A place I pass by every day

     Bodega is the name for a small shop here.  They are tucked into homes like spider webs hiding in nooks and crannies.  To an outsider, there don’t seem to be any businesses around, just houses made of brick, cement or adobe often times with metal bars over the doors and windows.  To someone from the barrio though, bodegas are easy to spot.  It’s a great place to pick up something you forgot to buy in the market and a great way to help out neighbors and give the local economy a boost.  Often times, people turn the front part of their home into a shop and sell to anyone who taps on the window or door or calls out “Seño” (leaving off the final part of Señor or Señora for whoever might be selling). 

     There’s a bodega that I pass by every day that fascinates me.  Unlike nearly all the rest, it isn’t a small converted room at the front of a home, it is a large portion of the home, but the space is used in an absurd manner.  A large wooden door opens up to light the dim cement room, which has a ceiling reaching two stories.  Crates of old beer bottles sit off to one side, while a long row of shelves with matches, eggs, oil, sugar, toilet paper, rice, pens and other odds and ends spans the length of the 5 meter by 20+ meter room.  Towards the back of the room are some stairs that lead up to a loft, upon which all can see Don Prado and his wife’s bed and other personal items stacked along the wall.  I rarely shop there because I feel uncomfortable entering and calling out to the hard-of-hearing Don Prado and fearing that he will crawl out of his bed after a siesta and be startled by my presence.

     The strangest thing isn’t that they’re so poor that they have to live inside their shop, but that they rent many (perhaps 50) tiny, dilapidating rooms from other parts of their house to other people and families living in poverty and all (including he and his wife) share the bathroom or two that exist there but don’t even have a toilet, but rather a hole in the floor leading to the sewage pipes!  It’s a mystery why they choose to live in such poor conditions when they could easily sleep in a different room or hang a curtain between their room and the bodega.  Some things simply cannot be understood.