Welcome to Serendipity or Madness – Leaving Guatemala heading to Cuba

I promised I would start posting after Semana Santa and here I am.  My site is not quite finished but not far off, so no more procrastinating.

Just to summarise how I got to this stage.  All the stuff you see in the archives here is everything I have written since I arrived in Guatemala nearly 8 years ago, apart from the endless emails of course.  So if you want to know more about me and my journey to where I am now, dip into the archives.  A lot of it was written to family and friends including great Aunts and 8 year old nieces etc.

Last year I started blogging with a group of people and it was a bit of a disaster for various reasons not worth going into here.  But in those early days of blogging I did not have a clue what I was doing, and still don´t really, but at least now I have been reading other people´s blogs and have spent a few months thinking about what I want to achieve by blogging.

So in my research into other blogs I had lots of fun but did not find many blogs about people like me, emigrant mothers who took a cross cultural walk on the wild side.  There are endless blogs about people skipping off to a new life on paradise islands and making dream holiday destinations their home a bit like all those endless TV shows in the UK.  They are usually doing this with a partner who is from their own culture so they can sit and moan together if things do go wrong.  Easy peasy lemon squeezy I say to those bloggers but good for you for working out how to have the easy life and pulling it off.  Maybe I will visit you one day in paradise.

Also the other kind of blog which seems to involve moaning about your adopted country.  A lot of these, white folks in the brown world being a little bit too superior for my liking.  I even found foreigners blogging in my own country, Americans lamenting about the lack of Tex Mex food, the lack of shopping malls and how tomato ketchup does not taste the same in the UK.  I´ll keep my comments to myself on this particular topic!

I even read an awful blog set up by a horrible American (who is now in prison) who just seemed to spend all his time slagging off Guatemala, the country which had actually given him and his family refuge from the FBI for a couple of years.  Some people are never grateful!

So I promise that I will not spend too much time moaning or criticising Guatemala or Cuba but will try to share my feelings with you as I discover things good and bad.  I am a qualified social psychologist so I try to approach things in an investigative manner.  There is always a reason why people behave as they do.  The interesting thing is to peel back the layers of the onion to find out why.  This way I am always learning and thinking about research topics for when I do return to work!

I am a mother of 3 children but I promise to veer away from the endless cutsey Hello magazine indulgent posts about my children.  But you shall be hearing about them, the good and the bad!  Paulo, Nico and Saskia, my gorgeous little hybrids.

I am not very whizzy with most things technical but I´ll try to get better at putting the odd link to something interesting.

I promise to try to see the world with the sense of humour that my culture is famous for but at the same time I may need to share the important stuff with you too.  Why? because I do care about the world and the mess we seem to have got it into!