Current mood:

numb

Skip this one...really
Seriously, I don't even know why I'm including this tragedy in the journal, except that it was something we witnessed. It was ugly and bloody, and seriously skip to the next entry if you want. I won't be offended. The next one will have the good, the weird, and the beautiful from Sunday. This one has the sad, horrifying car accident we happened upon.


On our way north Sunday morning, we'd hired a tour guide and were the only two folks on the tour. Eddie was his name and we had to leave really early Sunday morning. We were headed north on the PanAmerican highway and had not gotten very far out of Cuenca when we came across an awful car accident. The car was apparently headed south, and the front end of it was all smashed up. I don't know if the people/bodies on the road had been in the car or walking and hit by the car, but there were two people, dressed in the colorful Ecuadorian clothing I'd come to love, both lying motionless on the road. I'm pretty sure there were two, one by the car, the other by the curb. Even though we only saw it for a matter of seconds, the images seemed to burn into our brains. There was a small number of people gathering out of concern, and one person who was kneeling and cradling the head of one of the injured people. There was a lot of blood, the red ironically adding to the colorfulness. It was a few miles down the road before I realized just how "lifeless" the bodies in the road were. They had not been moving at all, and whether they were dead or not we will never know.

Eddie was visibly freaked out, and reached for his cell phone to call 911. No emergency crew had even arrived yet. The 911 operator acknowledged that it had been called in; Eddie told us that the 911 operator told him "he is dying" but I wondered if that was his mis-translating that she told him he was already dead. A few minutes later we saw a couple of ambulances headed their way. Yes, a few minutes. These unfortunate people were halfway between Cuenca and the next town, so EMTs coming from either direction had a long way to go.

I found myself saying silent prayers, and trying to take comfort in the idea that these were devout Christian people who were probably honored to go home to Jesus on Palm Sunday and just in time for the big Easter week. And that even these people's families might see it that way. Then I tried picturing them in the hospital and surviving, trying to put that energy/image into the world instead.

It was a sobering experience, and Eddie drove super carefully for the whole rest of the day.