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The big scandal consuming the papers in Guatemala when I am there is about foreign adoptions after a bogus doctor steals a woman’s new-born baby from a hospital in Guatemala City. It’s assumed the baby will be sold on the black market to a childless Western couple and it’s probably one reason why tourists are advised against photographing children in this country. The locals don’t like it. Unfortunate for my photographer friend who specializes in portraits.

After the baby-snatching-doctor story more tales of baby theft appear and the issue is up for discussion everywhere. My host family, my teachers, most Guatemalans I speak to are embarrassed by the foreign adoption industry. They know the child will be better off in the West but that doesn’t mean they condone the practice. Only a Ladino couple I meet think it’s a blessing for all concerned.

At any rate the issue grips me and I spend hours laboriously translating the stories with my Spanish tutor because it beats the hell out of “Juan is the brother of Pedro and the uncle of Pablo and he enjoys watching football” material I would otherwise be working from.

Also I am fascinated by relationships here. Well I’m fascinated by relationships everywhere really. First impressions are almost always like fake fur, warm and fuzzy but not the real deal. Here it’s devout Catholics, big, close families, happy children. But once my Spanish improves and my eyes open I meet solo mothers, commitment-phobes, tortured souls and step over lots of blokes planted face down on the road, felled by excess consumption of the cheap-as-corn-chips fruit alcohol.

Also one morning my teacher is called away to the phone and returns looking shell-shocked. She sits down, buries her head in her arms on the desk and spends the next five minutes like that, not a whimper but her shoulders shuddering ever-so-slightly.

When she raises her head it’s clear she’s been crying up a storm but she wipes the tears away quietly, apologies and we continue with the lesson. I just have to ask why of course. I learn her ex has just told her he won’t pay child support for their two-year-old son. Worse she says they still love each other but because she’s Pentecostal and he’s Catholic, their families won’t have a bar of their union.

Fantastic. This is stuff I know about. We spend the rest of the lesson carping happily in Spanish about male inadequacies. I like to think it helped her but it’s probably just as well for me that a week later I end up traveling with an American couple who are rapturously in love. A forcefield of mutual adoration and sexual frisson repels all negative thought. Bad meals, little sleep, filthy toilets are accepted with equanimity.

How do they do, it we ask ourselves? So I just have to ask. It’s pretty easy actually. She’s married but not to this man. Her husband at almost 90 is more than 30 years her senior and at home, probably being spoon-fed. She rings him regularly and fondly. He ends each call with “Just enjoy yourself, darling.” And she does. About four times a year.

Our last night with them is spent on a splurge in possibly the swankiest but undoubtedly the most romantic hotel in all Guatemala. Hotel Atitlan is the perfumed fanciful creation of a romance novelist. Once a coffee plantation, now a fantasy of landscaped gardens featuring hundreds of different roses, hibiscus and bougainvilleas rolling all the way to a volcano-ringed lake, three swimming pools overlooking the water, exotic parrots decorating the trees and butterflies floating in the balmy air. I hate to think what new excesses this setting has inspired in my American friends.

So I’m pretty surprised when chopping through this sugar-coated world like an axe are the voices of another American couple I can hear checking into the room next door. I recognize that tone. It’s the ring of disappointed and slightly stressed consumers.

We meet in the pool at dusk and of course I just have to ask. It’s not a tough interview I admit. A casual “How’s things?” elicits “Well this is a lovely hotel but if we’d known it was four hours from Guatemala City by taxi we’d never have come. I mean we’re traveling with a baby and that’s a long time in a car with such terrible roads. My travel agent really should have told us and I’ll definitely be pointing that out when we get home.”

“It must be hard traveling with a baby,” I say, offering some fake-fur sympathy but wondering why these people are here at all. They’re resort sorts, not third world explorers. “It is, especially when we’ve just picked her up.”

In answer to my blank look the woman adds “We’ve just adopted a little girl. After more than a year of waiting we finally got her and then we had to be cooped up in a taxi for four hours!”

My photographer friend gets out of the pool. He hates it when I do casual-but-nosey-as-all-hell and, to be honest, it’s a relief not to have him observing my insincere sincerity. They procured their little girl through an agency. The birth mother was under 20, on her own with two other children. It won’t be an open adoption (“What for?” enquired the new mother) and of course I just had to ask what the baby cost. A lot. About $US30,000 in total, including lawyers fees, this trip etc.

Later I learn this is actually quite cheap. Friends in London have also adopted a Guatemalan baby girl but all up she cost about 30,000 pounds. On their yearly trip back home my friends come to visit with their little girl. Naturally, since she’s also a journalist, the woman rounds on me and just has to ask. “So what’s your view on foreign adoptions? I hope you’re not one of those people against them.” And damn it all, like a lot of journalists I know, she’s not easily fobbed off, either.

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