In 1995, I spent three months in Guatemala. I studied Spanish, lived with a delightful “host family,” and travelled the highland countryside in resurrected old school busses from the States. I’ll never forget those busses: busses colorfully crowded with patient riders, seats built for two kids but wedged with three adults and a child or two all spilling into the aisle; busses where indigenous women in rainbow garb boarded with children and chickens and balancing baskets of potatoes and onions on their heads; busses with dangling window tassels and onboard stereos pulsing with Mexican accordians; busses blasting clouds of thick black smoke with each step on the gas; busses hand painted into clunking hulks of character; busses with speeding cowboy drivers and teenaged assistants riding shotgun, who loaded luggage on the roof and then climbed in the back door at forty miles an hour on winding potholed roads and somehow oiled their way through packed seats and aisles collecting fares and never forgetting who had already paid, and how much; and busses sporting stickers of the Blessed Virgin alongside the same suggestive silver silhouettes that sometimes here grace the mudflaps of trucks. It was quite a ride.