It’s hard to do official-ish things in Guatemala. I hazard the guess (literally) that lots of developing countries are that way. There are mountains of paperwork and steps and it’s actually really hard to find any information about anything unless you know somebody. The paperwork is tough: it needs to be done in ink with signatures of you, a notary, and your great great step-mother’s uncle, while the steps usually consume one or more whole days–in the capitol city, which takes a day or two to get to from anywhere else in the country. And deadlines. The world ends if you don’t meet a deadline (they’re usually not met).

Why? I think it’s like a Volcano ice cream bowl from Coldstone: Oreos mashed in with strawberries and chocolate syrup and bananas in vanilla ice cream: there’s a lot goin’ on that makes it what it is.

I’m sure that a significant ingredient is technology, namely how it’s kinda here but not really. There’s online banking but when you make any transaction more significant than a withdraw or deposit, it is first and foremost written and signed in pen in a Book of Acts. Also, there’s an enormous amount of corruption all around. I’ve talked with a lot of Guatemalans about this stuff, they agree and quite benevolently explain that that’s simply how things are here. It’s just hard to do stuff here.

How does a country become this or change away from this? Were the Mayans like this? Where the Spanish Catholics or Evangelical missionaries like this? My word, were WE once like this (possibly not, but I don’t know)? And the North America indigenous?

Gear change: a girl in the sponsorship program is graduating from high school this year and has the desire to keep studying, the aptitude to swing in the big leagues and the heart to actually do good things there. That’s a rare combo. She has a heart that’s not been muted and dumbed and a mind that’s survived a normally crippling secondary “education.” An absolutely necessary condition for this country to climb out of the mud will be for the few-and-far-between individuals like her  to reach for the stars.

But you know what? That won’t happen. If she does manage to keep studying, it’ll be Saturday classes at one of a few local university micro-branches that remarkably effectively board up the mind wherever the secondary education failed to do so. There are only a few good quality learning universities here and only rich people enroll. All the mountainous paperwork and myriad steps aren’t so bad when you can hire three or four lawyers to make sure things work out.

This girl, Ana, won’t ever know what it’s like to reach for the stars, to follow her heart and creativity and imagination, to have the world tell her “go for it and see what happens.” She’ll end up graduating from high school in October and going straight to work in the education system, with absolutely inadequate training to address the problems and struggles the students face, teaching the same poor curriculum that she herself only barely escaped.

Because that’s the way things are here, and it makes my blood boil.