Oh Life, What a Tease (Guatemala)

When is it time to give up on your dreams? I know the Disney answer to that is never, and that there should be a happy ending, but who is to say there should be? And sooner or later, money does play into things, you cannot pretend that it is going to magically appear along with the castle and prince charming. A girl has got to pay the rent somehow.
For me, part of the reason I have been traveling is to start a career as an international journalist. Now with less than two weeks of this trip left, I have realized that life has taken me in a different direction. So have I failed? I look at the facts, if I had stayed in one place instead of moving around maybe I would have started that career. It was a huge learning experience to see that I do need to be in one place to get contacts and learn the language, I think I would need that to be a more effective journalist. But I was also compelled to keep moving. So one could argue that I didn’t really give it my best effort. But that is the problem with conflicting priorities.
Life with its ebbs and flows can be interesting, how it can give you something and then take it away in a second. When I got to Antigua, Guatemala, it was sort of sinking in to me how I did fail in a sense. How I didn’t publish as much as I would like, and though being offered a travel advice column was exciting, that isn’t where I want to put my energies, I want to focus on human rights issues, not travel articles.
I enrolled in Spanish classes and quickly one thing led to another, and life sort of teased me again into thinking I could make it as a journalist. The timing especially was strange, right when I was thinking how I failed. I was going to volunteer at an NGO, via the Spanish School I was studying with. They took me to Nuestros Ahijados, or God’s Child project, ran by Patrick Atkinson. It is absolutely the most effective, well-run charity I have ever seen and it completely changed my mind about development work. I decided that instead of just volunteering, I wanted to write about the charity.
Soon I was swept into this crazy world of reporting. I was invited to meet the mayor and the attorney general to interview about the project. I went and followed social workers on their visits and saw how some families live. I met some of the most amazing people of my entire trip that work at the project and even allowed me to move in with them while I was there. I was shocked that these two boys that were my age were in such prestigious positions and did so much, it was truly inspiring.
But Patrick Atkinson himself, who by chance happened to be at the project which is very rare, was the most inspiring. Though he is interviewed by CNN and the Christian Science Monitor and meets with ambassadors and secretary of state’s, he treated me with credibility and dignity and gave me lots of time. He is one of the most amazing people I have ever met.
At the same time, while all this was going on, I started Spanish classes. My Spanish teacher happened to be a journalist as well and for my first class we went to a meeting of the board of directors at the main hospital in Antigua. There, another hot story fell into my lap. So two things are happening, supposedly, Guatemala is exaggerating their Swine Flu cases, so that they can get more aid money. The economic crisis has not only hit industrialized countries, but it has been catastrophic for developing countries who are losing their aid money. So Guatemala has seen the Swine Flu as a way to remedy the situation. I had the director of the hospital on record saying that the national health board has told them to only test one in ten people that come into the hospital with swine flu symptoms. He said that they are doing this for two reasons, the first is because the money that is allocated to the test kits is being funneled into Swiss bank accounts. Second, because they want to make the problem worse so that they get more aid money. I thought it was a pretty hot story to have him on the record saying this. Apparently so did authorities in Guatemala, because my professor who runs his own small paper had someone break in and smash the monitors of this computers while he was working on the story as well.
But for me, both of these stories seemed to be a sign that I should keep pursuing the journalism dream. And I have never been happier, I was working nonstop, I had no time to eat and my pants began to fall off of me, I was always running from one place to the next and food and sleep didn’t seem to matter. I loved the adrenaline and I loved thinking I was going to help people. My roommate would come home to find me asleep over my laptop, I was constantly rushing around doing interviews, then Spanish class with every now and then taking a night off to go salsa, mambo and meringue dancing in Antigua, which is by the way, so much fun. And I was so alive and so happy. Then the coup in Honduras struck. And I happened to meet a contact who had some very interesting information. Once again, I don’t want there to be tragedy in this world, but I felt like I was in the right place at the right time, and I love the lifestyle of thinking I have 1 hour to figure out how to tie things up because I am going into Honduras before the borders close.
Despite it feeling like everything was going in the right direction, life was only teasing me. No news source I could find was interested in the Honduras story, and in a different vein that situation ended in a bit of a disaster. I couldn’t develop the hospital story because the director had to clamp down and wasn’t able to talk all of the sudden. And the most devastating of all, after all the time that Patrick Atkinson and his staff gave me, I queried almost 40 periodicals and nobody was interested. And over half of those had shut down because of these awful economic times.
I felt like this dream had been given back to me, and then shattered yet again. It is worse to be so close and have it taken away. And the worst part of it is that I was loving the lifestyle and it felt like everything was going right.
I headed off in a daze to Lago de Atitlan, which is a whole different story in itself of life taking you in crazy directions, and a beautiful place as well. My trip is about to end and I didn’t really accomplish what I set out too. I read a quote by Patrick Atkinson himself actually, “God doesn’t ask that we succeed, only that we try.” And that was sort of a weight off my shoulders.
And I realized that this is really my first experience of failure that I can think of in my life. And then I realized that is something that I need to develop a better relationship with. We are all going to fail in our life, and if I want to accomplish anything I need to relax more with failure and not let it get me down.
But like I said before, where is that line between being practical and making a living, and not giving up on our dreams? Because I know the lifestyle of a journalist is something I am passionate about, but not the freelancing and not making a living at it part. Either way, it was an interesting time in Antigua.