The Christmas season can be one of thievery, we are sometimes warned. But scratch the surface, and some people have stories of gratuitous honesty and generosity at yuletide.
Rev. John Burk, recently arrived in Guadalajara to act as interim priest at St. Mark’s Anglican church, acquired one such story from personal experience a few days before Christmas. Returning home after a shopping trip Sunday, December 19, to La Gran Plaza, where he’d scrambled to find wrapping paper for a gift he was to take to the bishop’s posada the following day, Burk made a chilling discovery. His wallet, which he’d used while paying for a decorated box at a small papeleria stand on the mall’s second level, was missing.
Burk’s search for wrapping paper had started out badly, with the discovery that it is not commonly sold at big-box stores. He even walked a mile to a papeleria, which turned out to be closed. But all that was eclipsed by the sinking feeling he experienced a half hour after finally getting home with the fancy box in hand and finding that his wallet was not in his front pocket. As he scrambled to use his cell phone to cancel credit and debit cards—the latter are not covered by the bank, he said—he was not so worried about the cards, nor the 7,000 pesos and 50 dollars in his wallet, as much as about his Arizona driver’s license and health card, which he planned to use a week later to get routine health tests near his son’s home in the United States.
Please login or subscribe to view the complete article.