Employee of the Year

Chapter 6 - San Cristobal

As I finished my last call, the cleaning crew was making its way across the floor. I said hello to Jaime, who set down his vacuum cleaner and gave me a warm embrace of friendship.

Jaime and I chatted for a while. I felt like I had a lot to share with him. He was excited to hear that Father Javier got a donation from our company as part of the Cultural Outreach Program.

“Maybe that means we can finally move to a bigger church. We don’t have enough space where we are now. I have to get there forty-five minutes before mass starts just to get a seat so my wife and kids don’t have to stand in the aisles.”

I knew that Jaime donated a lot of money to Father Javier’s church, even though he barely made enough to feed his family. This was one of the reasons he took on extra jobs like the gardening and repair work he did for Flytrap.

“Temo, I need your help with something,” Jaime confided. “It’s my son Hernando. He’s getting to be that age.”

I knew what Jaime meant. He meant his son was now old enough to be a gangbanger and one of the crews in the local neighborhood would pressure him into joining. I knew from my own youth it was a lose-lose situation. Joining a crew was dangerous. But not joining might be even more dangerous because then you had no one to protect you.

Hernando was a good kid, and I knew he did volunteer work for Father Javier. But he would be an obvious target for the S Gang, which started in Pico Union and spread out across LA in all directions. The S Gang was one of the biggest Salvadoran crews, founded by kids whose families fled the civil war in the 1980s. They lived and breathed violence from an early age, and they could do it better than anybody. Nobody would mess with the S Gang. They were just too scary, too brutal. Even Flytrap made his peace with them, giving up a chunk of his profits so they would leave him alone to run his operations in Harbor Gateway.

Running with the S Gang would be a big temptation for a young guy like Hernando. It would give him a shot at money, nice cars, status. He could even help his old man financially. But he also stood a good chance of going to jail or getting killed by a rival gang. High risk. High reward.

“Have you talked to your son about this?” I asked Jaime.

“I have. He wants to do the right thing. He has always been very pure. He was an altar boy at the church. The problem is he doesn’t see any other way. That’s why I want you to talk to him.”

“Why me?”

“Because you made it through, Temo. You were just like him and you made it through. You didn’t join the gang or end up in jail. You got a nice job working in a call center. You even got your own chair and computer.”

“I’ll talk to him, Jaime. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

“I knew you would. Thank you, Temo.” We arranged a time that I could come by and meet with him. Then I went home to my wife and told her about everything that had happened that day.

Mauricio and I worked together the rest of the week. He greeted me with a warm smile, dressed in the same suit with a different tie each day. I was supposed to be the mentor, but Mauricio was a natural. He didn’t need any help. He was incredible in his talent for communicating with the cardholders, not just convincing them to pay but advising, giving hope, setting their life on the right track.

One afternoon I listened to him call a particularly desperate customer. Hilda Ramirez was forty-one-years old, native of Guatemala, a widowed mother of three in San Antonio, Texas, laid off from her job, and using a dwindling cash advance from her credit card as her final lifeline. She was five months behind on her balance and hadn’t made her minimum payment in sixty days.