A Story of Love, a Heinous Hole, and the Grossest Solution of Natural Ingredients You Could Ever Imagine

But before we get there, what comes once a year and is more stressful than anything else? If you’re in a relationship, I bet Valentines Day is one of the top five answers to that question. Where’s Steve Harvey and a survey?

As Valentine’s Day quickly approaches, and all the men are trying to figure out how to please their significant other, at least just enough so that they can hold onto them, or at least won’t have to hear about how they should have tried harder, all while trying not to break the bank…it’s a tough balancing act of requited (not a typo) love, potential loss, and not burning too much cash. On the other side, the women, or (insert whatever pleases you here), are hoping to outdo their peers, friends, colleagues, etc., and show that they are more loved, and more appreciated, and maybe in some ways, better than people with significant others who didn’t seem to try at all, or tried really hard, but just sucked at it.

Love is a hard gig in general, without some looming date that not only must be remembered, but also must be conquered as though one were heading to war. You need to be vigilant, focused, and prepared. All your ducks must be in a row. I don’t think love usually has a happy ending.

True, there are some outliers, people who detest the celebration.

They don’t fall for those shenanigans. They are deeper than that. They say things like, “Valentines is every day.” I hope so, outlier. For your sake. There is a lot of pressure out there.

And now with social media clogging the arteries of our very souls, the pressure has increased a thousand fold past when you were in elementary school, and you put a card on a desk, or into a little colorful construction paper “card receptacle” that you taped to the edge of your desk…and if you were lucky, you got several cards, and if you were really lucky, you got one of those chalky candy hearts inserted in with the card too. Yeah, Valentine's Day is a dog-eat-dog concoction of human misery, meant to be some much-awaited expression of love that culminates at some Everest high peak for at least one day every year. The day of love. Valentine’s Day.

February 14th makes you think though, about love, and what it means. I know what it means. I have seen what true love means. I have seen the greatest expression of love maybe ever witnessed on the face of the earth, and it didn’t involve flowers. I am not talking about a movie here, or a show, or a book, and I’m including the Holy Bible. I saw this most epic display of love with my own eyes, and I will never be the same again.

The day had started before the sun was even thinking about coming up.

My father had signed me up to head to Tijuana, Mexico (TJ) with a group of people from his nondenominational church, and link up with a catholic church group, to help build a house for some family who probably really needed it.

I had driven through TJ many times on my way to a little house my parents owned about thirty minutes beyond Rosarito Beach (link to Google Maps). I’d had a long stretch of surfing some famous spots down there, going sometimes every weekend for months on end. The surf was great, and the tacos were cheap. But I had never seen THE Tijuana, the outskirts of the city. The part of TJ that had those little dots of houses, visible from the other side of the fence, which sat side by side up loose-dirt hills with thin patches of grass. You never thought about who lived there. But people did. A lot of them.

I remember sleeping in the backseat of a friend of my father’s car.

It was an SUV, and the backseats hadn’t become comfortable yet. Back then, they made them cheaply and like a torture device, figuring if you were sitting in the back, that you weren’t important. It was painful, and my aching back was already waking me with searing signals of future complications that could happen if I didn’t shift my position every fifteen minutes or so.

We had met up with the Catholics on the US side, ate breakfast at un restaurante, and headed across. We could only bring so many supplies over because the Mexican government wanted people to buy from their side of the fence. It was completely understandable. But when we’d arrived at the actual building site, it wasn’t as understandable as I thought. This place was hell. Well at least to young me’s eyes at the time. There were cement shacks here and there, but many places were just hodgepodge pieces of plywood nailed together or, in the case of the family whose house we were building, two pieces of plywood leaned together teepee-style with a ratty blue tarp over the top, holding it together. The worst part was, that the “family” was a single mother and three kids. No husband. That family lived - actually lived - inside two pieces of plywood and a tarp. Less than a greenhouse, and as far as I could tell, they weren’t thriving off photosynthesis.

It sickened me, and incensed me to work harder, and as I looked out at the homes surrounding us, that were more junk than home, I realized that we would not be making a dent in the work needed to be done.

We would have to build thousands and thousands of homes to make even the slightest difference. But I also realized, that for this woman and her children, this house would make all the difference in the world. I berated myself for complaining about the car ride. I berated myself for complaining about not getting enough sleep. Heck, I probably complained about my toast not having enough butter on it at breakfast. I hate when they do that.

I think everyone was feeling the same thing as we toiled in the hot sun, until it became almost dark, and cold, and I knew that we were all weary but feeling like we were making a difference. We’d given up a day, got some blisters, sunburns, maybe we got hungry once or twice, but seeing that woman there as we handed over the keys to a real home, with windows, insulation, and doors, her children laughing and playing inside, well… it made everything worth it.

That, people, is love. That’s the day I learned how to do it. How to not only show it, but mean it. You sacrifice your time, your energy, your money for someone else in need. You will never forget that. I won’t ever forget it. What we did far exceeded anything I had ever seen or been a part of, to help another individual who couldn’t help themselves. I remember patting myself on the back for that. We had changed that woman’s life, and her children’s lives forever. Amen.

But don’t go just yet. That was nothing.

That wasn’t even a pimple on the rear of the greatest expression of love I had, and to this day, still have ever seen. That was only the prelude to maybe God showing me what love really was. That I had to go through all of that, just to realize that what I had done, was next to nothing compared to what I was about to see.

I had been sitting on the cursed straight-backed seat, waiting for the family who would be driving me back home, back across the border, where things made sense, and contained people who didn’t live in cardboard shacks. I was already getting cranky again. Helping someone was cool, but now I just wanted to go home, get in bed, watch some television, maybe stretch out my back. I’m pretty sure I was hungry.

Everyone was saying their goodbyes, probably patting each other on the back with well-deserved affection. It was a bit of a feat after all. Building an entire home in a day.

Then I saw him. He must have been two or three.

Like I had said, the sun was going down, but you could still see, even though the hills were casting dark shadows over the home we had just built. The little Tijuana resident was ambling through various piles of junk and wreckage, but there were plenty of ways to have fun, or get into trouble as a young lad in the Tijuana hills neighborhoods. It was the opposite of child proof, and I couldn’t figure out what the little guy was doing wandering around, with the sun going down, by himself.

It appeared though, that he wasn’t alone, another boy, probably six or seven, maybe eight, (I’m terrible with ages, but he was young), was riding through the area on his BMX bike, evidently to keep an eye on the little one. Probably his brother.

There are these pits though, dug throughout the neighborhoods, that are filled with feces, paper, urine, trash, and dirt.

They are awful things, uncovered, smelly, and probably twenty feet deep. When they fill up a hole, they simply dig another hole and put a little privacy shack over it until it is filled and then they repeat the process. They don’t have plumbing there. Not like we do, anyways. A water truck comes by and fills up blue plastic drums with water and the people take buckets and pots and fill them up for the day’s duties. So, yeah, they need to defecate somewhere, an unfortunate human process, and there is not a toilet for friggin miles.

There was a particularly heinous hole that was pointed out to us, which was filled, smelled like hell and death, and disease, and was actually quite gray in color. I remember staring at that hole when we’d arrived, thinking, these people should cover that. Someone could fall in there. But then I noticed five other holes just like it, and gathered that the people desired walls, over poop-hole-covers. I understood.

If I had to choose between a poop-hole-cover and a wall to keep me warm at night…not even a question, I would take the wall.

So here I am sitting in the back of this godforsaken, not-really-a-seat having car, and I’m watching this little boy stumble around on less that practiced legs near the hideous hole. The gray one. In my delirium, I think to myself — friggin little guy lives here, two-years-old or not, he knows this place better than I do.

Then, to my surprise, the little boy falls right into the hole. Right into it! No pomp, no fanfare. Just disappears into the gray hideous goo, of which, I thought might actually be quite firm, given how it looked to have a hard layer of gray on top that sort of looked like, but didn’t smell like, cement.

There was nobody around that I could see, and I won’t lie here, it took me a moment to process… but I didn’t have to process long, because before my hand went to the car door, the older boy, who was in fact his brother, rode his BMX bike directly into the hole after him. He didn’t stick on top. It wasn’t thick. I’m telling you, it was like he had ridden it into a filled pool, and simply disappeared into the gray. Nothing was sticking out. Not him, not his bike, and certainly not his little brother. I don’t remember him calling out for help before he went in. He literally, and simply, rode his bike in after his little brother. A hero.

I was out the door running, but someone must have seen it happen too.

Three Mexican ladies were running towards the hole, where the BMX-riding hero literally surfaced with the little boy above his head. They were covered in a dripping funk that I could never fully, or should, explain here. This young man who I doubted even knew how to swim was kicking his legs, keeping him and his little brother above, not water, but poop. He wasn’t wading in it either. He was swimming in it.

One of the ladies had snatched up the little one who was crying. And for good reason. If you dive into a pool of crap and come out not crying, there’s something wrong with you.

After breaking that plastic-like surface of gray horror, the smell intensified by a factor of three thousand.

It was enough to gag a maggot, and to cause it to throw up and possibly die.

The other two women pulled up the older boy who couldn’t stand on his feet, and had dropped to the ground unconscious. One of the women was beating on his chest. Probably some version of CPR that she’d seen on a television… somewhere… but more than likely not here.

My stepmother was fluent in Spanish, and she was there barking out orders that I didn’t know origins or the effect of.

I mean how do you deal with two kids you’ve just retrieved from a gray hole of feces, and urine, and whatever else, with one crying — thankfully — and one completely unconscious? The women were in an uproar, screaming and calling out to God I think, wondering how their son had been taken from them on this day of celebration, where their rich white neighbors came and built their friend a house?

Having been a trained EMT, I knew the boy to not be dead, but only fainting. He was so terrified, so horrified that he’d lost his little brother forever in that stinking hole, that he hadn’t even realized that he’d saved him. He would go in and out of fainting spells, the women beating on his chest every time he would close his eyes again. Finally, I convinced my stepmom to tell them that the boy was only fainting, and to have him sit and put his head between his legs. They did, and things calmed down. People were pouring water over the little boy, and his older brother sat there, covered and dripping in shit with a smile on his face, finally realizing that his brother was safe. He didn’t even ask for anything. That was enough.

It was all I could think about on the drive home as we left the beautiful people of Tijuana. I didn’t think about the house, or the woman we helped, or her family.

I thought of that boy riding his bike into a hole of crap to save his younger brother.

I’ve never forgotten it. And I never will.

So as we get set for the chaos that is Valentines, and we get ready to drop some serious cash, say some serious, “I love you’s,” brag the next day about what you did for your loved one, or what they did for you, ask yourself this question: would I ride a bike into a stinking shit-filled crater with maybe no hope of coming out alive for this person, and if I did come out alive, would I faint because I loved them so much, that their life was my only concern, that I wouldn’t even bother to clean the long stringy strands of aging, coagulated feces off myself before I made sure they were okay, and do that without question, without hesitation, knowing only that their life was more important than your own? Would the one you love do that for you?

This story, for as long as I am alive, will be my litmus test.

Cards, roses, dinners, jewelry, if that’s love to you, I get it.

You can show the world just how much you are loved, and maybe beyond most people can dream of. More power to you.

But all I know is, I want to love someone like that little boy loved his little brother and have someone love me back like that too.

Everything else is window-dressing.