Fiction Friday: Not for Profit, Part One

[Rationale (-ization?) can be found here.]

Not for Profit

They asked me to change the names.

Actually, they asked me not to write it at all, but I pointed out that it might as well be fiction — no one would believe it. And it needs to be told. So we compromised.

This is fiction.

I’ve changed the names.

*******

When I met Hector Perez, he was the bright spot in the middle of a very long day. I was on my first foreign site visit as the very junior program officer at a very big charitable foundation. I had a laptop case stuffed with the proposal and supporting financials of a Mexican hospital. Okay, Mexico wasn’t exactly the ends of the earth, but it still counted as foreign. I was running late — more than a week late, as I’d had to postpone the trip to help my sister while she had her third baby. Somehow Aunt Natalie, with no children and no prospect of any, was always the first choice to watch the kids. Now that the trip was finally on, I was also running late because of traffic, and on the way to the airport I managed to spill a cappuccino on the sleeve of my brand new, professional-but-still-practical-in-the-heat white linen jacket. During the flight, I convinced myself that I was completely unprepared and that it would be painfully obvious to the hospital staff, and that it must have been painfully obvious to my boss, so they must be setting me up to fail, and what was I doing in this job, anyway?

Then I took a deep breath and told myself everything was fine. That works more often than you might think.

Hector met me at the airport. He was wearing khakis and a loose shirt, and a wooden rosary around his neck peeked out at the collar. He approached with a smile and a firm handshake, and asked “Miss Evans?” with a purely American accent.

“California,” he added, either through telepathy or habit, as he took my bag. “Born and raised in Long Beach, pre-med at UCLA. I got permission to do a year of my internship here.”

“Permission from where?”

“Johns Hopkins,” he admitted, with a smile that held equal parts pride and embarrassment. I learned very quickly that that was Hector’s normal smile: it said two things at once, and they were usually contradictory.

“I don’t remember reading about you in the proposal.”

He shrugged. “I’ll be gone soon enough. They’ll still be here.”

He led me out of the airport to an ancient Volkswagen Beetle. As he opened the passenger door for me, he said that the hospital was about an hour’s drive, “not counting flat tires, washed out roads, or other acts of God.” Since the car was practically riding on rims as it was, I wanted to ask what he called a flat tire, but decided against it.

As he drove and kept a lookout for acts of God, I asked him how a Johns Hopkins intern had been drawn here. He told me about the hospital, about Dr. Reyes (whose name had been in the proposal) and about some of the patients he had seen. He was a persuasive advocate, and I wondered aloud whether he had chauffeured any other program officers.

He shook his head. “I’ve been here ten months, and you’re the first one I’ve seen. Honestly, I don’t think most of us expected you to really show up, either. We’re small, kind of under the radar out here. Maybe I shouldn’t ask, but does your being here mean we’ve got a shot at a grant?”

“I really can’t…”

“I get it. Anyway, you should see the place before you make up your mind.” And, with perfect timing, he chose that moment to tell me that the cooler in the back seat was stocked with bottled water. Before I could reach back, he had snaked his arm around the back of his seat, snared a bottle, opened it one-handed, and presented it to me. As I held it to my wrists and temples and then took a sip (gulping didn’t seem professional), Hector grinned: “How are we doing on first impressions?”

*******

Hector saw me checked into the hotel and insisted on carrying my bag up to my room. I was surprised by the size of the hotel: from what I had seen of the town driving in, it didn’t seem large enough to support that much tourism. Hector explained that the town had seen action during the Mexican War of Independence in the early 1800s, so it attracted historians, photographers, sightseers, and various combinations of the three. There was even a small museum on the other side of the square.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention here that I gave myself a pat on the back when I turned down an entry-level position at PricewaterhouseCoopers to take an internship at the foundation. I had the inner glow of altruism which comes from joining the not-for-profit sector, and which had lasted until I read my first grant application from Rwanda. I knew then that I understood neither courage nor self-sacrifice, and I had reminded myself of that every day since. So when Hector mentioned the museum, it seemed like a good opportunity to learn about people who had understood both.

Be careful what you wish for.