Lee Benson has written slice-of-life columns for the Deseret News since 1998. Prior to that he was a sports columnist. A native Utahn, he grew up in Sandy and lives in the mountains with his family.
SALT LAKE CITY — Growing up, as he considered his career possibilities, he entertained the idea of being a lawyer, like his dad; or maybe a small forward in the NBA, like his boyhood hero Adrian Dantley; or perhaps an archaeologist, a la Indiana Jones.
Director of a foundation dedicated to preserving Mayan languages? That never made the list.But that's the one that's turned into his dream job.Funny the twists and turns life takes. Winston Scott's twists and turns took him to the lush mountains of Guatemala, where he was introduced to the Maya people who have lived there for the last 4,000 years.The first 3,500, history suggests, were much better than the last 500. The arrival of the conquistadors and subjugation to the Spaniards exacted a heavy toll that continues unabated to this day — a constant eroding of their culture, their standard of living and, slowly but surely, their languages.It has become Winston's life's work to do something about the last one on that list — and in the process, hopefully help improve the first two. A book full of Mayan hieroglyphs lies on a table at the home of Winston Scott, director of Mayan Languages Preservation, a foundation dedicated to teaching and preserving the Mayan language, in Salt Lake City on Feb. 25. Scott has taken many twists and turns to reach this point in his life. Two humanitarian aid trips to Guatemala when he was in his late teens and early 20s first introduced Winston to the Mayans.There really wasn't anything to suggest much of a connection, let alone love at first sight. He's 6-foot-3, blue-eyed, blond-haired. The average Mayan is brown-skinned, dark-haired and barely 5 feet tall.Then there's the language, or make that languages. The Mayans have 22 different languages in Guatemala alone, each one distinctly different. And since the Spanish language — Guatemala's official language — arrived thousands of years after the Mayans were already there, there is absolutely no connection between speaking Spanish and Mayan. The same goes for English.Nevertheless, Winston Scott felt like he'd found his second home."From the very beginning, I just loved the people," he says. "I loved everything about them, the culture, the way they talk, their humility, their outlook on life even when they have very little."Inspired by what he'd seen and felt, after his second visit to Guatemala in 1999, he came back to the University of Utah and switched his major from archae
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