A Life-Altering RoadTrip

My memories of my early life immediately after the accident are very good. I remember it as a time of fun, adventure, and learning. It was an era in which I felt a sense of the intense and extreme generosity of other people toward me. Of course, the horrendous effects of the car wreck had a terrible and permanent influence on my childhood and my life. But I only realized this in hindsight. At the time, I was too busy being a kid and learning from experience to notice.

While I didn’t understand it at the time, I would never have succeeded without the encouragement and help of those close to my family and even those who were not close at all. Beginning with the people of Ciudad Valles, where the accident took place, I have benefited again and again from the generosity of others.

After I was released from the hospital, most of this group—parents, teachers, doctors, friends, and tutors—encouraged me to overcome my limitations. In the end, all of these people gave me the freedom and space to make mistakes while I was learning.

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ENTER PEPI

In June 1955, just five months shy of my seventh birthday and right after I completed first grade, my father and I started out on what was supposed to be a more than 2,200-mile car ride from New Orleans to Guatemala City. My father was beginning a year’s sabbatical to enrich his understanding of Central American processes of social and political development. My mother would fly down with six-month-old Benjie shortly after we got there.

I threw a tantrum when my parents first told me about the trip. I didn’t want to leave my friends in New Orleans to spend an entire year in Guatemala. There was no way I was going to go. Period! This defiant stance was my initial response throughout my childhood every time we had to leave one city for another, though my mother found an ingenious way to assuage my anxieties about our moves. With a soothing tone, she would remind me of all t