Listen for the Laughter
Daniel Simons
April 1, 1996
MY FIRST YEAR OUT OF COLLEGE, rather than dive directly into the career track, I headed to the highlands of Guatemala to intern with a development agency. As a mid-western farm boy, it was a new world for me: smoking volcanoes rising out of subtropical forest, populated by quiet but proud Mayans, wrapped in an impossibly complex jungle of political and economic forces that began with conquest by the Spaniards four hundred years ago. That jungle manifests itself today as economic imbalance: extreme wealth for a fraction of a percent, and extreme poverty for the vast majority. Staggering beauty and staggering poverty. A provocative combination.
My work took me often into remote areas of the highlands, via the almost exclusive mode of transportation: old Bluebird school buses that, having reached the end of their reliable lives in the United States, were driven down to Central America by entrepreneurs who knew they could squeeze another ten years out of them. These rickety school buses were everywhere, ferrying "commuters" to the fincas of the landowners or to their own little tenant-farmed plots perched high up on the hillsides. The buses were always full. We sat seven abreast: three in each seat and one straddling the aisle. Chickens rode up in the school-book racks above the seats, pigs rode underneath. The middle seat was always mine, since these elementary school buses had not been built for my six-foot frame.
...
As we clattered along dirt tracks in that shock-absorberless bus, I looked into these shy but solid folks' faces in the half light—the round full faces of the women, the angular, almost gaunt faces of the men. If the statistics were to be believed, these faces had lost up to half their families in the government-sponsored ...
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