We´re lost.
Actually what Edwin said was ´**** we´re already lost.´
And in a way we are, and in the most obvious way. We are looking for something that is everywhere, something it seems, that the harder you look the further away ít´gets.
Perhaps it´s necessary to get lost before you find anything of value.
And here we are in a restaurant in downtown Guatemala City wondering where we start and feeling the natural (or is it unnatural) pull towards making a plan; a list of interviewees and an efficient geographical route. That is how we get a result. Define a goal, make a plan and work diligently towards it. Right?
Actually in this case, probably wrong.
Perhaps this is where most of us manage to miss the experience of life; that incessant drive for the specific outcome, making life fit a plan.
Perhaps we should just take a step, any step, as we appear to be recovering from the need to make a plan.
A group of twenty-somethings have a suggestion. Everyone it seems has a suggestion. Theirs is to stay around in the city until Monday for the procession to celebrate the homecoming of the Guatemalan winner of Latin American Pop Idol, the global pop phenomenon. The country is ecstatic. On Thursday night there was dancing in the street, who knows what might happen on Monday. Terribly un-English. But I am left wondering why some have reacted so viscerally.
If we understood ´why´, perhaps we would be closer to an understanding of the country´s soul. But then again I haven´t even heard the winning performance.
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this was originally posted in October 2007. A few weeks later we received an invitation to film the Pop Idol idol. But logistics haven’t yet worked out.
