... in response to Re: Success stories, posted by Pete E on Jul 19, 2004The story of the gringo and the paisa. Anyone familiar with my posts can skip this story since you will have heard much of it already.
I live in a rural part of Texas not far from Mexico where the cows and the deer outnumber the people. I have always been attracted to Latina women and since single women are hard to find where I live, I thought that I might find someone in a nearby Mexican city.
I found a web site called amigos.com. and they have a feature where you can look at each week's new profiles. One day I was looking at the new profiles when I saw the face of this woman - it was as though I knew her already - she was so familiar to me. When I read her description, I found out she was a widow with 3 children who lived in Colombia and spoke only Spanish. Oh no! Forget it! The only problem was I could not forget her. All the next week, I kept hearing a voice repeating her name (she had used her name as her profile handle) over and over. It was like someone telling me that I had to contact her. So I did.
I knew about 5 words of Spanish but I used the internet translators to piece together an email to her. She replied and we started corresponding in Spanish - I bought a dictionary and some Spanish text books and started working hard to learn Spanish so I could communicate with her. She said my first letters were really bad but I kept improving. Our first phone conversation was crazy - she had to repeat everything about 5 times - but almost intuitively I could tell what she was saying to me. I sent her some money to buy a web cam so we could see each other and we started chatting daily on Yahoo Messenger - she would go to her sister's house after work and we would talk for an hour or two. I would have to translate everything she wrote into English and then translate my English into Spanish. What a lot of work!
She was a 42 year old chemical engineer who ran one of the shops in a large textile plant in Medellin. Her husband had died four years before leaving her with three children and to make ends meet and to give them a safer environment, her children had been living with her mother in Monteria. Her father had been a major in the Colombian National Police and had died in a shootout with Pablo Escobar's gang. In spite of these tragedies in her life, she was a vibrant, cheerful, optimistic person who always had a smile on her face. I was completely captivated by her.
After a couple of months of corresponding and chatting, we arranged to meet each other in Bogota where her sister lives and go to San Andres for a couple of days. I was so nervous the night before, it was hard to tell which worried me more, going to Colombia or meeting her. Finally, there I was, coming out of El Dorado airport looking for her and her sister. When I saw her, I was so happy - she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life. There was something about her energy, her smile, the look in her eyes - I would have married her right then and there. We kept asking each other, "Are you happy with me?" and both of us were really ecstatic. We scandalized her sister by kissing in the back of the taxi while we went to her sister's apartment. My wife told me later that her sister had to call their mother - she was concerned that her sister had lost her mind and was passionately kissing some man she had just met!
My wife later confessed that if we had not been so happy with each other that she would not have gone to San Andres with me. That day we agreed to be married and our trip to San Andres was like a honeymoon.
In the months that followed we had to make arrangements for the civil and church weddings by long distance and it took a lot of patience and trust to rely on each other. Luckily my written Spanish had improved to the point that we could communicate easily over the internet. In fact my wife says that now when she talks to me it is just like talking to anyone else in Spanish. After our wedding, it took us five more months to get the K-3 visa during which time I visited her three times. At the end of March we went to the embassy together for the visa interview and we came back to Texas a week later along with her three children.
All her friends and family say that her story is like that of a princess whose dream has come true. I guess many of these things don't work out and there are many broken promises. Still, I feel that I am the lucky one in this story - I am married to the most incredible, most beautiful woman in the world.
