How to not get Shot in Argentina, et. al.

You’re traveling in Argentina, somewhere just outside of the city when a kid, let’s say 14 years old - young enough to be more concerned about showing how hard he is and impressing his peers than any greater sense of a moral code - steals up to you with a bandana over his mouth and gun to your temple. He demands everything you own. What do you do?

I must admit, there are few things I fear more than 13-18 year olds with guns.

I pose this question because I get asked it, or variations on it, all the time. And though this situation has never actually come up for me (Alhamdulillah), I do think about it a lot, especially when considering the prospect of traveling somewhere generally perceived to be dangerous (right now I’m mulling over the idea of traveling in Zapatista territory in southern Mexico). Hypothetically, what would I do in this situation? What would you do?

I’ve considered all the possibilities from breaking down into tearful sobs to arrogantly refusing to simply, maybe even nonchalantly complying. Beneath all possible responses lurks the deeper question, is my life really worth risking for my (few) possessions? Obviously the answer is no, but maybe deeper than that poses a question of pride: how can I travel boldly without being victimized?

Before I left New York, I had a great chat with my friend Mario in an Upper East Side Irish Pub and he told me that the situation speculated above actually did happen to him. In telling me the story, he (as I just did) first posed it as a question. What does one do in this situation? Stop for a moment and think about it. What would you do?

Finally he told me what he did. He introduced himself.

He told the kid, “My name is Mario Ustazio, I was born in the Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic in 1987 to a poor family. I have one brother, Juan, who is two years older than me who is a wood carver and a sister, Annalisa, who is a year younger. She is a dancer. When I was 5, my family moved to Miami in the hope of making a better life. My mother works as a social worker in a poor Dominican neighborhood and my father drives a taxi. I’m in Argentina to learn what people like you are working for in the future, what you’re trying to build, and what possibilities there are for making that a real possibility.”

It worked for him. The kid let him keep is life and his wallet. Who knows how often it would anyone else (after all, Mario is completely fluent in Spanish...a non-speaker could never have responded like that). The underlying point of his story is that it’s far more difficult to shoot someone with an identity and a family than it is to shoot a nameless white person who is wealthy enough to afford the privilege of traveling 4,000 miles from home in search of something as frivolous as “self-enrichment.”

I think this principle is far more widely applicable than just not getting shot in a rough part of the world. This is the essential question of community, identity and human communication: it’s easy to be rude to a stranger, to be cruel to a stranger, or simply to disregard the existence of a soul in a stranger. Our world is increasingly alienating, governed more by stereotypes, generalizations (like the one I’m making now), and broad dismissals than the weirdly empathetic desire to actually see someone else; to hear them, to validate their presence by engaging them with respect. But it doesn’t have to be. Precedents simply need to be set, daily.