A Story of "Fuck You Lady"

After touring Lake Atitlan I had a late lunch with my travelling pals for the day, Janet and Tina, a white mother daughter travelling team from the states. A chunk of Pana´s economy is tourism and westerners are assaulted with Mayan folks peddling their wares and such was the case as we ate our pollo and tortillas. At least 15 times we had to assert "no gracias" to folks approaching our table as we ate. One of the last was a small boy who stood no taller than waist high to me. He approached our table and offered his wares speaking Spanish...we said our no thank yous. He lingered for quite some time and finally Tina asked him in Spanish (she is fluent) to move on. He then moved to the next table of westerners and spent quite sometime interacting with them....only leaving the table when the Canadian patrons left. He returned to our table and looked pleadingly at us, snot running down his face, leaning in over our food and sighing again and again....looking sad and pathetic. All three of us had spent a day saying "no gracias" (literally probably close to 100 times) we said it assertively again and again. At last Janet (an older woman still recovering from a stroke) got severely annoyed and summoned the waiter to shoo the boy away. The boy suddenly stiffened and stood tall and determined, he lost the pleading innocent face, and with the anger and force of someone ten years his senior he asserted in a strong, mature voice "fuck you lady"...and then he walked away. Travelling in this country means dealing with a very complex interface of culture, economics, politics, religion, history.....etc. In the Mayan dominated region we were visiting the Mayan people have for hundreds of years successfully resisted the decimation of their culture by the Spanish and subsequent Ladinos peoples. They retain many of their traditional ways even after surviving the worst of colonization, political upheaval, wars, racisim, and the recent 30 plus year civil war. But each person, each family has it´s own unique experience within this gross generalization.....and trying to remember, I think it was Mr. Rogers who said, "there is no one you would not love if you knew their story." So I can´t even begin to imagine the story this boy has lived. Living in poverty watching rich westerners come in and spend on lunch what is a small fortune while shooing him away. And who has taught him at such a young age how to solicit the westerners with feigned innocence? Who has taught him the anger and how to say "fuck you." And there I sit, a relative millionaire in this country...eating my pollo...listening to Janet get more and more pissed...feeling completely conflicted and uncomfortable...thinking about disease and this dirty kid breathing on my lunch...thinking about how I should give so much more in general....thinking about being exhausted and how relatively thinking this is a ridiculous thought...how can I be truly exhausted compared to the folks here who live such physically demanding lives. And then the boy hurls his insult and the complexities continue to unfold....and who am I here...to decide anything. And who am I to feel guilt....is it so bourgeois to do so...what stories and meanings and associations do I sort and piece together and why....and then I just want a shower and to sleep in a comfortable bed. And so I do....and where that little cussing boy spent the night...and on what surface he slept....I know not. I am a gringa from Oakland California with a US passport and a good US income and health insurance and a house and...and....and that night I dreamed of cockroaches...my big fear, a giant harmless bug that I can squish at will. Nothing simple about any of it and I have no answers....only endless questions....again, I am privileged just in the being able to sit back and think versus having to hustle a gringo for sustenance. ------------------------------- This country is poor...very poor. I believe it is the poorest in Central America, if not Latin America. To give you some idea of the scale, the quetzal, the Guatemalan equivalent of a dollar, is at an exchange rate of Q7+ to $1. In other words you get more than 7Qs for every US dollar. Now consider that I had dinner last night at one of the finest restaurants in all of Antigua and I paid about Q200...that comes to about $28. Typically you can eat a great meal for $5 in this town. You can get a decent hotel for $25-35 a night.....gringos are relatively rich. And the English, well, given the strength of the Euro are mucho rich. This is the reality of my situation. Here are some stats I got off the web:

• Guatemala ranked 117 out of a total of 174 countries in 1999
• In 1997 the GDP per capita was US$1,690, in comparison with an average of US$4,127 for Latin America and the Caribbean
• The average monthly income per family in the whole country was US$227 in 1999
• In the urban areas the figure was US$423
• Almost 70 per cent of the population lives on less than US$2 per day, and of these, almost 30 per cent of the population of the country, and 8 per cent of the urban population live on less than US$1 per day
• Income distribution is extremely uneven, the difference in income of the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population differing by a factor of 30, in contrast to 12.7 in Costa Rica and 15.1 in Honduras
• There is a correlation between the high population growth rates in regions and departments with higher indices of rural and indigenous populations with higher indices of poverty
• The marginalisation of the indigenous cultures has been inherited from the Spanish colonial period

...and my friends and I will spend a hundred dollars for dinner in San Francisco....."fuck you lady."