I’m a Tall White Woman in a Short Brown Country
Re-Exploring My Tall Girl Angst Once Again
In March 2020, after years of hard deliberation, my husband and I packed up our lives and moved from Florida to Guatemala to be full time missionaries.
The list of challenges was long. New country, new language we didn’t speak, new culture, new food, new climate, and to top it off, a week after we arrived, the pandemic closed the door on the country. We went into lockdown for 9 months. As if this laundry list of challenges wasn’t enough, there was one expected challenge that didn’t even occur to me. My height.
My husband and I are both tall, but it’s my height in particular that catches the attention. I’m a woman. A tall white woman in a short brown country.
We live in an area with no tourism. No one comes here to see the sights. The handful of other Caucasians are also missionaries, but there are very few of us, and I am the tallest female by far. I am 5’10.” In the United States, the average height for a woman is 5‘4,” in Guatemala 4’10,” and for a Guatemalan man, 5’3.” As I’m over 50 years old, I’m well passed having any kind of height insecurities. I left most of those back in the halls of junior high school where I towered over both boys and…
