I came to Guatemala for quick medical tourism and to visit in-laws.
Then without warning, they closed the airports. We were stuck.
Our government doesn’t seem like it will help Americans return from here like they are doing in Morocco. So we needed to find our own way home. I called my brother in Florida.
“All this craziness reminds me of 9-11,” he said.
I’m a life-long Midwesterner, and even though I love New York, I cannot fathom the emotions and impact of living there through that crisis. While the whole event impacted me, I also remember afterward how as a country we came together, helped each other, persevered, and prospered.
What hit me is that Guatemalans, like so many other countries, never experienced the crisis of 9-11. Further, they’ve had terrible civil wars but they didn’t really experience a global won like World War II. We each have our own perspectives.
Guatemala is normally a frenetic, happy, bustling place. With very few cases by comparison to the rest of the world and only a handful of deaths, the Guatemalan president took bold moves essentially shutting down the country. We were locked in, but for many, they were locked down in a way they’d never experienced in their lifetime.
Unlike we North Americans that lived through 9-11, Guatemalans haven’t experienced a crisis in recent memory that emptied the streets, shut down businesses, kept people in their homes, and created a wave of uncertainty and anxiety. Of even greater alarm is the lacking infrastructure to properly fight the pandemic.
For Guatemalans, this decision has been earth-shattering. My heart aches as I listen to my brother-in-law lament during this mandatory shutdown that he only has enough funds to carry his printing company’s workforce of 45 for two weeks. I can see the concern and fear of the unknown in his eyes. It’s the same eyes we had nearly 20 years ago when we woke up to a different world.
When 9-11 hit we marshaled focus and resources. Maybe we overreacted, maybe not, but we got through. Yes, we had fear and anxiety, and some inconvenience, and lost some innocence and gained faith in the process, but we survived and thrived. And for a moment, we experienced unity and focus unknown in our generation before or since.
Covid-19 has infinitesimally greater potential for national and global disruption and destruction than the national tragedy of 9-11. While we must take care of things at home first, let’s consider implementing on a local and global scale what we did to survive and thrive through 9-11:
- We united behind a common cause and ignored differences
- We shared
- We helped each other
- We sacrificed as needed
- We didn’t let fear paralyze us
- We returned to the new normal as soon as we could
For us, the first step was just returning home. We drove across the border into Mexico a couple of nights later. Then found a flight home. We returned to a home similarly facing crushing closures, empty streets and deep economic concern.
We’re more alike than we think. And now is our time to mobilize together for a truly inspiring global response.
