matt would be very interested  in this process.  I also wondered if Sergio was employed full time by  the hotel, waiting for just such an occasion, however humble, to jump  into action.   Of course, I had to sign a waiver, complete with my passport number and room number, attesting to the fact that I had been given medical  care.  In retrospect, I wished that they had given ME a document of  some kind, telling me what medications they had used on me. Finally, being curious about Lenin's name, I had to find out the story,  which he freely told me. His dad had been a university student who  was studying economics.  He admired communism and had wanted  to give his son the names of two famous communists, Lenin and  Stalin. His mother put her foot down at the middle name and he  became Lenin Stuart.  With America's long-standing aversion to communism, I don't think I've ever met anyone in the USA who  would want to name their child these particular names, despite  our openness to some pretty unusual names.  It made me wonder  about political conditions in Guatemala thirty years ago, which was the middle of the civil war here.  Hard to escape the reach of  politics.   A day later, the band-aids have been removed.  The finger is fine.   Sergio and Lenin did an excellent job.                   Bruce enjoying the hot tub where I had my mishap.