Introduction

11/13/2025

Hi there!  Thank you for having a look at my blog. My name is Micah. I’m a junior at Needham High School, and I need a place to start putting my thoughts down on “paper.” 

What kind of thoughts are these?  Not every thought, of course. That would be unfocused, and a little haphazard. The thoughts I want to share on this blog will include anything from culture, to economics, or to current events, political or otherwise. They will also all be about something in Latin America. Why?  It all started for me when I spent a week as a service volunteer with School the World in Guatemala. Or did it?  I’m a soccer player and fan, and there can be no doubt that, like any youth soccer player, I have had eyes on the top pros for my formative years, and there’s quite a bit of great soccer coming from Latin America. If I were to really trace my initial interest in Latin America, I might have to say that. But I don’t think so. With so much amazing soccer in Europe and having been to Spain with my family on a special vacation, and even watched a pro soccer game while there, it didn’t impact me the same way. For this reason, I trace my true interest in Latin America to my time in Guatemala in a remote village, Chatián, 6 hours outside of Guatemala City, meeting the locals, seeing their homes, teaching their children, and building and improving their school.

What struck me?  It did not matter that homes were made of scrap metal or that main roads were riddled with potholes, cracks, and crumbling tar. Every single person in Chatián had a smart phone, and they held onto it and used it as obsessively as we did back home. How?  Just looking around this village and visiting the homes of the families whose children went to the school we were renovating, it took a moment to put together a rational reason for it. Individuals wanted to communicate, wanted information, and wanted entertainment just the same. But how had this country become so different than ours?  It was even part of the same continent.

I dug around on Google a bit when I returned home, and what kept popping up for me was the bestseller, Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. I started reading. There was an awful lot of world history in it. There was quite a bit of discussion about Europe, its monarchs, imperialism and colonization in the America’s, and having just visited Guatemala, I keyed in on Latin America and its history. In the background of all of it was, of all places, Spain. Spain’s imperialistic conquests included numerous areas in Latin America, and Spain brought its economic and political philosophies, its “extractive philosophies” that left legacies. Those legacies lived on in places like Guatemala, even when countries like Guatemala gained independence. Why Nations Fail offers an explanation and history for all of this.

When I finished the book, I at least had an explanation. But now, I was hooked. I wanted to know more.