ANTIGUA, Guatemala _ When I told my parents I was bringing my 3-year-old daughter with me on assignment to Guatemala City, I heard a gasp.
"What? Are you crazy?" my mother said over the phone.
She turned her attention to my father, who was listening in. "She's taking Cora to Guatemala. Can you believe it?"
"She's crazy," my father said.
The water was bad, they said. There's crime, they told me. What would I do if Cora fell ill? Got kidnapped? What if she contracted a parasite?
The list went on and on.
I was as taken aback. This was coming from parents who were born and raised in Guatemala.
Never mind that they regularly took my siblings and me to Guatemala on vacation throughout the 1980s and early '90s _ during the throes of a bloody civil war.
Some of my best childhood memories were formed in Guatemala, where I was allowed to roam freely, surrounded by extended family and friends. I wanted my daughter to experience the same.
I had half-expected them to pepper me with recommendations on whom to visit and where to go. The worst-case scenario I had envisioned was persuading my father that we couldn't possibly visit all his family in Jalapa during our week's stay.
You'd think that at 39 I could muster enough courage to shrug off their concerns, but no. And my worries began to grow.
My husband and my sister reassured me. As it turned out, Cora was more than fine. My daughter had the best time of her young life.
We mostly stayed with the Ramirez-Moino family _ my lifelong friends with whom I spent most summers when I visited. They doted on Cora, happily hauling her around the city while I was working.
Dunia, Guisela, Isabella, Carolina and Agatha, all women, took turns caring for Cora and became the small village I needed, a luxury I don't have in the U.S.
I worried a bit about how to keep Cora entertained, but I quickly learned that in Guatemala _ as in most of Latin America _ life revolves around children.
