That First Scratch

 It was bound to happen, and it didn't take long. I got a parking ding on the new car. It was one of those drive-by-hit-the-mirror-before-driving-away accidents that happen routinely downtown. The damage wasn't bad, but still, I felt a pang.

We aren't a real car family. We tend to drive them into the ground, and even when we do buy a new car, it's never really new. My first car, purchased in 1978, was a white Impala that I bought for $100. I spent another $5 on a can of white spray paint from K-Mart which I used to cover the rust on the fenders and doors.

 It wasn't pretty (not as nice as this by a longshot), but my boyfriend could fix anything that went wrong with chewing gum and bailing twine, and it ran. I drove it to college and eventually sold it for $100.

Over the years, depending on the number of kids we were hauling around, the cars got bigger, with vast backseats. We had two Oldsmobile Silhouettes that we bought from my father-in-law which we drove into the ground. They were the type with the vast front windshield. It felt like you were driving an arcade video game. The last one, by the time we finally got rid of it, had a door that literally was tied shut with baling twine. It went on many family road trips and I would venture to guess it plays heavily into my children's summer vacation memories. They would listen to an old mix tape that was labeled, "Driving With Dad." Cliff still has the mix, and in fact, has gifted the children with memorial CD's. They speak with great fondness of the time they were fighting over a big bottle of Coke in the backseat and Cliff, while driving, grabbed it out of their hands and poured it out the window. "I can still see it streaming along the windows at 80 miles an hour," is how my daughter remembers it.  "Not my finest hour," is how Cliff recalls the incident. But they all laugh.

 Then there was the shiny red Sebring convertible. I loved that car, and Cliff bought it for me. It certainly wasn't his first choice. My dad said at the time, "I guess everybody has to make that mistake at sometime in their lives," and shook his head. And he was right. We rarely put the top down because it was either too cold or windy. When I bought it I had three small kids, so dropping them off at school meant one in the front seat, two in the back. "Shotgun!" was our morning rallying cry. I sold it the year we acquired a South Korean exchange student. Three teenagers just didn't fit in the back.

We bought a Jeep instead. I loved that car, too. It could practically move sideways, that's how good the turning radius was, and it also carried us on many family trips. Never mind the fact that it got eight miles to the gallon. We had it for a decade.

So, we bought the shiny red "Every Car." You know the one. It has a modern-day wagon look, with the windows that get smaller in the back, and the hatchback in lieu of a trunk. It goes a lot farther on a tank of gas, it's comfortable, and it boasts a Bluetooth phone and stereo system. But I have trouble finding it in a crowded parking lot.
I never had that problem with the white Impala.

Driving The World Over - Part Two

Yesterday I took a driving safety course, required by the company I work for. It wasn't a bad experience. Good advice. Reminders like swerve to the right rather than the left into on-coming traffic and don't drive if you can't see past the hood of your car. In Guatemala the rule is "butts on the ground," which means when riding in the back of a pick-up truck down the highway at 75 miles per hour, don't stand.

It's dangerous, of course, and that's why it's illegal to do it in the United States. But there's no doubt you can get an excellent view of everything this way.

There are the street views, so different from the way things look in the U.S.

And there's the countryside, which has a beauty all its own.

We seem much more concerned about our personal safety here than they are there. I can only speculate on why this is. Perhaps the view there is more fatalistic. Again, I never saw a Guatemalan wearing a seatbelt, and it was very common to see a family of four on a single motorcycle. I asked my driver whether there were a lot of fatalities on the roads and he said yes, it was a big problem. So why, I wondered, didn't people wear seatbelts? His response was a shoulder shrug and a smile. "Es lo que es," he said. It is what it is.  

On Visting the Chimeltenango Dump

 

  I should start out by explaining that I'm in Guatemala covering the opening of The God's Child Project Casa Jackson Hospital for Malnourished Children. While I'm here, I'll be doing some stories for KFYR-TV. The first one has to do with homelessness and the way people struggle here to feed their kids. Sometimes they fall short, and that's when GCP steps in.

    Getting from place to place in Guatemala is an adventure. Public transportation comes in the form of a brightly-painted bus (the so-called chicken bus),

 a tuk tuk (a three-wheeled motorcycle covered in a tarp)

 or an open truck with metal framing on the sides to  provide handholds for people who ride standing up, which I did. 

There I was, speeding down the highway with my hair flying, the other cars whizzing by, close enough to touch. It's a mountainous road, as are most here, and passing is perilous. Not that it stops anybody.The guy standing in the  back of the truck yells down to the driver when he thinks it's safe to pass. It's the ultimate trust exercise. 

(copy and paste this url if it doesn't open and you want to see video of the dump)

https://www.facebook.com/MonicaHannan/posts/10212337828509214?notif_t=like&notif_id=1491057047468949

     Our destination was the  dump in Chimeltenango. Like most dumps, you can smell it long before  you see it. Burning garbage smells the same the world over. But here, the blowing dust combines with the smoke. We spy a woman raking the trash on a hillside very near the flames. My guide, Heneo, approaches the woman to ask if we can interview her. She agrees and my photographer Javier and I trek through the smoke. Her sharply-lined face is covered in soot, her eyes are red-rimmed with irritation and she appears to be in her late fifties or even sixties. She tells me she is 34 years old, the mother of five, the oldest  of whom is 21. I see two small children playing at the bottom of the land-fill, hiding under the shade of a tree. I assume they are hers. She says, with Heneo interpreting, that her husband died leaving her with no way to  make a living, so she and her children spend their day sifting for recyclables. They earn about a dollar a day. As she tells me this, tears track a black trail down her face as she asks for help. I ask where she lives and she points to a cave carved into the side of a hill not ten feet away.There is a young woman sitting there, holding an infant who they say is about nine months old. The baby's  face is also covered with grime, but he does not open his eyes or even stir. The girl tells  me the baby is sick with a cough. It's not hard to see why, as the two of them are in the direct path of the smoke. We hand them money and turn to go. Immediately, the mother heads back down the hill to continue her raking. 

    Half of the population of Guatemala is living in poverty. For 25 percent that poverty is extreme. Offering money may fill an immediate need, but the real answer is education. It's important for this woman's children to go to school. Getting them there is the goal of The God's Child Project.