Jitterbugging for Jesus

Legend has it that whenever Hemingway read or heard something that badly annoyed him, he would announce:

“That gives me the ass!”

Or, depending on how tooted he was down at the bar, he sometimes verily screamed: “I got a bad case of the ass!”

I bring this up because I read an article about living overseas that gave me a bad case of, shall we say here at what is a blog fit for the whole family almost, it gave me a bad case of the arse.

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Wendy DeChambeau is a magazine writer who is the Ecuador correspondent for International Living, a magazine for which, a few years ago, I wrote a puff piece highlighting all the positives about life in Belize for one reason and one reason only: I needed an easy $300.

Of course, it took weeks of increasingly angry emails for me to get somebody in Denmark or England or wherever it is that the magazine is based to finally direct-deposit my $300.

That’s what I get for prostituting my writer self for easy money in a publication aimed at getting people to buy lots of real estate in places where the American dollar buys a lot of God’s prettiest green earth and white sand on the sea.

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Anyway, the aforementioned Wendy DeChambeau has written an interesting piece for the online magazine The Week about the decision by her and her husband to escape America and everything they hated about it with their two young boys.

In 2011 the family moved to a comfy, beautiful, and “humble village” in a remote part of mountainous Ecuador, the South American country that is one of the favorites of retirees and others looking to live well and on the cheap outside the USA these days.

You’ll find a lot of happy-face articles in International Living about it being your could-be dream home in a dreamy country.

So here is an excerpt DeChambeau wrote about her move to Ecuador for This Week, which is more of serious online publication about politics and culture in America:

Some of our friends turned on us, calling us terrible parents, or saying we were unpatriotic. Why would we want to leave the land of the free and the home of the brave? And where was Ecuador, anyway? Somewhere near Mexico? Africa? We were taking our children to a country that most Americans can’t even point to on a map. What were we thinking?

Well, we were thinking a lot of things, and taking a number of factors into consideration. In America, it seemed every third child was taking pharmaceuticals to treat behavioral issues, anxiety, or depression. High school students were unloading automatic weapons into their classmates. Opioid use was reaching all new highs. Bank executives were defrauding their customers and Wall Street was walking an increasingly thin tight rope. It felt like The American Dream as we knew it was all but gone, having transformed into a shadowy unknown. We fretted about what the future would hold for our family. We thought maybe, just maybe, a simpler lifestyle somewhere else was the answer. And so, in 2011, our family walked up to the edge of the unknown, took a deep breath, and jumped.

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Mind you, this radical move turned out to be just what DeChambeau and her husband dreamed it would be, in spite of the culture shock that afflicted them and that I can tell you will afflict you no matter where you move to live in this world.

It certainly hit me harder than I expected when I moved to third-world Belize, even though I had thoroughly researched the country and communicated with so many expats that I thought I could cope with all the downsides I anticipated.

The reality of life in a whole other country with a whole other culture and sub-cultures always bites, that I can tell you.

But enough of my digressing… In her description of the potentially maddening slow pace of life, in a country where the buses and nothing else much runs on time, DeChambeau could have been talking about Belize.

Here’s an excerpt (with my opinionated asides thrown in):

Aside from the daunting language barrier, nothing in this part of the world runs on schedule, so we constantly showed up hours early for events and just had to wait around. Or we found they would be held at some undetermined future time. For a punctual, time-conscious person like me, this ramped up my anxiety to new levels.

It was tough for the kids, too. Back home, my sons played little league, but baseball isn’t really a thing in South America. Instead, soccer reigns supreme. They missed some comforts of home, like the public library on rainy afternoons and the local swimming pool on summer days.

[NOTE: Remember, the writer and her family moved to a remote village in Ecuador, a country with libraries and swimming pools aplenty in some parts, as in any country.]

I began to worry: What if the naysayers back home had been right? What if the United States really was the greatest nation on Earth and we were ruining our children’s futures?

[NOTE: Reading this really gave me a bad case of the arse: America IS BY FAR STILL the greatest and by far the richest nation on Earth. Just look at how much we spend, and waste, on defense and the illusion security every year compared to Russia, China and every other big military spender.]

What if we never could learn to truly adapt? What if my children ended up in therapy all because I’d moved them halfway around the globe?

But within six months, our plan began to work. Our kids were soon chatting away in Spanish to their new friends and started showing interest in learning other languages. Some of Latin America’s best features were rubbing off on us, like the emphasis on family time and community involvement, which I loved.

In short, everything has worked out well for the DeChambeaus, who plan to send their kids to college back in the U.S.

Yet, apparently things are not quite so bad in America–where every town used to be safer and happier than life in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegone–that they will choose to higher-educate their children in their happy, adopted homeland in South America.

Wait! What’s wrong with this picture? …..

Eventually my boys will return to the U.S. to attend college and build their adult lives. When they do, they’ll have a leg up. In a world where the up-and-coming generation is castigated for their feelings of entitlement and inability to handle disappointment, my sons have no notions of being owed a thing.

Picture me doing a big, loud, excitable John Oliver “WOW!” here. That last sentence, especially, gave me the arse.

I mean, the writer suggests that the only way to ensure that your little darlings won’t grow up with “a sense of entitlement and inability to handle disappointment” is to raise them in a “Safety Zone” you can chop out in a remote South American village.

It must be nice to have her kind of money socked away to relocate anywhere she chooses, carve out a most secure life among peace-loving people (probably sweet indigenous people who sleep contentedly on mats on dirt floors), and then educate her kids back in dreadful America.

What is wrong with this picture?

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I urge you to read in entirety the somewhat lengthy but highly readable story (she is an engaging writer) by going here.

Again, I live in Belize, the so-called “Crown Jewel of the Caribbean,” which draws millions of tourists a year not only to the greenish-crystal waters and islands but also the mainland jungles and rainforests in which I tramp around in.

Belizeans are famously nice, hospitable and peace-loving people (especially the indigenous people).

But living here on what I call “the other side of paradise” among the thousands of Belize’s struggling poor people held down by an utterly corrupt government, I see all the country’s horrible third-world social ills every day–which of course I explore in my book The View From Down in Poordom.

(In fact, the book includes a whole chapter titled “The Other Side of Happiness in the Jewel.”)

I benefit from my white, American privilege in Central America and what privileged white or American person, like the woman who moved her children to Ecuador to escape America’s dark side, doesn’t take advantage of it.

Here are some of those social ills I see here in “Paradise” every day, such as:

alcohol-drug abuse that is rampant;

sickening, hair-raising violence against women and children;

a huge amount of Belizean on Belizean violence;

babies having babies, with first of many pregnancies at 13 and, increasingly, as young as 12;

the highest rate of HIV in Central America, which has the highest rate in the world (I’m not sure it STILL has the highest rate because of all the education about it, but it had the highest for whole decades);

horrific “public health care” (with private care that’s always the highest quality);

and, mostly, terrible education in a country that has zero accredited colleges or universities.

(I’m planning to share some of the headlines and news stories of Belizean violence that scream bloody murder soon, like the story of Belizean police goon squad in northern Belize that recently went to arrest an unarmed man (they said he came out with a machete) who was probably innocent of the crime they sought him for. The whole squad unloaded their weapons on the poor guy in a massacre so senseless that the townspeople surrounded the cops in a small revolt. Some rotten cop probably had some kind of a personal grudge; that’s how so many of the cops here roll.)

Despite all the social ills above, Americans and other Westerners bring their kids here to raise them for the same reasons the DeChambeaus are raising their young boys in Ecuador*: to get away from hyper-consumerism and violence and all the horrible things they perceive America to be.

It’s easy enough to live in a Belizean “Safety Zone” and not be touched by the darker side of life here.

What the writer DeChambeau failed to point out is that Ecuador is shot-through with all the same ills, especially in its cities, that afflict Belize and the USA and most any other country today.

The story of the Garden of Eden is a myth. It’s a wonderful and holy myth from which we can draw all kinds of moral conclusions about the inherent sin of men, women and talking snakes.

But in reality, there was never any such “Safety Zone” in this broken, violent world, which the Bible clearly shows has always been broken and violent and in need of the healing, restorative, reconciling, and redemptive powers of God’s love, grace and tender mercies.

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The DeChampeau family could have as easily carved out a bubble world for their kids by living off the grid in any number of remote, breathtakingly beautiful places in the USA (including many where much Spanish are Native American languages are much spoken, if they wanted the kids exposed to another language and culture).

It’s a really big country, America, with a lot of “out there” still “out there.”

I hasten to add that because I hold up the harsh realities of life in Belize and Central America in my book and this blog, that doesn’t mean life in countries south of the border is the utter pits.

Once more for the record, Belize plenty of redeeming social values, the friendly, hospitable, peaceable nature of the people ranking right up there with all the natural beauty and wonder of the jungles and seas.

As I point out in my book Belize always ranks at the top of those countries where the people are happiest and the living is easiest.

It’s a wonderful place to live–see my post from this past weekend about why I love Saturdays here!

I’m still all in here in BZ after five years and life is mostly very good if you can go with the flow of the buses and nothing much else, including the people, being or doing anything on time. (If your mechanic in Belize says he’ll have you’re vehicle up and running by noon tomorrow, his idea of tomorrow may be the end of next week, I kid you not.)

But there is that dark, “other side of Paradise” here in Belize, and in Ecuador, and in most countries.

But Americans have long been hung up on the illusion that “the grass is always greener” somewhere else, be it Canada, Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, France, or pale countries like Denmark or Switzerland, and nowadays, trendy Ecuador.

(BTW, remind me to tell you about a neighbor of mine here, who has a massage clinic on her piece of paradise here in San Ignacio, who packed up her native Switzerland decades ago because it was getting polluted and wracked by all kinds of problems. She didn’t like modernity closing in.)

Any place is Paradise if you have enough money for a dreamy home with electricity, running water and maybe a beautiful fountain in your tiled driveway, a masseuse, and other amenities your next-door neighbor may not have.

American white privilege has its benefits for me and I take advantage of them in Belize every day. I don’t worry about being slashed up with a machete because the police hear, who have world-class goon squads, come down like hot lava on Belizeans who kill tourists or expats from rich and privileged countries.

Murders of expats and tourists here do happen, and make a splash in the American news cycle a couple of days or three, but there is a reason I’m safer and more secure here than my Belizean friends and neighbors.

(Which isn’t to say I haven’t felt seriously threatened by my 4-year-old Belizean daughter’s own family, a family in which education was never highly valued and violence in the home in their growing up was just home life. Belizeans can get made, they can get violent, and they can turn around and get along and act like nothing ever happened the next day. It’s the strangest phenomenon I’ve ever seen in my life.)

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*Blogger and (controversial Christian author) Rod Dreher posted DeChambeau’s article about her cushy life Ecuador at The American Conservative (see it here) and asked readers to respond with comments about what they thought about the her moving to South America (and I did throw in my 2 cents in a reply), and one guy responded with a comment that sounds very much like life in Belize City, which has one of the highest crime rates in the world:

Ecuador: quelle b.s.

I was in Guayaquil (Ecuador’s largest city) a few years ago at Christmas. At our hotel, they instructed us to take taxis everywhere in the city because armed robberies were the rule and not the exception for tourists.

Not only that, they told us not to hail taxis or call taxis directly, because it was not uncommon for fake taxis, or possibly real taxis, to rob the people they would pick up at various sites of interest.

Instead, we were instructed to call the hotel, which had taxi drivers that it trusted. They would send a taxi driver from the hotel to pick us up anywhere in the city. It did not cost any more, so I think the motivation really was safety and not money.

The only safe area was along the river in a protected zone where people were checked for weapons before being allowed to enter. That was the only place you could walk freely in the city day or night.

And on Christmas Eve, or maybe it was New Year’s Eve, we were told not to go outside for the fireworks because most of what we heard was automatic weapons being fired into the air.

That said, we really did have a great time in Ecuador. But moving there to escape the evils of America? What a joke.

While I’ve never been to Ecuador (I’d love a visit to any country south of the American border or even would love to live most anywhere else as I think I’m more adaptive, adventurous and curious about other nations and cultures than most people), I’ve heard similar horror stories about “The Other Side of Paradise” that is Ecuador.

America is no Eden but neither is the pretty blue planet.

Chapters in The View From Down in Poordom, which includes one about “the other side of paradise” that is Belize.