Arquitectura Ecológica

In Chile, we have to pay our taxes monthly. If you are just a worker bee, your company does it for you, and automatically deducts what you have to pay from you check and that is that. However, if you have your own business you have to do it yourself (or hire someone to do it for you). Technically, Christian should be paying the taxes, but he has ¨hired me¨ to do.

I don´t know all the ins and outs of paying taxes in Chile. Since if you do it wrong you go to federal prison, it is important to do it right. Christian called one of his maestro friends to help me, Pedro Lagos. Pedro is about 68 years old and has worked in construction all his life (for those of you who live in Chile, I´m sure you can see where this is going).

I was expecting a five minute lesson of add this this this and this and them type those numbers into boxes 1, 2, 3 and 4. Oh no, because apparently if you are dumb enough not to know how to file taxes in Chile, then there is a good chance that you don´t know how to do other things, like lets say add or read instructions. Needless to say I got the full unabridged version from my dear friend Pedro.

We sat down, he read me the number out loud and made sure that I typed them in correctly, and then gave me a huge lecture about why for tax purposes a paint brush is categorized differently than the paint itself (even though he knows that in three months I will be getting my masters in economics). He then told me that he would be asking me lots of questions and giving me very specific instruction because, and I quote ¨You am a gringa so I don´t know how to treat you¨. Ah Da, I kind of already got that.
The truth is that it isn´t just Pedro who doesn´t know how to treat people who are different, it is all of us. How many times have you heard or you yourself told a person that speaks with an accent how good their English is? I have personally been told that many a times, and all I want to say is ¨well yeah I live here¨. One of my personal favorites is when people who don´t speak English at all insist on speaking to me in English. Or when someone asks the person standing next to me a question about me.
When I was younger and well lets say too ¨spirited¨ for my own good, I was very rude to people who treated me like that. I did the best I could to turn the situation around and make them look like fools in front of their friends and family (I was shamefully good at it). I have grown up a little and realized I´m married now, so there is this whole other person who I can make suffer along with me, and bonus, he is one of them (haha just kidding).

One good thing that has come out of me being treated differently because of the language I speak and the way that I look is that I try really hard not to do it to other people. I know that I won´t miss being treated like a stupid foreigner basically everyday, because it SUCKS.