A penniless farmer offers to pay for a certificate with vegetables from his garden: the official accepts
Sometimes it is the simplest and most genuine gestures which make the difference, those that no one ever notices because they seem too trivial but instead hide a much deeper meaning. Consider an old man who all his life has done nothing but work the land, a farmer from other times far away from the rhythms of modernity and the mechanisms of contemporary bureaucracy. Like Amadeo Cabrera, an 80-year-old from El Salvador, the protagonist of this touching story...
via El Salvador
Amadeo has just turned 80 and lives in Chalatenango in El Salvador. A farmer all his life, Amadeo had to go to the offices of his town hall to ask for a copy of his birth certificate; the man waited patiently for his turn and lined up, without asking for extra attention or special treatment given his age. But when his turn came, Amadeo discovered that the bureaucratic procedure he needed required payment.
The fact is that Amadeo at that time did not have any money in his pockets, which is why he decided to pay for the certificate with the fruits of his labor, even if they weren't coinage, but a bag full of coriander, known in the countries of America Latin as "cilantro".
Amadeo had nothing else with him but a bag full of this herb which he cultivates on his land with a lot of love and a lot of patience, and which in this case he wanted to use an exchange or barter, just like in the past, in the way that a farmer from times gone by would have done.
A gesture by Amadeo, which was moving for its simplicity and tenderness, so much so that the municipal official could not help but accept those sprigs of coriander in exchange for the official document.
A Facebook post reads: "This man went to the civil registry for an official document. He is a farmer and when they asked him to pay, he had no money. He took three bunches of coriander from a bag as a form of payment. The municipal manager smiled at him and accepted the bunches of coriander!"
There are few people left like Amadeo, that's for sure!
