Living my dream... or just perpetuating a nightmare..?

At some point during my college years, I don’t remember exactly when, I remember thinking how amazing it would be to teach and live abroad.  When I first found out that there was a demand for teachers internationally and that those teachers get a pretty sweet gig, it became my dream to do that.  

I love travelling and I love teaching.  To combine these two things became my dream, which I am now living.  Yes, I am living my dream and it is simultaneously an amazing experience and an extremely guilt-ridden one.  

I am so happy that my daughter is being raised abroad and will be bilingual from an early age.  I love the fact that she is growing up and has grown up in a place where everything isn’t cushy and easy, but is raw and real.  She is surrounded by so much natural beauty and amazing people that all help us to provide a unique and meaningful early life for her.  She is so lucky, and I want to impress that upon her and hope someday she uses her fortunate position in life to aid those who are less fortunate.

Here’s where the guilt-ridden side comes in.  I love my life.  I love my job, my friends, my boss, the beautiful country we live in and mostly my wife and daughter.  However, there is a lot of hurt in this country.  Over half the population lives in poverty.  It has been ranked on the top 10 worst places in the world for women and children to live.  And finally, corruption and impunity rule.  However, that does in no way tell the whole story of Guatemala.  Most Guatemalans have never played a role in the story of their beautiful country.

Over the past 75 years the United States has been a major player (in a negative fashion) in Guatemalan affairs:

• 

  Jacobo Arbenz, 1st democratically
  elected President of Guatemala

  In 1944 they led and supported a coup through the CIA to remove Guatemala’s first democratically elected leader,  Jacobo Arbenz, from office.  Why?  Not a simple answer, but a corporation named United Fruit Company was worried about losing land, so they used their connections to convince Eisenhower that the President was a communist.  He wasn’t of course, but nonetheless was seen as one in Washington and forced to leave the country under threat of violence.
• This led to a series of Right-Wing military dictatorships directly supported, both financially and militarily, by the United States.  This is when violence and impunity became the norm in Guatemala.
• In the early 1980’s Reagan ratcheted up support for the dictator Efrain Rios-Montt who, according to the UN, committed a genocide against Ixil Mayans in the northern highlands of the country.  These actions were supported directly by the weapons and money given to Rios-Montt from the Reagan administration.

These are just a brief overview of the horrid negative effects that my country has had on the beautiful country that I currently live in. What if another country even tried these actions in our homeland?  How would Americans react?  

While I am living my dream, I am often torn with the guilt of the actions my country took here.  Everyday I see the challenges that Guatemala faces and so much of the negative facets of life   here can be directly linked to the coup of 1944 and the aftermath of brutal dictatorships that divided this country and created violence as the norm.  Look what my country has done.  Worse yet, so few American even know or care.  

I wonder if I’m doing any good here or just making a difficult situation worse?  While I’m living my dream, my country helped to create a nightmare of a situation in much of Central America.  The little I’ve mentioned here is just the tip of the iceberg of the USA’s negative influence in this country and region.  My hope is that in some tiny way I can inspire hope and progress in this often times forgotten, but incredibly beautiful corner of the world.

Women are Perfect...

Almost 6 months ago my little daughter, Neyla, was born.  We had decided to find out early whether it would be a boy or a girl and of course it was a girl.  My wife was “secretly” hoping for a girl, but I wasn’t sure.  I didn’t really care, it’s that old cliché that as long as they have 10 fingers and 10 toes I’d be happy, but when I found out it was a girl that really made me think. 

I thought about what it meant to have a daughter and to be a good father to her.  I wondered what it would be like for a girl to grow up in the early 21^st century.  And I was thankful that as a woman she would be growing up when and where she was. 

Throughout history no group has been treated with more disrespect and inequality than women.  They make up roughly half of the world’s population, always have and always will, yet until the last century they were not allowed to vote, own property, hold office or inherit wealth in most parts of the world.  Until recently a woman only had four roles that mattered; daughter, sister, wife and mother.  Not to say that those are four unimportant roles, but to be strictly limited to that by society is stifling at best.  The progress attained by and for women over the last century has been astounding, but more is still to be done. 

Only a generation or two ago very little was expected of a woman outside of the limitations of the aforementioned 4 roles even after much legal and political equality had been attained.  Women were not necessarily expected to go to college or earn a descent wage, much of that was implicitly still left up to men.  The rub here is that as more and more equality has been achieved, the expectations upon women have increased exponentially and this has always made me concerned for my female students and now I share that concern for my daughter as she grows older. 

Young women are now still expected to be exceptional at those 4 roles (I’d argue much more than men), but now you can add to those already sky high requirements the high expectations to be exceptional students, have a certain body type, graduate from a great college, have an outstanding job and provide for their families.  The irony of this is that while equality for women has increased over the past century, the expectations upon women have only gotten greater and weigh women down more, all while the expectations upon men have changed very little.  Heart disease among women is at an all time high.  Eating disorders and depression are higher than ever amongst young women and in my opinion these can be traced directly to these added expectations. 

The truly amazing aspect of all of this is that while the weight bared by women has increased so greatly, they outperform men academically, graduate more often from college and on average have greater professional success quicker.  Again an appalling irony exists here in that women are still paid 33% less than a man for similar jobs. 

Men are all too ignorant to the situation of women in our current American society.  Typically men just see women as having achieved total equality, and although there is some truth to that, men do not see the added pressure, but even add to it with their inability to respect women in the professional and personal realm. 

I am not arguing that all men are disrespectful towards women, but all too many objectify women in their personal relationships and the statistics on pornography are truly disturbing in that this industry is responsible for more objectification of women than any other industry in the world. 

When will women truly attain equality in our society?  This won’t happen until we all realize that we are not there yet and that women are truly remarkable in ability to balance all of these weighing expectations that American society has placed upon them.  Then and only then will I feel truly secure in “letting go” of my daughter.  I feel like it is going to be so much work (in a good way) for my wife and I to raise our daughter with a less sense of weight and stress on her and more of a sense of personal identity and proud to be the woman that she is to be. 

I remember a line from one of my favorite films entitled, “With Honors.”  At one point Joe Pesci, who plays a homeless man living on the Harvard campus states, “Women are perfect… Don’t matter if they’re skinny, blond or blue.  If a woman is willing to give you her love it’s the greatest gift in the world.”  Women may not be perfect, but they certainly amaze me.