What is culture? We learn about cultures from the past. For many of us, our main thoughts about culture might come from museums. We know from archaeology that the cultural artifacts include burial methods and ceramic pots. (As a child, I felt vaguely threatened by museum trips focussing on mummies, …
Book exchanges are truly wonderful resources – one often picks up (for free) a book one may not have chosen otherwise. In this way, I recently read Paulo Coehlo´s The Fifth Mountain, and now I am finding the work of Heather Montgomery on child prostitution fascinating. Montgomery provides a welcome …
Everywhere you look when seeking images or travel information on Guatemala, you see photos of the brightly coloured textiles of indigenous women. And tourists here are snapping photos of women on the street – it is true they wear their handwoven clothes as daily wear, and that their embroidered patterns …
I am finally going to have to discuss drugs. You know what drugs are: coffee, tobacco, alcohol, and all those things people use to alter their feeling or state of mind. Coffee and rum abound here, but the main drugs of concern here in Central America are those not legal. …
Panajachel, Guatemala- I am quite proud that I can read the entire newspaper now in Spanish. It does mean that my vocabulary includes a breadth of words relating to crime, drugs, and jail, and also quite a few relating to commerce and development. The World Bank recently published figures about …