Guatemala – Where I discovered I was biased

January 7th, 2023 I arrived in Guatemala City, Guatemala after 32 hours of travel. (Side note: I discovered that it is much cheaper to fly than most people realize if you are willing to have ridiculous connections and long layovers.) I had departed Vancouver late Friday morning, not arriving in Guatemala until Saturday evening. I was tired, hungry and a little overwhelmed but I was still excited about the adventure that lay ahead. Armed with optimism and misplaced confidence due to my 350 days of Duolingo, I exited the airport, found a taxi and said, with absurd confidence, “Hola, soy de Canada. Usted habla ingles?” to which he replied “yes, yes” and so in I jumped and off we went. I soon discovered that the only English he knew was the word yes, and my 350 days on Duolingo did not actually teach me how to understand Spanish at all. My long anticipated journey to Guatemala was off to a rocky start.

Now the driver seemed nice but he had no idea where my hotel was as it was not in a touristy area (which is likely why it was so very cheap) and as I have since discovered several times, many neighborhoods in large cities do not have easy-to-navigate street names or sequential house numbers. So if you cannot direct your driver to your hotel, the driver may or may not drive around for over an hour while you sit in the backseat flipping between your “I am calm, I am strong, I am worthy of happiness” mantra and the less helpful mantra of “relax, nobody wants to kidnap you, you are too old and bitter, relax, nobody wants to kidnap you, you are too old and bitter.” Finally, after close to an hour, we arrived at a bizarre gate situation where an armed guard asked for my name and reservation number – by this time, it was quite dark and I was trying to stay positive and hoping this was normal. I definitely was hoping that I wasn’t being delivered to a Guatemalan prison for being an obnoxious tourist that couldn’t be bothered to learn proper Spanish. It turns out that it was normal as some neighborhoods in larger cities do have gates and guards and they needed to call the hotel to check that I was expected… phew! I was very relieved but only for a moment.

The hotel looked unlike any hotel I had seen before as it had a strange iron gate that was weirdly large for such a small building and directly inside the gate was both a large black truck and a small rickety desk which turned out to be the front desk (and the truck was actually in the lobby and I am still not sure why). Sadly for both myself and Jose, the front desk receptionist/owner (and as I found out later, the coffee maker), he spoke even less English than I spoke Spanish. And by then, exhaustion, fear and hunger had completely wiped out the little Spanish I knew from my brain. I am still not sure what Jose and I ‘discussed’ but it seemed that Jose said that I did not have a reservation (I was certain that I did and that I had in fact prepaid for a room but also I didn’t have data or a SIM card to use my phone to check). Anyways, it seemed that he had a room available in the back, which truthfully looked like it might have been a staff bedroom, but it had a toilet, shower and a lock on the door so I just gave him my card and said “muchas gracias.”

After Jose got me settled in my/his room, and I washed up and felt a little more human, I wandered out with the idea that I might find some food. Then began another interesting ‘discussion’ as he wouldn’t let me leave. He kept saying “stay here” over and over and I was both trying to remember my Spanish but also back to reassuring myself that I was too old to be kidnapped. He did seem very nice so I tried to remain calm and once I was able to remember “Neccesito comida, por favor” he brought me into a tiny kitchen and gave me some crackers and a banana. And so my first night in Guatemala ended up with me sitting in a hotel room with no windows, or maybe it was Jose’s room, eating crackers on the floor and crying a little (both because I was scared and I really don’t like bananas).

But that first night taught me a few valuable lessons that will stick with me forever. And the lessons have absolutely nothing to do with staying in ‘safer’ neighborhoods or ‘better’ hotels. The next morning when I wandered out of my room, I realized there was a cute little courtyard that I had been too tired or scared to notice the night before. I then followed the scent of coffee and found both Jose and coffee, plus toast and some fruit. I am not sure if he also uses Duolingo but between the two of us and a weird combination of Spanish, English and miming, he was able to convey that it was better for me to stay inside of the gate until my ride came, there were no restaurants in the area and that he had been worried I would get lost the night before and that is why he wouldn’t let me leave. Then he set me up in the tiny courtyard with a tray and some coffee, toast and fruit, telling me to enjoy and then he left me there with breakfast and my thoughts.

My thoughts were that I had always considered myself free from biases and prejudices but in fact, the first uncomfortable situation that I was in, I made some negative and stereotypical assumptions based on both appearances and language differences. I realized that coming from central Canada, and maybe some of it is generational too, I do have unconscious biases that I was not aware of (huh, guess that is where the unconscious comes from). So that is an ongoing lesson for me – the fact that I have deeply embedded biases and that I need to continue to be aware of and try to unlearn them. The one that I am most ashamed of, so I am going to put it out there and give it some light, is that I realized that I assumed that safety is related to wealth, and that is totally not true. The second lesson is that it was (and is) arrogant to go to a different country and assume that people will speak English. This is something that I notice all of the time now – how wildly arrogant many North Americans are when travelling, as we expect that there will be always be services offered in English. Not to be too high horsey, but I think that if you are visiting another country, the very least that you should do is learn 4 or 5 phrases in the language of the place that are visiting. And my third lesson is that while Duolingo is great for acquiring vocabulary (and I am quite proud of my now 600 day streak), it is not that useful for actual conservations with actual people.

Guatemala will always be one of my favorite places in the world, not only for the incredible people that I met there but for all of the lessons that I learned about myself.