I sat in my mom’s boxy green Volvo, breathing irregularly, as the old man in a white trench coat explained what I did wrong.

“You didn’t back up in a straight line,” he grunted. “And you didn’t make a full stop at that last stop sign.”

There was a pause.

“Did I pass?” I asked timidly. My fate and what was left of my pride rested in this old man’s next word.

“Yeah,” was the muffled, unenthusiastic response. He then got out of the car.

As soon as he had safely exited, I haphazardly parked the car and ran into the DMV building. The Department of Motor Vehicles was suddenly a much less bleak and intimidating place than it had been just an hour before.

“I didn’t fail!” I shouted too loudly at my dad, who was sitting in one of the uncomfortable sea-green chairs across the room. He gave me a thumbs up, and I gave a little jump; I was stoked. But just as quickly as the relief and excitement had filled me just moments earlier, anxiety and dread pounded in my chest.

I remembered I was leaving the country the next day.

A Dangerous World

I stepped from the plane onto the carpeted floor in the tunnel leading directly into the Guatemala City airport. The walls were bright turquoise, and the airport had a strange garage smell. My dad and I went through customs, then found a man holding a sign that read, Healing Waters. Dean Nelson. Vanessa Nelson. And the names of the five other people with us.

We piled into a shuttle, and the man who held the sign looked into my dad’s eyes and said, “I will drive right behind you in my truck the whole time. I won’t leave you. You don’t need to be worried.”

It was at that moment I started to realize this trip was going to be very interesting. Other than going to Europe when I was 5, I had never been out of the country, and now I was in a strange, and apparently dangerous, place. I wasn’t sure what to think.

My family and a few others had donated enough money to sponsor a clean water system in Guatemala this past year through an organization called Healing Waters International. Now the seven of us were being given the opportunity to see the system open and working, as well as see some of the Guatemalans it affected.

Once we got safely to our hotel, I started asking my dad tons of questions. I asked how dangerous the city was (number one city in the world for kidnapping), how safe the water was (we had to brush our teeth with bottled water and close our mouths when we showered), and what exactly were we going to do there? My dad wasn’t quite sure about the third question, so, I pondered it a while, got in bed and watched the end of a Spanish soap opera, and then went to sleep.

Forty Cents for Five Gallons