My Year of Living Dangerously
Moving to Guatemala resulted in learning many things I never expected.
The first morning of my new life in Guatemala I electrocuted myself.
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…
