Perspective

I spent the weekend before my little trip to Guatemala at my friends Jim and George’s beautiful house in East Hampton. I had a great time, and would love to go again soon (are you reading this, Jim?). But I must confess to a little bit of envy while I was there, seeing so many people, including my good friends, who have such a nice house that I could not come close to affording, and probably never will. I know that my inability to have such things is the direct result of decisions I’ve made, and I don't regret those decisions (most of the time), but there it is. Living in New York, I am constantly reminded that there are so many things I can’t afford, even though I make (or at least made until recently) a very good living by most standards.

Well, there’s nothing like a few days in a developing country to put things in perspective! Thank you, Guatemala, for reminding me how spoiled I really am.

One of the great things about this trip, and this kind of trip, is that I am actually talking to real Guatemaltecos every day. I have spent the last three days conversing with my teacher, Pablo, and while studying the difference between the preterite and the imperfect and memorizing irregular verb forms, I’m also learning a lot about him. Pablo is 28, a graduate of the University of San Carlos, Guatemala’s most prestigious university. He graduated in law, and is studying for the equivalent of the bar exam here. His family comes from a village near the Mexican border, where they have some land and a home, and they also have a home in what sounds like a pretty exclusive area in Xela. His brother is studying to be a doctor. In short, he is comfortably middle class, upper middle class even. And yet, the only foreign country he has been to is Mexico; he’s never been on an airplane. When the topic of rent came up, he guessed that I paid somewhere around $500/month; I told him I paid considerably more, and left it at that. These are just a couple of examples, but I am embarrassed to let him know just how much more I have than him—all simply because I had the foresight to be born to the right people in the right place.