From Preface: My family and I chose to settle in a small town where families have done that for over four hundred years, where house floors are hard-packed dirt and streets are littered with plastic wrappers, where drainage systems and telephones are recent amenities, where women congregate to do laundry at the town pila and carry firewood home on their backs and heads for cooking. This town on the foothills of a towering dormant volcano grew up around the cathedral and convent built by Guatemala’s first Bishop, Francisco Marroquín. My career work in marketing communications and international development took me to remote places and connected me with people that I surely would not have known otherwise. People shared their hopes and joys with me, and their doubts and fears. They told me of the “birthmarks” that they were born to carry and the “tattoos” that they craft onto their hearts, bodies and material possessions as life impresses itself into their respective realities.