HOW WOMEN ARE TREATED ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD...

If you can consider Guatemala the other side of the world?

Hi All

I hope this newsletter finds you hale, hearty & happy? Okay, it’s probably difficult to be happy right now, with the state of the UK and not for the first have I been having the odd pipe dream (I don’t really smoke a pipe!) about possibly spending my later years abroad.

Well, sometimes I think anywhere is better than here. And that got me thinking to the last long haul trip I had just over to two years ago to Guatemala in Central America and how very different (and very satisfied) a country it was

If you’re anything like me, you would have had to either Google where it is or gone and found an atlas. Well, to save you the trouble, it’s right below Mexico on that strip of land that connects North & South America. It’s not a huge country and is quite underdeveloped. It’s also overshadowed considerably by Mexico, but I got the impression that’s how they like it.

So, why was I there? Well, at the time, my eldest daughter and her boyfriend were at the latter end of their 6 month round the world back-packing trip. In October 2022, she chucked in her job in London, sub-let her flat and flew off to Vietnam to start her adventure. Six months and seven countries in (she added a couple more before she returned home) she met us at the beginning of April 2023 at Guatemala City airport to then explore Antigua de Guatemala and latterly St Pedro de La Laguna.

Over the space of 10 days we got a complete eye-full of a Central American county. There’s no slick tourist areas for Guatemala to hide behind and we saw life in the raw. And in some cases, it was very raw. Don’t get me wrong, in both areas we had comfortable accommodation, thanks to Air Bnb.

But as I said, you walk amongst real Guatemalan life. We did saw glimpses of abject poverty but these people who don’t know any better and do what they can to support themselves and their families. Everything from preparing mangoes and selling them by the roadside to collecting wild branches and sticks to sell as firewood.

It was a very levelling experience. And, I was interested to see how women were treated in their society. Which I did, in spades.