The Taxi Driver

I met a Taxi driver in Lima and he told me a story I thought was worth recording.

In my International Econ class last semester, we had talked about some of the ways taxi drivers apply to economic social concepts. I was asking Baldeon ( a friend of mine in Lima) if he knew much about some of the things that we talked about it. Of course I was being lazy, and we were talking in English. Well, the Taxi driver decided to jump in and help answer my questions. I decided to play along that I didn’t know any spanish (which I have recently re-discovered isnt far from the truth) and asked him how he learned English.

This is what he told me.

Before he had his own taxi, we had worked at a touristy hotel as a driver. One of the people that he drove was a lady that had come down to surprise her boyfriend who spent a lot of time down here on business. She was the one who got the surprise though when she learned that her “boyfriend’ had a wife and two kids in Lima. Needless to say she was devastated, and let it all out to her driver. After some boo-hooing (remember, im paraphrasing), she asked if he knew a place to grab a bite to eat and something to drink. He said that he didn’t know a place to go but that he was a pretty good cook. Amazingly, she accepted. She spent the next month with him. While she was there, she taught him English.

One morning, he woke up, and there was $4000 on the bed and she was no where to be found. He never heard from her again. With the $4000, he was able to buy his own taxi and with his new English, was able to do well enough with the taxi to buy a few more taxis. He now speaks decent English and owns his own taxi company. You want to know what he said?

“Crazy Americans”

Dale out.