What a Boy Wants

by Songül Arslan

When my boyfriend and I decided to travel to Nicaragua, the greatest motivation for us was to see the volcanoes. The cities Granada and Leon, copied after the Spanish cities, were ideal places to visit while searching for volcano trips. Though we came to the country with a plan, we quickly realized that despite our grand expectations about bubbling lava, the best part of travelling will always be unexpected encounters with the local population.

In Granada, such an encounter with a local boy still makes me laugh. In a way it shows me--again--that people are the same the world over and that boys will be boys, no matter where they live or how old they are.

It was around June that we were in the city of Granada. The weather was humid and hot, inspiring an apathetic laziness. I couldn't even find the energy to simply lift a finger, but the houses in the streets were so colorful and exciting that I wanted to look at every single one of them. Even some of the churches had striking colors, so I would find myself out battling the heat and laziness, to take a look at this colorful city--the word that always remains in my memory when I think of this city.

Upon closer inspection, I could see that the city was desperately in need of a restoration. Despite the colors, the paint seemed to be flaking off the buildings with every sigh of the wind. With the ongoing poor economic situation there is not enough money to feed everybody, let alone to address the aesthetic beauty of the city.

After a few attempts to wander and do some sightseeing, my boyfriend and I gratefully sank on a bench on a plaza filled with tourists and vendors of water, ice-cream and shoe polish. While I sighed, I looked around me. I saw a young boy coming our way. He was so thin that I thought he was about twelve years old. He had short hair and big, dreamy dark eyes.

When he was close to us, he said in well-spoken English, "Where are you from?" Soon we started talking and he drove the conversation. It turned out that his name was Moses. I was impressed by the biblical name and it somehow helped me feel a strong confidence in him. It was as if he was sent by a higher force.

He opened up and told us a few facts about himself, including the information that he was seventeen and had been working since he was very young. During the conversation I eyed him and I noticed his ragged trousers and shirt. We had seen many young people with hardly a whole pair of shoes on their feet, so I wasn't surprised.

"I am a shoe polisher but I don't do it now," he said.

"Why not?" I asked him.

"I have been mugged by street gangs. They came and beat me up, they took my shoe polish and then hit me in the face. See?"

We leaned forward and looked closer. Yes, there was a vague, purple mark on the side of his face. Poor thing, I thought. I was impressed by the boy's English. It was clear that he had not enjoyed an education, but he had somehow had the grit to learn English anyway.

"Where did you learn your English?" I asked out of curiosity.

"From tourists," he said, and I nodded approvingly.

"You see, I need shoe polish for my business. If I don't have shoe polish, I can't polish shoes and I won't have any money. Could you give me 20 cordoba to buy shoe polish?"

I heard my boyfriend whisper "Well, what do you know, I was just waiting for the next 'give me money' story," softly in my ear.

"I think he is genuine. I think this guy's for real," I whispered back.

"If he is, then we will go with him and watch him buy the shoe polish," my boyfriend suggested.

"Okay," I agreed and stood up. "We will buy some shoe polish for you," I said to the eager young man.

The boy nodded and said he would lead the way to the store. We crossed the plaza and walked a bit past the colourful houses until we were in a crowded market street with stands as far as the eye could see. The market was almost unimaginable in it's variety. A person could by anything from fresh meat to lace to TVs and underwear. It bordered on the point of overwhelming.

Moses picked a store which had a jumbled up diversity of inventory. He talked with a man behind the counter where after the man ducked behind it and searched through items behind glass for us to see. He was definitely searching in the drugstore division between shampoos, combs and nail polish. When he stood, he held up a plastic jar filled with something yellow that looked transparent and liquid.

Moses nodded and instructed us to buy it.

"That's the strangest shoe polish I have ever seen," my boyfriend said, trying his best not to burst out in laughter. I asked the man behind the shoe counter in Spanish if that was shoe polish, although I knew it was not. I had no clue what it actually was.

"No," the man said, "it's hair gel."

"Moses," I turned to the boy, "this is not shoe polish, this is hair gel and we agreed only to shoe polish."

First he still tried to deny it was not shoe polish but the man behind the counter interrupted him, saying it was definitely hair gel. Shoe polish was about the only thing he did not sell in his store.

Then Moses gave in. "You know, I need hair gel, or else the ladies are not interested." He stood there disappointed and more fragile than you could expect a seventeen year old to be.

"You lied to us," I said with a sharp tone and I tried to say something that sounded adult-like and responsible, but my words only drove Moses away. The man behind the counter giggled. Then we started laughing too. Wasn't it universal? What could be more important, no matter what the circumstances are, in a seventeen-year-old's life than possessing a girl-attracting potion like hair gel?