“¡Hola! ¿Como te llamas?” My Spanish may not be perfecto and my accent is likely atrocious, but after greeting child after child with the expression, “Hello! What’s your name?” I was feeling pretty confident in my ability to communicate the sentiment.
It’s unfair to evaluate the contentedness of a Guatemalan citizen based on my own definitions of comfort and happiness. Still, I catch myself doing just that. While here I’ve thought, “Life must be boring without Wi-Fi,” and “These people have to prepare their food every day completely from scratch. What a burden!” From a logical standpoint, I know I am wrong to assume that lacking Wi-Fi is boring and that preparing food is a burden, but it’s hard to separate my standards from local ones.
Today is August 9, the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. Today is also Keb Aimagi in the Mayan Calendar, a holiday dedicated to asking god for forgiveness of sins. Today is the day I got to celebrate the former by learning about the latter, and what a day it was!
