More on Apathy

Si no tienes nada que vale la muerte tampoco tienes nada que vale la vida.

If you don´t have anything worth dying for, you don´t have anything worth living for.

People have occasionally accused me of being a perfectionist, and this isn´t true. My problem is, I expect people to want to be perfect. I expect people to never settle for ¨good enough¨but to always want to do better and find ways to improve things, not just themselves but with everything in life. It´s naive I know, and yet I can´t shake this conviction. For this reason, I cannot handle apathy of any kind. I cannot understand it and I cannot forgive it or look past it. So I realized yesterday that I really dislike Guatemala. It´s the most apathetic place I´ve ever been and I can´t get past it. There are other problems here, but we´ll just stick with one for today.

Anyways, as to the title, yesterday I was not up for the fight. I am ashamed to say that I stood back and watched. At the same time, I would make the same decision if I had to do it again. And I hate it. The other teacher and I were walking to the bus stop yesterday and came up on a really bad fight between 4 guys. And I stood at the bridge and let Pablo (who is 20 years old and about my size) take on the situation alone. He managed to difuse the situation, possibly saving one guy´s life. It kills me that I did nothing. And that I tried to talk Pablo out of walking me to the bus stop in which case, no one would have helped the guy. I understand the other two women who were watching from a distance, I did the same. But I cannot understand the (adult male) shop owners who stood around watching. Especially in a community that´s tiny, and where everyone knows each other. I didn´t find out until later that even though they were significantly bigger than me, they were actually teenagers. But the shop owners would have known these boys, why wouldn´t they step in? I hate that as a female, I cannot step into this situation. And as a result, I become the very thing I most despise (and cannot forgive) in other people.