LETTERS



Editor,

Saturday, October 6, ALMA was the recipient of a benefit Indian dinner prepared by Chef Sam Chapra at the Villa Jacaranda. The sold out crowd thoroughly enjoyed the evening of Indian food, decorations, and Bollywood movie. A special thanks to Sam Chapra and his wife, Nadja, Sally Leonard and the staff at the Villa Jacaranda for this wonderful gift for ALMA. Muchas gracias to all who attended.

Rosetta Harrop

Editor,

The Kennel Club of San Miguel would like to thank the many kind people who helped to make our annual yard sale such a great success ; the volunteers who donated their time, all those who generously donated the items for sale and those who helped with the pickups and deliveries. A special thank you to The Palapa who again so kindly loaned us space and tables. With your help we raised a total of 18,462 pesos!

The Kennel Club, which has annually donated to both organizations, is pleased to give a check for 9,231.00 pesos each to the SPA and Amigos de Animales.

The Annual Kennel Club Dog Show will be held Saturday, October 13 and Sunday, October 14 at the Unidad Deportiva. Everyone is cordially invited to attend.

Jacqueline Hall
President
Kennel Club of San Miguel

Dear Editor,

The incident I am reporting now to tourists and residents alike was quite disturbing and also ended in paying a “multa”(bribe) to terminate the situation. On Saturday evening at about 9pm, a taxi arrived to pick up a Mexican friend and me from a celebration in Los Frailes. It was a rainy holiday night, and we were well out of the Centro. One of our town’s well known taxi services, TaxiTel, was called and sent a driver who immediately had an unwarranted unpleasant attitude. We needed assistance with a number of bolsas and boxes and I offered him a “propina,” for his help. My friend and I did all the carrying of things and packed the taxi. The ride back to town was uneventful.

Upon arrival, my friend and I unpacked the taxi and the driver stood outside the cab offering no assistance. We both had taken several boxes up the stairs and my friend, another woman, came to tell me that the driver refused to help because “she had broken his car!” When I arrived at the taxi, I saw the driver holding what appeared to be an entire fender of the car .Not only could I not figure out what this piece of plastic was, but how she could have possibly “broken it.” In Spanish we three had a very heated exchange, she upset and me livid. It soon became quite clear that he wanted 300 pesos from us to repair it. I accused him of wanting a bribe, of creating the situation himself and trying to make us victims of a scam. He said he was calling the police and I said I was also. By now dozens of male neighbors, passersby, etc. had gathered in the street, watching.

A policemen just happened to be only feet away and the cab driver was telling him a very elaborate story of how my friend broke his car, etc. She was equally telling the driver and the policeman that she couldn’t have done this. I was furiously telling the policeman that the driver was out for a bribe. The policeman was totally passive and radioed in for more police. Two trucks of police arrived for this “emergency situation!” Our very heated, high decibel argument continued. By now, my friend was crying and sobbing at being accused of something she did not do, I was shouting in my best Spanish, quite fluent when I’m in a rage over an injustice. This continued on and on. My friend, between sobs, asked me to pay the “multa,” she didn’t want any “problems,” etc. We both paid the 300 pesos as the police watched the transaction. I told the driver that I COULD FIX THE CAR with Kola Loka and 2 screws! The driver then insisted that we pay an additional 70 pesos for the fare, a rip off price under any circumstances. 
I fumed, she cried and we paid. This entire incident took close to an hour. The driver and all the police drove off, she ultimately calmed down and went home.

In re-telling this story to two friends, they immediately were able to relay stories of friends of theirs who were also extorted by taxi drivers in the last week or so! As I tell acquaintances and friends, some of whom were at the party, they respond with their taxi stories. What exactly is going on here in San Miguel? And more importantly how do we deal with the situations as foreigners and citizens alike?

Thank you for printing this as a warning and a request for some official action to protect “taxi victims” living here or visiting our town.

Name withheld upon request

Editor,

I was reading the Atención on a flight to Minneapolis. I thoroughly enjoyed it and was prompted to send some thoughts.

Many articles in the Atención address concerns for the future of San Miguel de Allende, offering speculation about what quality of life is imminent. Some writers like the scholarly Ma. De la Paz Espino in her September 28, 2007 article on pg 15 in the “Readers Forum,” offers profound insights, ironically obscured to the inattentive by the writer’s succinctness and intellect. (It seems that we retirees sometimes become lulled into a state of intellectual complacency.) Most commentaries express concerns about physical realities of traffic, a lack of control of construction, evidence of the seeds of urban sprawl, the negative effects of big-bus emissions on air quality and the like. The focus appears to be more symptom than cause.

If we could focus on the importance of developing and sustaining core beliefs and human values in the macro community, the criteria for making those decisions that will impact our quality of life in the micro environments would be availed. Defining and then conforming to a value system are fundamentally expedient. Rather than addressing the range of ill effects that poor decisions manifest in their wake, forethought about decisions and more scrutiny of their compliance to defined values is the more orderly, logical, timely and effective problem-solving approach: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”—the apropos allusion.

I enjoy San Miguel de Allende for many reasons—colonial quaintness, pueblo ambience, diversity, beauty and so on; however, what keeps me here is the quality of people—the human element. I suggest the obvious: that if we focus on education, the support of our human resource, we will find the means to develop and nurture effective problem solving, capitalizing on both local insight and talent. The value of education, then, must be one of our core beliefs. Our abstract learners would recognize that such issues as ethnocentrism, greed and corruption, secularism gone rampant and other attitudes manifest concretely across our environment.

From my point of view, I see a glimmer of the “principle-to-practice” approach in existence. It is my hope that by calling attention to this positive problem-solving strategy, that very approach is promoted.

Jay Vlasak