I’m officially back from my ten day experience in Guatemala. Before I left, people asked me things like “why would you go there?” or “so…you’re not going for a mission trip? Then….what?” People were confused, and I didn’t really know what to tell them. The truth is that I was a little confused too. I knew I was going to soak in a whole new culture and country that I had up until this point in my life been completely separated from. A country where my good friend Eric Hill-Tanquist spent two and a half years in the Peace Corps and found a second home; and that he wanted to share this world with our friend Jess, my wife Kaija, and me. But I didn’t really know what to expect. It was so totally different than anything I had ever done before. I was excited, sure, but I also felt nervous and anxious and unsure. As we flew in, I saw what I had been programmed to see: poverty, with an endless stretch of structures that resembled slums that I had seen on TV and in movies, congestion, and complete traffic chaos. Shell shocked and jet lagged, it took me a while to settle in. But when I did, when I did my best to struggle through conversations in broken Spanish, try new food, play basketball (Eric and I even did a dunking expo for the locals on what had to be a slightly lower rim-it was quite the spectacle), go inside homes and stores and schools, see the indescribable Mayan capitol of Tikal, and observe and interact with the other aspects of the natural environment and culture, what I found really surprised me. Yes, the homes mostly had tin roofs. Windows were a luxury. And my old ipod could not find a place to connect to wifi. But oddly, I found myself not caring. It was liberating to walk around without a cell phone. No texts or emails to check. No reason to be anywhere but completely present in each moment of the experience. This is what these people do every day in the small town of Zaragoza where I had the pleasure of spending most of my trip. People laugh about what they don’t have, while embracing everything that they do have. The food must be good. Family must always love each other and stick together, literally, and this love always starts at the top and filters down across generations. The homes are always works in progress, but the families own their homes and they are beautiful structural representations of all the work they do throughout their lives, throughout their parent’s lives., because these homes are handed down to the next generation. Children pick up building where their parents leave off. And then there was the community. Everyone I passed in Zaragoza said hello and/or good morning/good afternoon/good evening as we walked by. Anytime you wanted a genuine human connection, you just waited until you walked by another Guatemalan, or sat in the park and waited for someone to come to you. No one was invisible, regardless of their income level or appearance. This community even threw us a huge going away party that also served as a surprise birthday party for me, complete with homemade food, cake, drinks, wonderful reflection and camaraderie, and even a piñata! I was moved in the deepest of ways. Oh to be in a place where total strangers can share a space and freely interact and share their experiences. No headphones connected to electronic devices to isolate people. No manufactured bubble to shut off the world. No lens of constant competition to focus on to make sure they win against their neighbor by having more stuff, more relationship success, and on and on. Instead, people ate together, they celebrated together, and they collectively grieved together. None of this was taboo, but rather, was a normal way of life. By the end of the trip, I had a reinvigorated spirit and outlook on life, and a whole new lens of what poverty really looked like. It had less to do with monetary wealth than I had ever thought. It had little to do with what material your roof was made of, how large your family was, or even how long you were able to live. Instead, escaping poverty is about positively and genuinely connecting with the world and the people you have the pleasure of spending each moment with for as long as you happen to be alive. It is about unconditional love and sharing what you have when a neighbor is in need, while living in a way that conserves resources and ensures you have something to leave to family or friends after you pass away. It is about knowing that life is painful and short and hard, but when you share that pain and common experience with your family friends, and even strangers, you truly live. Yes, there are people and villages and even larger areas of Guatemala where, like many other places in this world, people do not have one or several basic needs that they need met in order to survive. Hopefully we will continue to develop and work within current structures to make sure that resources get better distributed to help with these issues. But real poverty isn’t just about surviving. It’s about living. About what life is like once your basic needs are met, and how you spend the precious little time that you have on earth. And in this sense, I did not find much poverty in Guatemala. Instead, I was and will continue to be inspired by the richness of the land. By the unquenchable hope of the people, the love they have for each other and themselves, and the community mantra that says that life is much better spent together than alone. Thank you Guatemala. You will forever live on in my heart and hopefully in as many ways as possible in the life that I live.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 19:40:09 +0000
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