Selling in a Crisis

6Be Grateful for Adversity

It was late on a blazing-hot summer afternoon, deep in the middle of nowhere in eastern Colorado. A one-lane dirt road stretched as far as I could see. I had just passed an old wooden sign, covered in vines. Carved into it was the word Amache.

As the car picked up speed, a dust plume rose behind me, obscuring everything in my rearview mirror. It seemed like I'd been driving forever when the road abruptly came to a dead end. Except for a small, tin-roofed pavilion that housed historical signs and placards, there was nothing – no other cars, no other people, only silence.

I walked over to the pavilion, started reading the markers, and immediately became engrossed in the story of Amache – so engrossed that I didn't hear the car pull up next to mine, didn't hear a person walk up behind me, and was startled by a frail voice that said, “I was here.”

I whirled around to find an elderly man leaning on a cane. “Excuse me?” I muttered.

“I was here,” he said again.

“Here?” I responded, pointing at the ground.

He nodded, “Yes. I was brought here as a child.”

The man began telling me the story of how he and his family had been ripped from their home in Southern California, put on a train, and shipped to Amache, a Japanese internment camp, during the early part of World War II.

Even though there was nothing left of the camp, we walked along the worn pathways in the scrub brush, and he drew a vivid picture of what Amache was like when he was there as a young child. ...