Listen For the Laughter
January 1, 2003
My first year out of college, rather than dive directly into the career track, I headed to the highlands of Guatemala to intern with a development agency. As a Midwestern farm boy, it was a new world for me: smoking volcanoes rising out of subtropical forest, populated by quiet but proud Mayans, wrapped in an impossibly complex jungle of political and economic forces that began with conquest by the Spaniards 400 years ago. That jungle manifests itself today as economic imbalance: extreme wealth for a fraction of a percent and extreme poverty for the vast majority. Staggering beauty and staggering poverty. A provocative combination. My work took me often into remote areas of the highlands, via the almost exclusive mode of transportation: old Bluebird school buses that, having reached the end of their reliable lives in the United States, were driven down to Central America by entrepreneurs who knew they could squeeze another 10 years out of them. These rickety school buses were everywhere, ferrying "commuters" to the fincas of the landowners or to their own little tenant-farmed plots perched high up on the hillsides. The buses were always full. We sat seven abreast: three in each seat and one straddling the aisle. Chickens rode up in the schoolbook racks above the seats, pigs rode underneath. The middle seat was always mine, since these elementary school buses had not been built for my six-foot frame. Hundreds of hours on those buses have blurred my memory of exhaust and farm smells and a din of squeaks and rattles. But I still have vividly etched in my memory one particular early morning, rattling out into the hills at 4:30 A.M., surrounded by the smells and sounds of 80 people and animals in close proximity. As we clattered ...
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