Dispatch Number 47 -Children

In Central America children are put to work at the earliest age possible. In the cities kids peddle trays of candy or shine shoes as young as five or six years old. In the countryside they help with carrying wood bundles or babies on their backs. These little children perform these tasks with all the seriousness of adults at an age when the most a child in North America would be made to do is put his toys away. For the children of Central America there is no prolonged period of learning or easing into responsibility like it is in America.


In the mountain regions of Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua the children carry their heavy loads up 60% slopes not for yards, but for miles. Hiking on these same mountains I grow winded carrying nothing except water. In the countryside a remarkable amount of time is spent gathering wood for cooking. This precious fuel is never used to warm a house, even those in the Guatemala highlands at elevations over 3,000 meters (10,000 feet).


Life in these poor indigenous villages and settlements is striped down to bare essentials where gas stoves, concrete floors, electric fans, electricity and running water are considered luxuries, most go without. In Nicaragua 80% of the population lives on less than $2 a day, (the indigenous population lives on less than $1 a day) it is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The poor Nicaraguan wants my relative wealth and I want his slower and simpler life. As always human nature presents itself -we want what we don't have. As a traveller I spend more than $4 per gallon for gasoline, $2-4 per meal and $5-8 for a place to sleep. What travelers like myself spend in a single day the average person in Nicaragua could live on for 12 days or more.


Even though I do not feel like it the Nicaraguans and Guatemalans view me as a very rich man. While traveling these countries I am a petite bourgeois for I have the freedom to travel about in a private car and can take my meals in just about any restaurant and sleep in nice hotels. In my actual case, I travel third-class eating $3 meals instead of $12 ones, sleeping in $6 places instead of $30 ones.


Everything is relative, but can be shocking when you take a closer and more thoughtful look at the income differences between yourself and the countries visited. It influences my behavior as a visitor and keeps me humble and respectful. A travel philosophy I have adopted is to spend my money in small locally owned businesses and eat in family-run restaurants.


When I drive about the countryside I offer rides to locals who pile in with baskets of tomatoes & peppers for market, some with babies, other times at the end of a very hot day it is the campasinos, (country folk and farm hands) who hop in with their three foot machetes and reused radiator jugs for drinking water. Exchanges are fun and I ask about their crops and things like that. I am open to it all and largely avoid the yuppie backpacker tourist path- a class of traveller who is hopelessly caught in the guidebook syndrome. I avoid the cities and take the dirt roads over the back country where the cows are and I need to ask for directions at every road split; real cowboys and the penetrating stares you get when driving through small settlements. Dust swirls around the cabin of the truck because my windows are always open.


A friend of mine who I have not talked to in a long time was fond of saying, The beach is out, the city is in. Today, the city is out and the country is in. As a traveller I have discovered that I am not fond of big cities anymore. I am a rural tourist.


David
Casco Viejo, Panama City, Panama