The Power of a Coke

On my last cross country trip I joined a few leaders on a visit to our Brazilian Missions Institute. We were surprised by a rather interesting event. We left the a rural central state and traveled south west to an even more rural state the name of which means “Thick Woods.” That is literally what it was at one point, but now it is mostly covered in huge expanses of lonely pasture speckled with white Brahma cows and crisscrossed with red dirt roads and rickety barbed wire fences.
Just in case you were wondering how a trip like that compares with traveling in the States let me just say, “It depends!” If you are traveling in South Eastern Brazil you might even have the luxury of traveling on a well kept four lane toll road but if you’re as lucky as we were and you are traveling anywhere else the roads are often precarious at best. The excitement (some would call it the deterrent) is that you never know what your going to find and this time we were in for a surprise.
After a few dirt road detours that could qualify for the Paris Dakar Rally we came upon a washed out bridge and had to take another detour. This time we were rerouted through a pasture to a spot upstream where a barge was waiting to ferry us across. The river was more the size of what we would call a creek back in Pennsylvania but much deeper and swifter. The barge barely fit in the river and had to travel only about half of its length to touch the other shore. Guided by steal cables the barge safely ferried us across. Up to that point not too much unusual had happened but it was on our trip back that we all felt a bit like fish out of water culturally speaking.
It was about 12:30 A.M when we came upon the barge on our return trip and we were the second car in line. To our dismay the operator shut the gates and announced that it was lunch time and then we noticed a little hand painted sign off to the side. It read, “Lunch hours: 12:00 – 1:30.” “Great,” we thought, “we’re going to have to wait a whole hour just to get across a 50 foot span of water.” Other cars had pulled in right behind us and wanted to know what was going on so they called the operator over. As we were discussing the situation the operator surprised us as he walked up to our car and leaning over to look into the car window, announced, “The gentle man behind you contributed with a coke so I’m going to take you across.” “Great!” we thought, but wait a second, he’s not caring a coke. Come to think of it I don’t know of very many people who travel with an extra 2 liter coke for special occasions like this.
Our driver turned around in his seat and asked us, “What should I do?” What would you do? There’s got to be more behind that than just a coke? I mean, I know a nice cold coke is pretty good, but its not worth that much and besides, we never saw this coke. We did what most people do in a situation they don’t understand. We just went with the flow. As we continued our trip we concluded that the man behind us had bribed the operator with some money. The operator had simply found a nice polite way of asking us for some more money by informing us of the “kindness” the the gentleman behind us! I guess next time we should travel with a spare coke!