Dispatch Number 29 -Material World

As the driving journey into The Americas becomes an odyssey I evolve and learn a little more about myself; the path of self-discovery, a destination we never really arrive at. Travel brings constant stimulation, everything is new. Guatemala did not come as a series of distractions such as visiting one national wonder after another or drinking myself to bed every night with fellow travelers; it was unrushed time in villages and towns with Mayan and Ladino families (a Maya-Spanish mix).

A unique perspective of daily life was mine. On the tourist trail local people have adapted their lives to serve the traveller. Places where they have learned the automatic smile and how to be photogenic. After a constant stream of oddly dressed wealthy strangers invading their land and their homes they seem oddly subdued and sullen from the experience.

The beaten track is filled with anti-corporate backpackers who demand McDonald's predictability in their hostels and special buses. Whereas, communities off the beaten path where I have chosen to travel offer few services to support the traveler making the experience different, one filled with genuine smiles and questions and people who do not see you solely as a business opportunity. A place to experience their culture and their hospitality.

It was in these places that I saw their poverty, took meals with them and interacted with their children. Their simple homes had very little in them by way of material wealth, an environment reduced to basic needs of a wood stove, a hand grinder to make corn meal, a rickety bench and table and simple platform beds. I had to confront my desire to help them and ultimately chose to just observe their lives.

If I am open and aware self-knowledge is mine. I try. I try to surrender and only observe conditions and try not to move to a place of mentally fixing what I see with my western inbred concepts of order, law, security, insurance, newness, neatness and the need for all things to be excessively sanitary.

In much of Guatemala existence is reduced to bare essential life. Poor families who cobble it together a day or a crop at a time. All of it makes me reflect on the material world I was nursed on with its excess and wastefulness. What I hold in common with fellow Americans is something called the American way of life, an economic system involving the constant purchase of consumer goods on credit to maintain a high standard of living. I try to reconcile myself with my country, the United States the most powerful material culture the world has ever known.

My relatively lengthy stays in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua have reinforced that material prosperity is less important than beauty and friendship, and that as North Americans we may have lost our way. In America we lead lonely, separated and atomistic lives and appear to possess very little spiritual values. Life in North America is easy but empty.

David
Matagalpa, Nicaragua