Culture Shock

When you live internationally, culture shock happens. And not just once. Like a bad hair day, it comes and goes and comes back.

Whether it was cold “widow-maker” showers, constant firecracker explosions, eating beans with every meal or walking through trash-strewn streets, we all felt it from time to time. For those living in households afflicted by alcoholism, it was sometimes worse.

Given time, we could get used to most things – some of us even developed a taste for beans. What was harder to get used to was existing in a context of political corruption and social chaos.

[Photo borrowed]

As we prepared to return to San Juan after visiting other missionaries in Panahachel for Thanksgiving, we received word from some friends who were already on the road.

A taxi driver had pulled up beside a Chicken Bus and shot the driver, making the bus full of people almost go off a cliff. Apparently, the taxi drivers are trying to extort money from the bus drivers by threatening to kill them in this way.

When a couple bus drivers further down the road heard about this, they used their busses to block the road, trapping the taxi driver ...and all other drivers.

This enabled the police to catch the taxi driver they thought did the shooting. Only that's not where the story ends.

Unsatisfied, the Bus drivers created a mob around the police station demanding that the suspected taxi driver be killed ...without a trial. This mob burned tires to block the roads around the police station, and even blew up a police car.

When they starting burning down the police station, the police turned over the taxi driver along with 2 women suspected of being accomplices. The mob dragged all three people into the street, doused them in gasoline and burned them alive.

The next day, eleven bus drivers were shot in the Capital.

I can't wrap my mind around how anyone could think extortion, threats and murder are a good idea. There's no possible way that kind of plan could work out for anyone.

And I was shocked that there's no due process. In Guatemala, people are assumed guilty until proven innocent, and mobs are permitted to carry out lynching.

And then there’s the whole issue of burning people alive. The people there rationalize that it's the “traditional Mayan execution,” but there is no context to justify that sort of thing. I don’t know why they want to emulate a fallen civilization anyway.

Hearing this whole story as it unfolded helped me to appreciate the systems we have in place in the States. I’d suffer bureaucracy for the sake of security any day.