I well remember the first time I spent a whole year in a place that didn’t observe daylight savings time. That place was Guatemala, and I said to myself, “hallelujah! I finally get to experience the natural progression of day and night, light and dark, due to the tilt of the axis of the Earth—uninterrupted by daylight savings time.” Yes, I can understand why the confusing and disorienting mass agreement to suddenly change the clocks is advantageous in some ways in northern climes, where the tilt of the Earth is more pronounced. But here, closer to the equator, there’s never really been a reason for it; the sun progresses from rising at 5 a.m. or so to rising at 6 a.m. or so, and setting at 6 p.m. or so to 7 p.m. or so. . . and back again. No big deal. It’s convenient for those of us here who phone the West Coast of North America to only be an hour different—and for those of us who phone the East Coast. But to have it change twice a year makes it hard to remember which is which. 

Up North they always used to say, “We have to turn the clocks back, because otherwise the kids will all have to get up for school in the dark.” I remember what a drag it was when it got dark at 4 p.m. on cold rainy winters . . . and I remember the delight when suddenly for some mysterious reason we all had to “spring forward” by one hour. By the time summer came around, we could play in the evening light until 8 p.m. But it all seemed a bit random as well as discombobulating. I used to wonder, especially around the time of “changing the clocks,” what it would be like if we just left the clocks alone and adjusted ourselves to nature. 

As I got older I realized that changing the clocks always made me cranky for a few days and that I just plain didn’t like it and that many other people didn’t either. We used to call it “daylight stealing time,” and I had a friend who hated it so much she referred to it as “the biggest perpetration in the history of human stupidity.” It outraged her that we all complied with it, even though most of it thought it silly and cumbersome. Plus, we did so because we really didn’t have any choice. But here in Guatemala, we had a choice, and with that freedom of choice came chaos.

So here I love going through a full year without having to deal with “daylight stealing time.” I loved it the first time, and I still love it. But there was a year in between when the Guatemalan government decided to experiment with enforcing daylight savings time. (Something about being consistent with the rest of the world time-wise for business and commerce reasons.) I’m not sure how this worked in other parts of Guatemala, but I suspect that it was as much of a chaotic mess in other places as it was on Lake Atitlán, where I was at the time. Imagine the towns and various villages around the lake, all interacting and doing business with each other, several hundred people traveling by lancha, pickup and bus, to and fro across and around the lake every day. Now imagine them all with different opinions about whether or not to comply with the ridiculous idea of letting the government tell us to call the hours of the day by different names.

Pure chaos. Teachers crossing the lake to work, and many, many other people were crossing time zones on a daily basis. And nobody knew whether various businesses or even municipalities were calling 8 o’clock 8 o’clock or calling it 9 o’clock. Add to that the confusion of stores and businesses which already closed for two hours every day for lunch!

When the Guatemalan government decided to change clocks, I was working on Lake Atitlán, living in Panajachel and traveling every week through Santiago Atitlán and San Pedro la Laguna. I talked to a lot of people in the towns and certainly on the lanchas—conversations which arose as we asked each other which businesses and services were open at what times, or when we missed the lancha, or the clinic hours because of all the confusion. In fact, if someone told you that the last lancha leaves at 5 p.m., they would add la hora de Dios or la hora oficial. And you could be in trouble if you forgot to ask. Of course, this made it all the more confusing, but I had to admire the fact that Guatemalans were not willing to go along with letting the government tell them that dawn was coming along an hour later this season. Half of the people were going along with it, the other half not. “How hilarious,” I thought, “good for them, having minds of their own.” When I asked people why they were not complying with “government time,” they simply said, porque no sirve—because it doesn’t work.

I saw how even more absurd changing the time was here than up north. Think about it: This is a culture and a society that is tied to the land and its rhythms; people live by the rising and the setting of the sun, not by clocks. In general, in a rural and agricultural society, parents will wake up shortly before dawn, get the cooking fire going, prepare breakfast and awaken the children. All this is time to be together to eat breakfast before the father goes off to his work, which in agrarian work and for fishermen begins at the break of day. That’s just how it works.

If the local school, office or shop where the mother worked complied with “government time,” the wife and children had to live by schedules that were an hour off from the father’s. It caused immeasurable stress and hardship all over the country. It caused separation as well as confusion.

Around Lake Atitlán, the entire town of Panajachel complied with “government time,” but smaller more rural villages—even just down the road—did not. Half of the populations of Santiago Atitlán and San Pedro complied with the time change; the other half did not. The lanchas were running on “government time”—they had too many regular local passengers, like school teachers, not to; but they weren’t happy about it.

People who travelled between Santiago, Panajachel and San Pedro could take a 30 minute lancha ride and arrive an hour and a half later—or arrive half an hour earlier! I thought daylight savings time in North America was disorienting! I could not have imagined how disorienting it was here. And still, throughout that crazy season, I always admired the independence and sovereignty of Guatemalans who refused to comply and insisted on living “on God’s time,” no matter what the government said.

But, boy, was it a relief when it was time to “change the clocks back” to standard time and everyone could be in agreement again. And I was among the millions of people living in this country who were ever so grateful to discover, six months later, that the government decided not to try it again. It just feels better to live by the rising and setting of the sun, and to go through the gentle and gradual transition of daylight along with nature, rather than against it. Hallelujah!

Not long ago, while perusing the endless tables piled high with used North American clothes at the Saturday paca market in La Antigua, I found a little T-shirt that caught my eye. It was about the right size for a 5 year old, and on it read “I want it— You buy it for me— Got it?” Now, why anyone would manufacture such a thing, or who would buy it, is a complete mystery to me, but it certainly was thought-provoking.

It brought to mind being in a giant Toys R Us-type mega-toy store, the pungent smell of plastic reaching toxic levels, and hearing tiny voices demanding, insisting, badgering and whining for the toys they wanted. I don’t frequent stores like that in the States, but on my last visit there, one could witness the same kind of whining insistence in grocery stores, on the street, in malls. It’s the attitude that comes through with the voice.
I saw that shirt, and I thought, “What a North American thing.” But for all I know that kind of dissatisfied, entitled insistence among children is also a European and Canadian thing. I rather suspect so. It certainly isn’t a Guatemalan thing. Not in the least. Gracias a Dios!

Plastic bags are toys to play (photo: Victoria Stone)

I look around the vast used-clothing market and see four Guatemalan children playing fútbol with an old empty juice bottle for a ball. And others, who laughingly compete to see who can yell the loudest as they imitate their parents calling out “barata, barata!! Meta la mano!, solo un billete.” (It must be said that the whole issue of working children in Guatemala is another matter, beyond the scope of this writing, and that there exist some horrendous conditions in some places. But I have seen working children who take every opportunity to play at work, and who seem happier than many privileged “Western” children I have known. And, having not spent time in the poorest parts of Guatemala City, I cannot say if my observations apply to those places.)

Costales are toys to play (photo: Victoria Stone)

As I walk through the main streets and the neighborhood side streets of Panajachel and other small towns, I always see children playing in groups. Morning, afternoon, and in the safe dark of evening, little groups of boys and girls play fútbol, race, play hide and seek.

Flying a kite in Lake Atitlán (photo: Victoria Stone)

There are always playmates, too. And I mean always. Many children have big extended families with many siblings and cousins to play, all living in the same town. Not only that, but sharing seems to come naturally. After all, if there are any toys, they’re a lot more fun with someone to play with.

What do they need toys for anyway? They’ve got sisters, brothers, cousins, grandparents, uncles, aunts. And if a child has an imagination, there’s hardly ever a lack of toys. Walking along the shore of Lake Atitlán, I see that the local children have no qualms about turning the plentiful flotsam into toys. On one stroll I noticed a group building a little house together. They framed it in with popsicle sticks, used a styrofoam plate for a roof, plastic detergent bags for rugs inside, and were having a great time planting twigs for the garden outside, and watering the garden with a styrofoam cup. A bit farther on, their big sister had filled a small plastic water bottle and a piece of broken hose with sand to make a play torch—and was happily holding it up and proclaiming herself the winner of the antorcha race.

Then again, when there’s no garbage available to make toys out of, there are always the tools of work, as when children on the shore have joined their father who has brought down a pile of plastic costal bags to fill up as he harvests sand and pebbles from the shore. These, it turns out, are perfect for climbing into to have a jumping race with your cousins. Or when several little cousins crawl through the “tunnel” made by boards drying in the sun outside the carpenter’s taller.

Remnants of Semana Santa decorations become the perfect vehicle for sledding down the church steps with friends. (photo: Victoria Stone)

Once while traveling through the backwoods of Chiapas, Mexico, I walked through tiny encampments of indigenous people who were the poorest I’d ever seen, living in little dirt-yard shacks amid sparse vegetation. I noticed that the slack-eyed children had not a toy in the world. Tin cans in the garbage piles had not even become wheels to pull on a string, neither had rags become dolls. And I remembered the saying, “Of the many kinds of poverty in the world, the most tragic is poverty of the imagination.” This may be a type of poverty shared by “Western” children, but thankfully here in Guatemala, imagination, inventiveness and play are alive and well.

Girl with knife (photo: Victoria Stone)

Written by Ana Flinder

Culture shock is a strange phenomenon which most of us have experienced in one way or another. For those of us who travel outside of our own countries infrequently, arrival in a new and foreign culture can be absolutely overwhelming; every moment is filled with so many new sights and sounds, and new customs that we must adjust to, that we only begin to notice specific differences and become able to differentiate and articulate them gradually.

On the other hand, those of us who have lived as residents in foreign countries for long periods of time get so accustomed to the cultural differences of our adopted countries that we hardly even notice them, and when we return to visit our “country of origin” we experience more culture shock than we did when we arrived in a foreign country.

It is tempting, and often subconscious at first, to make value judgments about the cultural differences we experience, and to judge things rather harshly as right or wrong, or simply in terms of what we like and don’t like—but with a strong emotional edge. Many people actually travel frequently and are still constantly buffeted about by their own emotional judgments of what they see.

Personally, I strive to remind myself to ask myself whether something which I simply don’t like is or is not morally wrong, according to my values. Usually the answer is no.  More importantly, I remind myself to observe impartially, to continue to observe, and to try to find the humor in the situation. Fortunately, this turns out to be extremely easy in the majority of instances.

Not long ago I was taking an evening stroll down Calle Santander, the main tourist street of Panajachel. As I passed by a string of locally run restaurants and tiendas, I saw a little Guatemalan girl, about 2 years old, alone in front of her family’s shop, off the sidewalk, in the street, playing with a little pile of broken glass.

Having recently returned from a trip to the U.S., I could easily imagine that if that scene had taken place in my country, her mother would soon come out of the shop to find her girl playing with broken glass, and with great drama, whisk the girl away in a freak-out, and tell her adamantly and theatrically how dangerous it was—“Don’t play with that!! You’ll hurt yourself !!” And of course, the girl would be startled to tears. But I have seen both the freedom and the good sense of even the smallest of children here—the coconut seller’s 4-year-old son practicing dehusking coconuts with a machete, the gangs of little boys setting off firecrackers under their own noses with no adult supervision, the children high up in flimsy limbed trees whose branches somehow magically support their weight. So I simply sat on the opposite sidewalk to see what would happen next.

There was no drama, no scolding, no violent dragging the girl away from the danger—no parental “Oh my God, get away from that!!” Instead, the girl’s father came out of the store, saw her playing with broken glass, calmly took he hand and led her inside. Moments later they both returned, he with a dustpan, she toddling along with a broom bigger than she was. Her father showed her how to use a broom as he held the dustpan, then he finished the job himself and they both went inside, holding hands, to put the broken glass in the garbage. No drama, no fuss. No big deal. Job well done, simple as that.

OK, I must admit, I make a value judgment: I like this way of responding better than the drama and complexity that would have ensued in such a simple situation in my country. Not only that, but I do believe that the response I witnessed was much more healthy for all involved, especially the little girl. But, yes, it also made me shake my head with a chuckle.