$%^@ Americans

I had breakfast this morning with an American backpacker called Jonathon. He was pleasent but kind of odd. I asked him how long he'd been travelling for and he said 3 years. But then it turned out that he'd only left American 3 weeks ago. He said he'd been in Panajachel 2 weeks but then said he'd only got here yesterday. We had an interesting (disturbing) talk about poverty and street kids. He subscribes to the 'spiritual' version of poverty. Basically the 'I as a rich westerner don't have to care about the poverty of the rest of the world cos they are just inherently different from us. Although it would be very difficult for an american child to be homeless, the kids in majority world countries really don't mind. They're happy, and they don't need luxories like food or shelter, cos they're just so spiritually rich.' He even told me that if [the particular street-kid who was trying to sell us stuff at the time] died tomorrow, he (the streetkid) wouldn't care! I asked him if that wasn't cos they had nothing left to live for and he looked down at me and said, no it was cos they were just living in the moment.

Sigh. Whatever gets you through the night I guess. Whatever lets a rich american feel comfortable slumming his was around the South without having to think to hard about the inequality you see everwhere.