Click for full-size image. At left, one of the snapshots I took in Guatemala. These children work along the streets of Puerto San Jose, a small town with black sand beaches that swells on weekends with Guatemala City residents. It's about two hours by car from the capital, and two hours from the border of El Salvador. It's frayed, grimy, full of makeshift cinder-and-tin shack homes, and not the sort of place where foreign tourists tend to go. The girl in this photo walked alongside her brother, who balanced a basket of watermelon slices on his head. The fruit sells for about five quetzal a piece, more when it's hotter outside, and was tasty. My travel companion took some snapshots of the children with a Polaroid, and handed the snapshots to them for them to keep. The girl flipped out when she realized she was being handed an image of herself, for keeps — this huge grin spread across her face. I don't think either of them had ever seen an instant photo before, definitely not of themselves. As they walked away, she would not stop looking at the instant photo. She was so engrossed in the image that she stepped into a hole in the sand and fell flat on her face. This made her brother and other vendors laugh hard, loud, and long, but it didn't kill the grin.
