My fiancé and I recently got back to Cincinnati after about 80 days in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, the first of two legs of travel for our sabbatical year. Here's a brief outline of what we did:
We spent a couple weeks backpacking from city to city and staying in hostels through southern Mexico, then eventually decided we wanted to slow down and spend more time in the places we stayed so that we could get to know people and absorb a little more of the culture. So we ended up spending close to two months in Guatemala. First we stopped in Xela, the second biggest city in Guatemala, to take Spanish classes while living with a host family for a couple weeks. Then we went up to Petén, a rural area in the north covered in rain forest, and spent a few weeks volunteering on farms involved in reforestation projects. Along the way, we passed through a couple more culturally significant cities in Guatemala--Lake Atitlan, Livingston, Antigua, Guatemala City--before heading over to El Salvador for our last eight days, which we split between a hostel in Santa Ana and a couch surfing host in San Salvador.
I'll spare you all the details, but suffice it to say the trip was exciting, challenging, relaxing, stressful, thought-provoking, realigning, meaningful, among so many other things.
For me, the most beautiful and beneficial aspect about it was just being able to get some space from the environment, lifestyle, and patterns of thinking I'd settled into over the past six years living in Cincinnati. We're fortunate to be able to have this kind of experience. It should be something that every human on the planet is entitled to every few years, and I hope anyone reading this can make it happen someday if they haven't already.
We learned so much while we were away: about the Spanish language, about Central American history and politics, about Mayan culture and traditions, about farming, plants native to the Guatemalan rain forest, tropical fruits, about ourselves and our relationship--the list goes on and on.
I've noticed that often with traveling, a big part of the learning actually happens when you come back, and the person you've grown into returns to the place you left with a new point of view from which to experience, evaluate and make sense of what you've been swimming in your whole life.
The most striking thing I've noticed being home this time around has been the perfectionist way with which Americans from the U.S., or at least middle-class and wealthy Americans, view the world. The deeply felt need to tightly control one's surroundings, to do things "right." This contrasted drastically with the laid back, let-things-unfold-as-they-unfold approach to life we encountered on our trip.
One example: shortly after we got back to the U.S., we saw a woman approach a bus that was stopped at a red light, hoping to get on. But that particular bus doesn't have a stop at that particular intersection, so the driver opened the door and kindly informed her that she couldn't get on, all in about the same time it would have taken her to board, pay her fare, and sit down. Of course there was no practical reason not to let her on; it simply violated protocol, the "right" way to do things. Now, the exact same thing has happened to me before, even with the same bus route. But after our trip, it struck me as so odd, even ridiculous. In Guatemala a bus will typically stop for you anywhere along the route, even if it stopped literally ten seconds earlier. Less rigid, less focused on efficiency and the "rules" about the "right" place to get on the bus, which opens up space for more compassion for the person who wasn't quite able to make it to the stop in time. And this was the case even though, ironically, if you miss a bus down there, there will almost certainly be another one coming shortly. We took busses dozens of times, and maybe three or four times waited longer than five minutes. The woman who missed her bus in Cincinnati probably had to wait another 15 or 20 for the next one.
Another way this cultural difference manifests is in the relationship between humans and animals. Dogs roam the streets everywhere in Guatemala. They don't bother anyone, but regardless, in the U.S., most people would never be okay with unattended dogs walking around their manicured, pristine suburbs. In Guatemala they seem to be tolerated at the very least; people even put food out for them and let them hang out on their doorstep. When we got out to the rural, the coexistence was even more pronounced: pigs and chickens are also part of the menagerie. They walked around freely, grazing along the sides of roads. We figured they must be owned by someone, and when we asked about it we were told they were. Apparently everyone seems to just kind of know whose animals are whose, and they let them roam free to find food wherever they can. Instead of humans needing to be in complete control, animals and humans are coexisting, with nature at the helm. Plus, it makes for many more sightings and interactions with puppies, and kittens, too.
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| Even this squirrel wanted to coexist...especially when he found I had food. |
We also noticed that people were so much more resourceful down there. In the U.S., when you need some material object, what do you do? Go out and buy it. Or nowadays, pick up your phone for a couple minutes and click a button. In rural Guatemala, instead of always buying a manufactured item created perfectly for the exact use you will put it to, people engineered what they needed with whatever was around. Simple benches from a slab of wood and tree stumps, outdoor stoves from leftover cinderblocks and rebar, flowerpots from washed-out water or coke bottles, wild plants used as teas to cure soar throats or as bandages to heal machete wounds, the list goes on. All perfectly functional, and less wasteful.
Maybe the most pronounced example was the work culture. In the U.S., we literally have a phrase "work-life balance," which shows that we typically treat work as if it is disconnected from life. As if you have a life, and then you go to your work which is not part of it. On the farm in Guatemala, work was much more integrated with life. The first thing we'd do sometimes when we showed up to the farm would be drink a coffee, while enjoying the scenery and chatting with the other folks around. Then maybe we'd discuss what we'd be doing that day, and get started chopping down branches to feed the cows, or planting cacao or coffee or breadnut, or transplanting trees. After an hour or so doing that, we'd head back to relax and chat while someone prepared lunch. Someone may pull down a coconut, chop it open, and pass it around for sips of coconut water. After lunch we'd find another task to do, and the cycle would continue. It felt like a rhythm, a balance between producing and just living, being, with relationships at the center as opposed to productivity-- relationships with nature, with food, and with other humans. We also loved how mothers could take their kids to work with them, and that there always seemed to be kids around wherever we went. It made child-rearing seem much more natural, less stressful and complicated, than back home.
I realize that I'm generalizing quite a bit here. I met plenty of people whose mentality toward work was further along the spectrum toward that of the U.S. I also don’t mean to romanticize life in Central America or less developed countries in general, though I suspect I am some. I'm aware that there are positive and negative aspects to any cultural norm, and I could go back and point them out in each of the ones I described above. For example, the American director of the organization we were volunteering with lamented about how the farms could be producing so much more and making themselves more financially stable if only they took a more diligent attitude toward the work. There is probably truth to this--and I have to admit, I sometimes found myself feeling bored and wishing there were more for me to do--but the owners of the farms, weighing his arguments, seemed to opt for the more relaxed, rhythmic, balanced, and relationally-rich work culture they were used to. They kind of smiled and shrugged when describing his seemingly unquenchable zeal for "improvement."
Whatever positives to American work-culture there most definitely are, we have to bear in mind a difficult truth: the urge to control things in our environment to the extreme that we do, to be perfectly efficient, to "advance" technologically, is a legacy of white supremacy and capitalism and, in my opinion, a fundamental driver of climate change and the destruction of the planet. Guatemalans may have a low per capita GDP than Americans*, but they are infinitely less responsible for the climate crisis. In fact, reclaiming indigenous practices similar to the ones practiced there, where Mayan culture is thankfully still very prevalent, is going to have to play a big role in whatever resurrection we can hope for as/after the climate catastrophe runs its course.
Not to mention, I don't think it would be at all fair to say that Americans are better off than Guatemalans. Materially, yes, and I certainly believe in creating a world where Guatemalans have the same basic access to the important care and services that we do. But in terms of overall well-being and happiness? I wasn't there long enough to truly know, but my instinct, based on the many interactions and conversations we had with people from diverse parts and backgrounds of the country, would be to say that Guatemalans have us beat. I suspect it has to with the fact that they spend so much more time in community, just being around other people, than Americans. We noticed that they were essentially always with other people, whether their immediate families or the several friends who would randomly stop by to chat for a few minutes every day. Middle-class Americans seem to spend so much time alone, in (comparatively) giant houses, with all sorts of stuff, but very little human interaction. No wonder that so many Americans are terribly lonely. Paradoxically, it's mostly by choice. Once people have money, they often spend it to make themselves more comfortable, but that often means more isolated. I've always believed that capitalism and the inequality it produces are not, in the end, healthy and wholesome for those who reap the material benefits. Which is why the privileged need to be just as invested in forging an equitable society as the marginalized. But I digress...
Many Americans, myself included, have had the perfectionistic need to control and manage deeply engrained in their psyches for generations. I'm struggling with it right now, as I keep revising this post so that it perfectly expresses what I want it to before I publish it. My goal in writing this isn't to convince people to try to change that all at once, but maybe to help them at least become conscious of it, and to be reminded that there are people who are getting by with a much more "let-things-unfold" kind of attitude toward life.
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*The reason for poverty in Guatemala goes much, much deeper than anything I've described here. The country has had a long history of being exploited by foreign companies (United Fruit) and governments (the U.S. funded the Guatemalan government during their civil war, which left hundreds of thousands dead, persecuted, and displaced). I'm sure there's plenty more that I'm not even aware of. My point is just that even if it were feasible to "advance" economically through a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps type of increase in production, if they follow our model, it will only exasperate the global crisis we're in.
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