Sarah Akhtar

I’ve definitely changed more than I thought I would. I didn’t expect two weeks of my winter break to change my life in such an extreme way. I’m not the Sarah Akhtar I left as. Guatemala gave me a mission and granted I don’t know how I’m going to go about doing this, but I’m going to do things. It’s going to happen. I finally feel like there’s a purpose to what I’m studying, learning, and talking about. Awareness is the first step and that step was so crucial for me because I would not have become what I feel like I am now. And maybe that’s why it’s so difficult for me to reassimilate into my social circle where the things I do are for the moment I’m in and have no major consequences. I’m also not saying I’ve come back as this saint. Yeah, I’m definitely no saint because I do things for myself and for fun and it’s still great. I’ve just come to realize that ALL the time there are things way bigger than what I’m worried about in this world. 

A community leader we met with said to us, “We live a horrible life here.” His whole entire village is being taken over by cement companies and logging has become a huge issue around the area. They live in fear of being shoved out of their homes or killed, yet they smiled and took pictures with us and giggled when we all used our awkward spanish with thick american accents. 

All I know is that I think more about how those people are. The ones that aren’t fighting to get revenge or to prove that they are better, but are fighting for justice. It’s a difficult concept to grasp even when you see it in the works because most people don’t actually know the difference.

I just wish there was a way to make people care as much as I realized I do, but the only way to do that is to show people what I saw and show them what they don’t know and thought they knew. These people I met were probably some of the most amazing people I will ever meet and I hope people will start looking at them with the amount of respect and amazement I look at them with. And with that, here is a link to a website of an amazing and dedicated group called HIJOS (“We are all sons and daughters of the same history.”)

http://hijosguate.blogspot.com/