Last week I wrote this: "Today I saw an old man sitting by the sidewalk with three used teddy bears lined up next to him. He was selling them. I wondered how he managed to sit there and smile. When I left, I wondered if he had sold any. How in a city where robbing seems, to many, like the best alternative, he would want to earn an honest living by selling used teddy bears on the street. Then I realized how some people in Juárez will do whatever it takes to survive without harming others."

I decided to go back and look for him. I saw him from afar and slowly walked close to him. His hat was covering his face. I wasn’t sure if he was the man I was looking for. I asked, are you the man who sells teddy bears? He looked at me confused. With a frail voice he answered, “I sell everything. I change my merchandise everyday.” To be sure, I asked again, where you selling teddy bears last week? “I didn’t sell them, he said. In fact, I didn’t sell anything that day. I took the teddy bears back home. I have them if you want them. The two small ones with outfits I sell for $5 pesos, the big one for $10.” I had found him.

His name is Jose Rios Escandon. He is 92 years old and has been working as a merchant since he was a child. He says everything he knows he learned from his father.

Every day Jose sits at the same corner downtown behind the cathedral selling just about anything. He has been doing it for years. The stuff he sells is whatever he gets as gifts from people from El Paso. “They stop by regularly in nice cars and give me stuff,” he said. He doesn't know who they are.

In fact, this time he was selling two pairs of used shoes and two other single shoes with no pairs. After talking to him for about five minutes, he offered me to take the shoes with no pairs for free if I had liked them. I declined. I felt bad to take them from him, but honestly, I didn’t know what I would do with a single used shoe.

What surprised me the most about Jose is not that he still works at his age, that people from El Paso care for him, or that he can keep a smile on his face, rather that he works after he attends mass at the cathedral everyday.

“God is so good to me,” he told me. I was stunned. It took me a while to understand. In fact, I’m not sure I fully understand yet. In front of me was a man, who had every right to complain about life. He is old and poor, he walks with a cane and still has to work and yet he is telling me how God is great and how he is so thankful for everything he has.

I have more than him I thought to myself, but I suppose in the end it is less if I am not as grateful for it as he is. I have everything, and yet somehow it’s never enough. For Jose, what he has is more than he needs.

Jose told me he never married so he has no kids to care for. Being a pessimist, I saw it as he has no one to take care of him. But I was wrong. As I took his picture, a guy asked me what I was doing. He said I’m watching you; we keep an eye on him. Normally I would have been offended or mad, but I was actually happy that guy was keeping an eye on Jose in the busy street.

It is ironic that Jose is apparently poor yet so rich in something we have lost value for—
human spirit and faith. He is an example of hard work and optimism. I’m glad to have met him and to finally know how he can just sit there and smile.

Alejandra Gomez is a resident of El Paso and Juarez, a city that she loves enough to tell its stories.