My Year of Living Dangerously

 

My Year of Living Dangerously


I’d arrived late the previous night with my Guatemalan boyfriend with the optimistic plan to live there. The next morning, I stepped into the shower in our cheap hotel, eyeing an odd contraption on the shower head. It had a heat setting so I figured it controlled the water temperature. I twisted on the single tap. The water was barely lukewarm. Used to steaming hot showers, I reached up with my wet hand to slide the control to max. A zap shot through my arm. I screamed, tried to pull my hand from the device but the side of my little finger was superglued to it. My vision blanked. My knees buckled. As I sank to the floor, Leo, my boyfriend, rushed in and caught me just before I hit the ground. After he dragged me out and I recovered, he explained that the device, plugged into an outlet on the wall, heated water as it passed through the shower head. Electricity in a shower. That really made a lot of sense. The incident was a harbinger of what was to come during my year in Guatemala, from 1993 through 1994. I had come to experience difference, to discover. And I did. Daily life in one of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest countries was a jagged edge of broken concrete, risk omnipresent in every touch. It was fascinating, eye-opening — and exhausting.Guatemala City, the capital, was a chaotic assault on the senses. The first thing that hit me was the industry of survival. Pavement peddlers hawked sugary soft drinks poured into plastic bags with straws, unripe mango chunks coated with spices, oranges cut in half, green coconuts with stalks, branches of bananas, brilliantly hued birds and orchids wrenched from the forest. Anything they could sell. Shoeshine boys, carrying wooden boxes containing the tools of their trade, roamed, their eyes needle-focused on footwear they could offer to polish. Stray dogs, fur matted, teats swollen, sniffed in rubbish-filled gutters for food. The air was acrid with the sooty plumes spewed by the fleets of small-cylinder motorcycles and ancient North American school…

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