Beautiful Things

“Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are a privilege of the rich.”

Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray

Today was my first day back at work here in Chiquimula after my long awaited vacation home to America for my sister’s wedding. Before I left I thought a lot about what it might feel like to be back in Portland for the first time in so long or how it would feel to come back to Chiquimula after going back to my beloved Tenth Avenue. I’ve talked to a couple of my volunteer friends here who have told me that it is weird to go home because when we are here we are always looked at as outsiders and foreigners, then when they went home they once again felt like they were on the outside because they had spent so much time away and so much time trying to integrate into another culture that they had a hard time adjusting to America and its culture. Basically, they feel like they belong in neither Guatemala nor America.

It appears that I am fortunate enough to not have experienced this. It hit me last night as I lay in bed waiting for my eye lids to close that the weirdest part about going home was that it didn’t feel weird to go home. And the weirdest part of coming back to Chiquimula was that it doesn’t at all feel weird to be back. Sure there were times in America that felt a little strange, like going to a Blazer game, but mostly just because I hadn’t done them in such a long time not because it felt foreign to me. Nothing felt out of the ordinary about going out with some old friends or eating out at nice restaurants, even hanging out in one of Portland’s most posh hotels after the wedding, or the wedding itself for that matter were all subconsciously accepted.

Today we went to one of our communities called Chipop. Since I just got back I didn’t know what we’d be doing but it turns out that the organization that funds us wanted us to fill out a questionnaire about the quality of life of the women in our groups: how many people live in their homes, do they have latrines, how much do their husbands make on a daily basis, etc. The answers, as one might expect, were quite disheartening. Out of the 17 women that were there, only two have cement floors in their kitchens, some don’t even have kitchens and cook in the same room in which some of their family members sleep, only a few of them use stoves instead of fires on the floor that fill the room with black smoke, not one of them has a latrine. We then asked them about how far they made it in school: two of them graduated sixth grade, a few made it through second or third grade and for the rest we just filled in the word, “No.” And anyone that knows anything about the Guatemalan education system knows that finishing third grade here is roughly the equivalent of an American kid watching one episode of Sesame Street without the sound.

For some reason when we were going over these questions something popped into my head from when I was back home. A day or two after the wedding, I went with my sister and brother-in-law to return some things with them at Macy’s in downtown Portland. As they were taking care of the exchanges with the clerk I wandered around marveling at all of the things that our culture creates, sells, and buys. I looked at pictures of beautiful people trying to sell beautiful things. I passed up and down rows of kitchen appliances with abstruse purposes. I saw a contrived picture of a smiling Martha Stewart sitting around a contrived table of beautiful dishes and silverware hosting a contrived group of racially spontaneous dinner guests. Finally, I stumbled upon a device that I had to pick up and play with to figure out what it was. It was a battery powered wine bottle opener. I tried not to look at the price but my curiosity got the best of me.

As I sat on my plastic chair next to the dusty road in Chipop I thought about that battery powered wine bottle opener. I thought about all of the people that have no stoves on which to cook their food, the 35 quetzals (less than $4) that these women’s husbands bring home, all of the people with less than a second grade education and I thought about how far away their lives are from the lives of the people that create, sell, and buy battery powered wine bottle openers. I thought about a quote I read recently from one of my favorite billionaires, Warren Buffet, “If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing.”

But then I started to think back to my original point of belonging. Being in Guatemala for a year and a half has led me to learn that I am much more “American” than I ever thought I was. I like to arrive to things on time and have others do the same. I like football better than futbol. I don’t like small talk, etc. So while I am unequivocally American in most respects and while I now feel comfortable in both America and Guatemala, I eventually concluded that I probably belong somewhere between the side of the road in Chipop and a battery powered wine bottle opener. Maybe feeling like you don’t belong isn’t always a bad thing.