Search Guatemala online, and you will find plenty of stories about crime, travel warnings, dangerous neighborhoods, armed robbery, gangs and all the other things that make a parent wonder whether they have completely lost their mind for considering bringing their children here.

Concrete is gray. That is one of the first things you notice when you arrive in Guatemala. Cinderblock is everywhere. Houses go up in concrete blocks, walls are built in concrete blocks, retaining walls are concrete blocks, and plenty of buildings seem to spend years in the strange unfinished state where you can still see exactly what they are made of. If you arrived by plane, drove out of Guatemala City and headed toward the rural communities around Lake Atitlán, you could b

“Time’s fun when you’re having flies,” said the Frog. In an unbelievable, mind-bending twist of events, our family just four years ago shifted direction and relocated to Guatemala. We needed it. Something big, over the top, had to occur to give ourselves the jolt we needed to shake off the ruts, bad habits and general discontent we felt in life. We needed extreme circumstances to shock us from the numbness we had become accustomed to. When we look back at pictures, we looked