When we first came into the town of Warsaw, my first impression was blunt and made purely through the use of basic visual evaluation; there really wasn’t much to see. Worn and faded, the sign at the town’s entrance made a fitting metaphor for Warsaw. The town was indeed worn and faded, but peculiarly so, as if even its very foundations seemed crumbled and eroded, grounded away by the mighty gears of time. The unkempt lawns and haggard storefronts looked forlorn past all years possible of recognizable maintenance and served only to further the sense that the town’s poverty was not merely a reflection of the stagnant local economy, but rather an indication that the town had always been this way and that there were never any “glory days” to which the town’s disheveled inhabitants could nostalgically harken back to.

It was an anomaly made even more distinctive by the fact that the town certainly did not match its Polish counterpart in prestige and beauty, but one could doubt this bothered the townsfolk quite too terribly. It looked as if the people there were bound to Warsaw by some unknown power which presumably held the resolve to discourage those living or visiting there to leave, or surely they would. And Warsaw, facing the same socio-economic situations that have plagued countless other Southern small towns for the past three decades, would then undoubtedly collapse in on itself, becoming simply just another desolate, yet once cherished ruin amongst the endless horizon of hog farms.

Now, before I continue scrutinizing the plight of this poor, rural community populated by people presumably employed in the myriad of agriculturally minded professions that dominated the region, while I sit here at my desk writing this piece from the comforts of my room, flanked to my left by a flat screen T.V. and perched above a garage, where I park the car I drive around fueled by gas purchased by my parents, allow me to cover my muddy tracks on the carpet, so to speak.

In the midst of being a naïve, inexperienced kid from a middle class suburban background stuck, by a stroke of misfortunate car trouble, in a very economically deprived community inhabited by people who had probably worked harder in a single day than I had in my entire teenaged life, there was Juan.

Juan, the friendly El Salvadorian mechanic who fixed our car, traveling often at great lengths and through much peril to do so, was our unlikely savior. When we first took a look at the shop he ran, our skepticism was strong, though not as strong as our need to replace our faulty alternator. At a first and judgmental glance, he seemed both unable and uninterested to help us, an out of place family of foreigners stuck in his town. But that judgment was a supreme error on our part, as the guy definitely came through for us in the end.

As I sat with my mother and sister in a rather antiquated gas station, under the considerably ludicrous guise that I was to be the “big boy who held down the fort”, Dad ran off with Juan on a journey to hunt down a functioning alternator for sale in the nearby town of Mount Olive (which is notably proclaimed as the pickle capital of the world). Corresponding with him via text, we came to understand that this journey was not without its dangers. Immediately outside of town (and for reasons still unknown and speculated upon to this today), the local police had set up a checkpoint and Juan was discovered to have an invalid driver’s license.

After a ticket and a stern warning was issued by the lead officer in charge that Juan was not to be caught driving illegally again, unless he wanted to be arrested, my dad took to the wheel and completed their voyage to Mount Olive, where they paid $246 for a used alternator. It didn’t work.

At that point, we didn’t know what to make of our situation anymore. We were hundreds of miles from anyone we knew, we were tired from returning from our small weekend vacation to the beach, we were frustrated, we were defeated; but Juan wasn’t. Without even the slightest hesitation, he jumped on his Harley and took off down the road at a 100 mph, to return the faulty equipment and come back before sundown with a new one. Juan made yet another trip, this time on a loud and noticeably fast motorcycle (the kind cops tend to notice). Warsaw reabsorbed him a few hours later; he came back victorious.

Without waiver, Juan did not falter in a giving to us a friendly act, when all we had done was mope, scrutinize, and communicate with him in embarrassingly poor Spanish. And at last, due to this stranger’s truly kind patronage, we were back on the road. We limped desperately away from Warsaw’s mystical binding power as the town clock chimed six and the sky pulled a glowing red sun under the horizon, illuminating our long trip home.

For all we know, there is still a Juan in Warsaw.