Guatemala was amazing. It was sweet and sour. I felt free and entrapped, and I felt hungry, but not in the way that many in the country feel. I felt a hunger for the children there to be educated and fed and have childhoods. I felt a sincere appreciation for the United States. Now that I'm back in my country, I see things differently. I'm not the same.
My partner Miles and I are now working on a story about a 21-year old Guatemalan man named Jose Perdomo Salguero who works at the Ministry "Hope of Life," or "Esperanza de Vida." Several times a week, he travels up to six hours per trip to remote areas of Guatemala where there are children in need. He sometimes finds kids with protruding bellies whose bodies are ambushed by parasites or kids who are skin and bones who may die if not fed and nursed to health quickly.
One of the days Miles and I tagged along with Jose, we drove in a pickup truck with Maya hitchhikers in the back to the top of an emerald green, steep and breathtaking mountain called Terrera, where our breaths were taken away by something else: a little girl who was almost two and weighed a mere nine pounds. My eyes swimmed with tears when I saw her taut skin stretched over the dominating protrusion of her bones. We saw other stuff too. Stuff that I don't want to think about right now. It was terrible in many ways, and yet I feel a sense of sheer joy and appreciation that I was able to experience this pocket of the world I didn't understand or feel fully. Now, I am changed.
