Filed under: Deepness
I turned 23 this week. So I may not be about to kick the bucket but I am officially starting to feel old, and a little terrified at how fast the years are flying. I swear it feels like just last week that I turned 18.
Today I was listening to a podcast by my favourite author Don Miller about how our lives our like stories, we are the authors, and we have the chance to write an engaging and exciting story or a meaningless and empty one. Kind of cliche but it´s actually very inspiring. What kind of story will we write? A story that someone will want to read, with risk, love, sacrifice and adventure, or a story about a man who´s goal in life is to buy a volvo? (ok so he definitely phrased it much better….listen if you get a chance)
And in this feeling kinda old state it got me all inspired to live…just live. Dream. Laugh. Take risks. I don´t want life to just happen to me, to go through the motions, take the path of least resistance and one day wake up old. I want to happen to life.
You´ve heard all the cliches, ´live life to the full´, ´seize the moment´ etc.
But, what if they´re actually really good cliches.
It´s true…today is a blank page, and only you hold the pen. You get to choose what kind of story you will write. How you will treat those you love. How you will treat that beggar in the street. How many times you will laugh. If you will stay in that job you hate or do everything you can to find what fulfills you. How you can take that step of faith and run after what your heart beats for, maybe loving some AIDS orphans in Africa or joining a band.
¨Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn´t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream Discover.¨ ‘ Mark Twain
I read a book this week about a lady who moved to Lebanon with her husband to become missionaries, was working hard serving pregnant ladies in a health clinic when she was shot dead by a terrorist. A waste of a life, to put herself in such a dangerous situation, or a life well lived, lived to love and serve others, and laid down for a good cause? I´m not saying we should deliberately put ourselves in dangerous situations, but the fact is our lives are fragile.
Although we can reduce risk, death can actually surprise any of us, at any time.
So why do we let things like insecurities and fears hold us back? If there´s one thing I´ve learned this year it´s that we have so much to be thankful for and so many opportunities. I say let´s throw caution to the wind, find something that would be worth dying for, and then give everything we´ve got to live for it.
¨There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.¨
Doesn´t mean it´ll always be easy. I know I´ve had some emotionally challenging moments this year in Guatemala, dealing with sickness, a new language, feelings of isolation, culture shock and just plain homesickness. But the things I´ve learned, the changes that have happened in me, the people I´ve met, have all made it so worth the rough patches. And the rough patches themselves have been what have been the times I have grown the most.
So I challenge you…pick up that pen and write your story. Decide today what is important to you, laugh in the face of fear, love big, do something just for fun, let faith grow in your heart, play with a child, and just LIVE. You´ll never get this blank page back again.
I leave with you a quote from Rob McKee as quoted by Don Miller In this podcast:
¨Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear, for above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage. Courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully, but write boldly. Then like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world.¨ Robert McKee
Filed under: Life in Guatemala
You can buy your bread already toasted here. Pretty cool, huh?
They don´t eat much toast. They think I´m a little strange in the home when I put my bread in the grill to toast.
When cooking lunch every morning with Seño Sandra, we have nice chats about all sorts of random things. Ok, restricted as I am by my basic spanish, she definitely does the majority of talking (I can understand better than I speak it).
Tuesday morning, while chopping and peeling and dicing, she told me something that actually rather shocked me.
How when she found out that her third child was a girl, she was devastated.
Not because she doesn´t like girls, but because she felt so sorry that this little person had to face life as a woman. She told me she has suffered a lot for being female, and she just wanted to have sons because life is so much easier for them.
This surprised me because although I´ve seen a lack of respect for women from a lot of guys here, I never really considered that the situation is all that bad in this country. Women can go to school, work, choose who to marry (most of the time).
But then I started to think about all the women and girls I know here who have told me stories of being cheated on, abused, or harrassed in their families, churches and workplaces. And the majority of women have stories to tell.
I have heard multiple horrible stories of married pastors hitting on teenage girls when they are new to the churches, of husbands cheating on their wives multiple times, of ridiculous amounts of domestic violence (although unfortunately this applies to the women too).
All the girls in this home have suffered abuse before coming to the foundation.
One of our most intelligent girl´s mother doesn´t want her daughter in school because she thinks girls only need to know how to run a home and not how to read and write. She doesn´t see the point in trying to improve their lives…never mind that they live in a house made of scrap pieces of corrugated iron.
When I was staying with a catholic family my first month here, I was surprised to see how the wife waited hand and foot on her husband and didn´t sit down to eat until his every need was met. Culturally this was very new for me.
As fair skinned foreigners us volunteers get a ridiculous amount of attention from guys here, who will openly look you up and down, whistle, shout out suggestive comments. I´ve never felt threatened, but it does get annoying after awhile. When walking along roads a good half of the cars will beep their horns for your benefit (and sometimes you even get police cars flashing their lights and sirens).
So I realise life is a little tough for women here. You are generally expected to marry, young, cook and clean and have a truckload of kids. It appears much worse in indiginous country communities, where there seems to be very little education for women, very young marriages and the husband is definitely the head of the home.
We are so blessed as women in our western culture to have the freedom and respect that we have. But unfortunately this isn´t the reality for the majority of women in the world. Centuries old stereotypes and prejudices still remain strong in most of the planet that men have more value than women. Horrible abuses and things like honour killings are the norm in certain countries.
70% of the world’s poorest people are women and girls; one in three women is beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused; and women account for just 17% of all parliamentarians worldwide. WomanKind
It made me so grateful to have the opportunities and protection and freedom that I have. Let´s do what we can for suffering sisters in the rest of the world.
One last thought…in spite of the problems here in Guatemala I do know some incredible, respectful and decent guys here. There is a real mix of poverty and wealth, ignorance and education in this country, so both extremes exist. This means that there are parts of the culture that are very similar to ours. And I also want to say that Sandra´s daughter, Dulce, is very much adored and a happy little 4 year old girl.
Filed under: Life in Guatemala
Monday Arrive back at Salem after my weekend in Mexico. Unpack. Cook lunch. The food money hadn´t come through so very little fruit and vegies. Wait at the road and wait for the bus to drop the girls home. Lunch, supervise cleaning chores, supervise showers, wash some dishes, listen to story about school day, help with home work (lots of maths…), sort out a few disputes. Beautiful weather, play outside…football, marbles, monsters, and then a pretend funeral for a pretend baby that died. Cook while girls are having devotions, dinner, wash some more dishes, teach Linda how to moonwalk. Sleep.
Tuesday Get up 5am, tell the girls to hurry a million times while they get dressed ridiculously slowly, make school snacks, breakfast and lunch, supervise cleaning chores, make sure everyone has their snack and homework and hair done and walk to wait for the bus. Go to a staff meeting, which in true Latin American style goes all morning. Come back in time to meet the school bus, lunch, cleaning, showers, homework, explain division for the hundredth time, play outside (still amazing weather), cook dinner. Sleep.
Wednesday 5am. The usual snacks, breakfast, supervise chores and getting dressed and walking to the bus. Then go with 3 of the kids to the city (an hour and a half drive with stops), try and study spanish while waiting for 3.5 hours in the psychologists while they each have their appointment. Afterwards wait at the office for another hour or two with the kids, until we´re finally ready to head home. Lunch at 3pm, homework, eat cereal for dinner cos still no money for food. Find a fly in my cereal. We have so many flies it´s ridiculous. Worse than Australia believe it or not. Go to church (half an hour late), try to keep the girls from falling asleep on me but don´t succeed. 10pm, sleep.
Thursday same 5am routine. Finally have a quiet morning, finally get to wash clothes, finally get to sleep a bit. Normal day, girls home an hour early; cooking, cleaning, washing dishes, explaining division, sorting out disputes, breaking up the occasional fight, teaching how to say ´cry baby´and ´crazy´in english, playing marbles, giving lots of hugs. Great weather still, strange for rainy season. Get a massive bruise while playing football but totally worth it. Cook, clean, sleep.
Friday 5am normal start. The couple who run the home very kindly took me out to breakfast at Pollo Campero; afterwards, run some errands, then get home in time to cook lunch, pick up the girls, and then to shake things up a bit we took lunch over to the swimming pools in our housing estate. 2 of the girls are sick and were very sad that they weren´t allowed to swim. Ran some races and games and then ate in the sunshine. Supervise showers, cleaning, pack my backpack, then leave to sleep the weekend away in the city….
Filed under: Life in Guatemala
Frijoles con crema, huevos estrellados y pastel…
[The cake isn´t normal....only for girl´s birthdays. But a lot of them are having 2 birthdays this year as the first time around they forgot to take photos, so to replace the gaps in the Salem album we are celebrating birthdays for a second time round....]
Filed under: Uncategorized
Why would anyone spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to convert people to the terrible news that we are merely highly evolved animals marooned on a giant rock, spinning meaninglessly in space, doomed to a purposeless existence, without moral consequence and without recourse to any higher power, meaning or hope? Why didn’t they just throw a massive party, or buy millions of mosquito nets for Africa, or install a wall of plasma televisions at every morgue in the country? read more…
Personally if I were them, I would have just gone for the massive party….
Filed under: Travels
¨Push the button.¨ The uniformed customs lady pointed at a small button on an equally small pedestrian light.
Emma and I were standing at the border of Guatemala and Mexico. No gate, no door, just a path, and those pedestrian lights. She points closer. Emma presses, the red light flicks instantly over to the green ´Pase´ and satisfied, the customs officer waves us through and settles back in her seat. She didn´t ask to see our passports to make sure we had received the appropriate stamps in the office up the road, didn´t check our luggage. Apparently, to enter Mexico, it was just the button that mattered. Push it, hopefully all will go well and you´ll get a green light. This is why life is so amusing over here.
We went to Mexico for only 3 days to renew our Guatemalan tourist visas (they come in 90 day lots…first time you can pay to renew, second time you have to leave the country. or you can pay and send your passport off with one of many entrepreneurs who will take your passport to the border and organise a new visa but I was a bit reluctant with this arrangement…). We took a short trip just over the border to Tapachula.
I noticed quite a few differences between Mexico and Guatemala, which actually surprised me given the proximity. To start with the immigration offices were totally different. Guatemala´s was small, when we were there lit by candlelight due to a power outage, and we had to queue outside in the rain. Mexico´s, a few metres up the road, was large, had working electricity, a waiting room, customs forms and an armed security guard keeping the hawkers away. So different.
Also, I didn´t see any barbed wire in Mexico (almost all buildings in the cities here are rimmed by razor wire), the people generally taller, the food definitely spicier, the streets cleaner, the shops a lot more open (here in Guate most little shops have bars across the front, you just ask for what you want). Spent a quiet couple of days exploring, eatting, and shopping. Unfortunately I had no luck replacing my broken shoes as the largest size there was a couple too small for me.
It was hot. And wet. Rainy season thunder is so loud. Emma was sick. I wasn´t. Which is strange considering I am normally the first to crash. Maybe my stomach is finally getting stronger. The food was incredible and totally worth the risk; tacos, and a whole lot of things I can´t spell. So spicy. So good.
Not many foreigners. You get stared at a lot for being so different in this part of the world. Sad part is, Emma and I have now become like them…we saw one gringa, and sat there in the park staring at her for ages before we realised what we´re doing…
Obviously my knowledge of Mexico is very limited as I only went to one small city. But I liked it. The coolest part, though, was coming back to Guatemala and realising that…it felt like coming home. 
Back to work tomorrow.
2 weeks til my birthday.
3 weeks til I go to Belize.
Life is good.
Filed under: Life in Guatemala
The couple that work in Salem, Victor and Sandra, work 15 days on then get a 3 day break, before starting 15 days again. They are on duty 24/7, with no lunch or coffee breaks. I have never heard them complain.
One of the teachers in the spanish school I went to gets up at 3am to start work in her family bakery, where she works through til the morning and starts teaching at the school. If there are enough students, she will work through til the end of the day. Week in, week out.
I have also met many people who work 2 jobs during the week, and attend university on the weekends to try and get a degree.
As someone who has grown up in a country of unions and rights and labour laws and government handouts, I´ve had a thing or two to learn about hardwork and appreciating options. Many people here have the mundane job of selling snacks or pens on buses simply because it´s the only option some of them have to try and earn a living. I often wonder how many bus vendors or shoe shiners could be Einsteins or Da Vincis, but just haven´t had the chance? I have spent so much thinking about what to study, what kind of job I would like, what to do with my life; and have unfortunately taken these opportunities for granted.
How frustrating it must be to have an unfulfilling job and no opportunity to change. And yet, these incredible survivors of the human race in countries all around the world get up and keep going and work hard and make life happen; waking up at 3am to work in bakeries, or looking after 12 kids for 15 days straight.
Are we too spoiled? Have we forgotten the meaning of hard work, of realising that not everything in life can be fun? Certainly labour laws and your health are important. But the difference I see in the general attitude toward work here is so completely different than at home.
I just wonder, if we were willing to work a bit harder, what might get done. We sing in church week after week about how we will go no matter what the cost and how we will be His hands and feet; but then we go out for coffee and have a good time and actually do very little about the millions of children living on the streets of this world´s cities or the thousands of people dying each day of preventable diseases or the new churches in remote communities desperate for some good Bible teaching.
At first when I started work here I found it hard that I was living at my job, not being able to leave it behind at night, settle back for an easy evening of food and chatting online to friends at home. But what if living a life of service isn´t a job, but a life? What if the cost (not just financial) is really high, but the children or families or whoever oh-so-worth it? Victor and Sandra aren´t just singing about it. They´re doing it, serving the least of these, feeding the hungry, being His hands and feet, giving their lives.
These are the people I really, really respect.
