So it’s extremely difficult to visit Guatemala and not feel the creeping sense that one has led a comparatively entitled life. Being an American I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve arisen at three in the morning to make flour tortillas by hand. Then sold the tortillas door to door. Then headed off to work for the rest of the day in the fields, reaping sugar cane with a machete or picking coffee beans from plants growing on steep mountainsides or plowing unreasonably rocky soil with a hoe. Then bagged whatever harvest had been gotten and carted the bags into town in a bus alongside pigs and chickens, if I didn’t ride on the top — which I could if I had been born Guatemalan — to sell the produce at a market and return home again that night on a similar bus and go to sleep only to do it once more the following morning. And so on, ad infinitum.