The colorblind shoe shine gang

October 29th, 2010: After a morning of successfully shedding off a multitude of scrubby kids wanting to clean my already clean shoes in which I personally pulled off every speck of dirt a few days back, I noticed that I was internally breaking…becoming more and more acceptable to saying yes, after every, no. Just at the right moment a gang of three shoe shiners approached me telling me how dirty my shoes were. I know it was just a script of theirs…if I had food at that moment I would have eaten off them – even the soles, to show them that they were not even close to being as dirty as the claimed. Thinking about it, they could have been my military boots after spending days of pulling out spit from deep within as I shinned them and the savages would have still said they were dirty.

The shoe shine gang was very smart for their age and they must have noticed my weakness, capitalizing on my shortcomings. Talking to the gang members a bit whose ages I suppose ranged from 7-10 years old, I collapsed giving in and gave them clearance to somehow shine my shoes.

Not wanting to tell these experts in shining shoes how to properly do their job, I decided to sit back and watch as 2 kids went to work on my shoes as the younger boy talked to me to obviously distract me. After the reasonable brush selection and unreasonable polish selection (black) for my brown leather shoes, I became quite interested on what they were going to do.

Starting to polish my black rubber toes with the polish I was relieved that it looked like they were not going to use it on the leather. Making my rubber toe shinny and black, they continued possibly feeling they needed to do something else to my shoes for the ridiculous prices they were charging me in Bolivian standards. And…that is when they then caked black polish along the sides of my shoes making the grey spongy porous material of my soles…black, along with the bottom leather portion giving my shoe a crazy two-tone look confirming to me that they were all unfortunately color blind.

Watching them, I was attempting to hold in my laughter and I didn’t bother stopping them as they were continuing to destroy my shoes figuring I would buy a brush later in the day and wash them up at the hostel. While all of this was taking place I thought the kids would have known more about shining shoes but I still didn’t want to correct them – this is their profession, not mine…so I let them finish the job they started.

Once they were done, I had to lie to them and I told the shoe shine gang that they did a great job, happily thanking them as I paid them there fee and a little extra for a tip. What they were going to do with the money…I don’t know, perhaps purchase some gasoline to huff, crack to smoke, or some fresh clean needles for their veins - but more than likely, just a candy fix.

I must say…kids are great…just not great shoe shiners…especially those who are color blind.