I'll be occassionally updating this blog with my thoughts about my journey through the fascinating but sometimes misunderstood countries with their various cultures in Central America. (I could have a random blog somedays that has nothing to do with Central America. And you probably won't find all of my blogs as interesting as I do. Just try and bear through it with me. I'll probably get back on track soon enough. Probably.)
I plan on exploring the local issues which have recently led to tens-of-thousands of Central Americans immigrating to the United States each year. The economic and social troubles of the "Northern Triangle" of Central America burst in to the media spotlight this past summer, 2014. From the northern part of Central America - Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, thousands of children traveling without their parents were flooding into the United States. Although the numbers of migrants from those countries soon slowed, it was apparent that the economic and social issues in those countries were at least partly to blame.
I know have a little bit of first-hand knowledge about the current situation in Central America. I actually traveled to Guatemala and Belize in the summer of 2013 with my now ex-girlfriend, Frida, for a couple of weeks. She is originally from Mexico and was spending a couple months visiting her family back in Guadalajara. (She's exactly like the countless bilingual people in Tucson who I talked about extensively in my previous blog post. She was born in Mexico, moved to the United States when she was 2, and was raised in a bilingual culture.) I flew from Tucson and she from Guadalajara. We rendevoused in Guatemala City.
We were in Guatemala and Belize primarily as tourists. But, because she is a public health professional and is interested in the human rights of the indigenous population, women, and the LGBT community (among others), we were able to occasionally peek into the cultures of people that we traveled past. I knew very little Spanish at this point, but she was able to act as a translator and occassional interviewer. (She is a bit more cautious then I am when interacting with the unknown, which probably was a good thing on that trip. Now that I'm traveling alone and have learned more Spanish, I probably cause more mischief. In Central America, that probably isn't a good attribute for a tall, lanky, awkward, white guy.) For example, when we were staying for a couple nights in La Casa del Mundo, a beautiful hotel with breathtaking views of Lake Atitlan, we spent an evening conversing over a meal with a local indigenious boy - probably 9 or 10 years old - we met earlier on a dock. We told him about our lives in the United States and he told us about his life in rural Guatemala. He told us about the multiple languages he had to learn so that he could talk with distinct but essentially neighboring indigenious towns.
After our trip, I thought that Guatemala wasn't a very dangerous place. Granted, I only traveled from city-to-city during the day and I had a fluent Spanish-speaker with me, but the economic and social problems of the country didn't seem to spill over into extreme corruption or heavy gang activity. It still remains for me to see whether Honduras or El Salvador have high amounts of either of those problems (I've especially heard not-to-good stories about the corruption and gang activity in Honduras). I've found Nicaragua to be a friendly and respectful country despite having serious political problems and being one of the poorest economies in the Americas.
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