Over more than three decades spent researching cultural aspects of how children learn, the author has had the opportunity to learn about how individuals and cultural communities change and continue. During her research on children's learning by observing and "pitching in" in a Mayan community in Guatemala, the author learned a great deal from interviewing a leading midwife--an expert on pregnancy, birth, and early childhood. Chona Perez was born to be a midwife, marked with a sign of her calling at her birth (with a piece of the amniotic sac over her head like a veil). The author has been talking with her for over three decades about her remarkable work and life. Twenty years ago, they decided to write a book, called "Developing Destinies: A Mayan Midwife and Town" (2011), about how Chona learned her work from her birth destiny, her childhood, and being divinely selected and prepared for this calling. "Developing Destinies" illuminates human development as a cultural process by recounting the life and work of this Mayan sacred midwife, as well as the changes and continuities of children's and families' ways of life in Chona's Guatemalan Mayan town. The book shows how individuals build on cultural heritage from prior generations while also creating new ways of living.