Learning how to grow up again.

The situation is this: you´ve have just sat down on the edge of the lake and divided your only sandwich into two, and handed half to your charming wife. Then, amazingly, out of nowhere a rough unkempt looking indigenous fellow-- but not skinny or anything, suddenly appears, standing over you. He asks if he can borrow a cigarette, in broken Spanish we say we don´t smoke, and we can´t anticipate what happens next even though we know the encounter is not over. He sits down uncomfortably close, comments on how beautiful the lake is and then demands some of my half sandwich. Mind you there are probably a dozen people, half grinos and the rest mayans on the same beach. I´m unepectedly perturbed and just say no, and we stare each other for a couple of minutes, at which point he says something to me in K´iche, we can assume something not nice, and then goes a few feet away to talk to some local ladies.

For the next hour I find myself royally pissed off, and don´t eat my sandwich at all. I sit there fuming, talking, mumbling to myself about how inconsiderate some of these people are, constantly coming up to me for money, trying to hussle me, to the point were I´m constantly on guard. And consequently, working myself to the point till I´m not much fun to be around. This was building in me for a few days, until I realized that maybe the problem is more with my perception of right and wrong and not with them. Even though I´ve been to Latin America several times, never have I been here to live, and it feels different then being a total turista. I need to except their culture, learn to understand and grow from it, instead of them excepting mine, which is generally the case in most heavily touristed places like Costa Rica.

Really, what did I gain by not giving this guy my sandwich. We both went hungry over a 2 dollar sandwich, which isn´t any money to me at all. The mayans sense of space is very different than ours. They are constantly very near to you, all around your stuff, all around the door of your room for instance. And being that my wife is an avowed peaceful person, and never had one playground fist fight, and rumors swirl constantly around here about people being robbed, I had become overly paranoid about our stuff, our safety.

Stupid. When you do get hassled, most of the time, you can get off by given them 5 quetzals, that´s about 70 cents. And look at me, blond, curly hair with glasses, which by the way no one has except rich people like me, and my dumb 8 dollar watch from K Mart that every Guatemalan man seems to think is a rolex and wants to stop and talk to me about it, and how much it costs. I have stopped wearing the watch. Can not do much about the glasses. I now keep a few quetzals in my pocket, to give to people, and not much else. I´ve have calmed down a lot. I expect them to start burning trash outside my window at 6 a.m. I expect them to show up in the dark and check the waterline to my room. I expect to hear the nightly church service with singing broadcasted out to the village, which is beautiful by the way. I expect to have a hard time bargaining with the lady who has the only tienda, grocery store in San Marcos -- the tienda ladies are much friendlier in San Pedro because there is lots of them. Economies of scale of course. These are reasonable things here.

The truth is, I´m looking forward to making our way to the orphange in the jungle next week. For sure, it will be harder there. But there, I hope, I can be part of something instead of being a spectator. For those of you who plan to travel to guatemala, this is a weird place to vacation. Give us an email, let me know if I´m crazy.

matthew