On the plane down to Guatemala I sat next to a man with cropped hair and an oxford shirt. My single serving friend had grown up in eastern Guatemala, worked as a Jesuit priest in the highlands and Mexico, studied in Boston, and now taught in San Diego. He gave me his card and I ended up sleeping at a house he was in the process of turning into a dormitory for people connected with his movement. He also introduced me to some one he had known growing up, some one who had seen his life take a different course.
The commandante told me “When they ask why I became a guerrilla I say. If not for the coup in ’54 I would have become a Mormon priest, if not from the suppression of the officer’s revolt in ’68 I would have become a doctor.” These events galvanized him, as the execution of the nihilists in Russia galvanized Emma Goldman, or the haymarket affair in Chicago created a new generation of US revolutionaries. So the Commandante fought alongside peasants in the mud with guns in the jungle, trying to win land for landless peasants. When the peace accords were signed, he put down his guns. The struggle continued, but in an environment more open to political change, he chaned his way of fighting.
The day I met him, he was signing an agreement to get the land he had begun fighting for so long ago. His lawyers had achieved what his soldiers had not, and the men who signed up with him had had their faith rewarded with title to land. Now he, like some former Marxists in the US, seems to have become a neo-liberal. Now he shakes his head at the peasants, like some I knew, who are hesitant to get on board with development plans for a revolutionary new neo-liberal economy based on agricultural exports from US-model large collectivized farms which the professors at the University say is the solution. I suspect in the 60s he shook his head at peasants hesitant to get on board with plans for a revolution and communist economy (probably involving Soviet model large collectivized farms) which the students at the University said was the solution. But whatever he thinks of those who didn’t join up with his program, after three decades he delivered the goods for those who did.
My uncle has spent much of his life working with Wycliffe, an organization named after a man very nearly burnt at the stake for translating the bible into the language of the common people so they could decide for themselves what it meant rather than depending on the educated priests who had learned Latin. A friend of mine once commented: “Muslims say ‘we have taught these people Arabic so they can read the Qu’ran in the original.’ Christians say ‘We have translated the Bible so they can read it in their own language.’” But prior to the Reformation, Christendom often showed as little interest in Barbarian languages and cultures as the present-day Umma. And it was unarmed prophets like Wycliffe who helped change how the faith community related to its component cultures. Organizations like Wycliffe catch a lot of flack from secular leftists who see missionaries as cultural imperialists allied to the conservative business class.
My uncle introduced me to a team of Bible translators working in Guatemala. The wife was from the US, the husband was a Mexican of Zapotec Indian ancestry. They were not big fans of godless communism. The critiqued one of the leading icons of the Guatemalan left. At the same time talking about what they had witnessed on the small Guatemalan town where they had lived since the eighties they said “It sometimes seemed the government policies were designed to drive people to join the guerillas.”
The husband also told a story that stayed with me. He had business to do in a nearby village but was warned not to travel. “Those guerrillas are crazy and will kill you.” Sure enough, along a deserted road, a guerrilla stopped his car, rifle in hand.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes. You’re a human being, just like me.”
The guerrilla waved him through.
The missionary called what protected his life in that situation God. A materialist might use a different name. But the missionary’s faith in the Galilean, like the peasants’ faith in the Commandante was more than superstition, it was a way of speaking about something which motivated action in the real world and achieved real-world results.
One woman I met in Guatemala remarked on how her Guatemalan husband’s father and her own, had remarkably similar ideas about child-rearing and the importance of family. However the Guatemalan father was a Marxist guerrilla and the US father a Republican businessman. It reminded me that Karl Marx justified the elimination of private property in Europe on the grounds that so few people had access to it, but pointed out elsewhere that access to private property might forestall revolution in the United States. In the US the diffusion of private property, education, voting rights, and access to credit meant that a majority of those interested in improving the lot of their family and community become Republicans or Reagan Democrats to preserve their economic enfranchisement. In the very different socioeconomic environment of Central America in the 1960s lack of access to those same things led people with the same aspirations to communism to obtain economic enfranchisement.
Latin America had Simon Bolivar, it’s George Washington. But it never had it’s Andrew Jackson, or its Homestead Act. The founders of the US hoped that land (expropriated from native Americans) could serve as a means to give new immigrants a stake in the system and serve as a bulwark against revolution. Access to land granted in the Homestead Act and its successors ensured, as Karl Marx and the founders of the United States foresaw, that the US did not develop a European proletariat and at least in the North, never had a feudal peasant class. Access to land meant that in a small way, US conservatism included not just a conservatism of repression, but also a conservatism of cooptation. Through homesteading, home ownership, or the GI bill, they sought to give the laboring class some reason to identify with the dominant system—something in common with the wealthy. In Guatemala, some people I met had begun their lives as serfs, forced to work without pay for large landowners. In some cases peasants were even forbidden from planting corn for their own use, to prevent them from becoming in any way independent of the landowners. Barriers of blood, language overlapped with economic barriers.
In the 1950s Guatemala attempted to implement its own variation on the homestead act, granting peasants the right to small pieces of property from unused land. However while the homestead act granted people in the US “unused” land taken from powerless Native Americans, the Guatemalan plan took unused land from the much better connected United Fruit Company. Here as elsewhere US business interests were allied with feudal landowning interests who fell back on a conservatism of repression, with tragic results in 1954.
I traveled a little with the Commandante. He went to speak at the castle where Guatemalan military is headquartered—helping to design a training program for soldiers in the army he had fought against before the peace accords. (For the record many guerrilla leaders had trained in the same facility, switching sides when the time of revolution arrived). He seemed to take pride in the fact that he was the only former commandante allowed to travel in the US after September 11. He attributed this to the fact that he had never killed or kidnapped US army personnel. It did not sound like a deliberate policy, but apparently both he and Washington had kept track. As some one who had sent men to their deaths, he was probably noticed how the Pentagon felt about the men they sent to their deaths. He also seemed proud of his links to regimes opposed to Yankee foreign policy. He met with the powerful at the military headquarters. He also met with a group of poor peasants who wanted his help to resolve a property dispute.
It was interesting to me—comparing perspective of a man who fought with guns, and then put down his weapons when the war was over—to people who fight by saying nasty things—and have not put down their weapons. When I thought about the land he won for his soldiers, I thought to myself “We remembered our boys, the Commandante remembered his boys.” The culture of an NGO is different from the culture of a soldier's camp. No one ever says “yes, sir” no one ever says “hasta siempre, commandante.”
The last time I saw him was at a Christmas party at the Department of Agriculture. He was invited because of his success obtaining land for the peasants he had taken up arms for three decades earlier. Several more bourgeois people seemed very tickled to be talking to the famous Commandante. My Jesuit friend had warned me that I should not be put off by his way of being a Latin American man with women. Later on he was joined by his current girlfriend, whom he described as being from a higher social class than people he usually knew. They danced and he motioned to me to dance with his girlfriends young but very pretty daughter. Later we all had tacos at a roadside stand opposite a gas station
Thursday 30 December 2004
Tuesday 16 November 2004
Encounters with things past
My partner and I sit on the burlap sacks on the wooden planks as we travel from town uphill to the village. William Least Heat Moon of the Missouri called his pickup a boat on the inland ocean. Pickups, with their molded plastic beds, can seem a little like a motorboat, especially in Guatemala where you ride in the back, holding on to metal pipes welded so twenty people can ride standing up. The larger “camion de veranda”, with wooden planks supporting the cargo area, are more like barges. They cruise slowly along the narrow roads of dirt and gravel, as barges once plied muddy creeks and narrow canals. These carry building materials, fertilizer, and people, especially on market days when they are crammed with baskets of food and flowers, firewood, and the occasional pig. I read a book once that talked about the Erie canal and how it brought development, making New York City great, but also slicing through rural communities and destroying rural folkways. These transportation were built in the nineties, so it is too soon to see what effect they will have on these rural communities
Guatemala gave me a hint of another culture, the Maya peasant culture which still survives in these isolated “backwards” areas. It is in the highlands, where peasants have continued to live most “primitively” as town-dwelling Americans would define it, that the Maya people have best preserved their race, their language, and their culture. I am not saying that all possible forms education and development inevitably lead to assimilation and loss of unique cultural characteristics, but given the assumptions of education for most of the twentieth century, being “backwards” could be seen as a functional bulwark against the values and society of the European conquistadors. Places like Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala, and southern Mexico had the most advanced cultures in the centuries before Europeans arrived, but have remained economically under-developed in the centuries since. On the other hand in places like Argentina or the United States, economic development has gone hand in hand with the dilution or disappearance of indigenous blood, language, settlement, and culture.
I watched as a Maya shaman critiqued education for drawing children away from their traditions. In the US this happens too. It is why the Amish went to jail rather than allow their children to go to consolidated High School—or why others have decided to home-school. Even in the 19th century, Laura Ingalls Wilder's book Farmer Boy describes education remaking children. A daughter attending the academy five miles away returns to scoff at the table manners of her backwards father. She was not inculcating the values of a different ethnicity, but education still helped instill the “values of the town.” And at the end of the book, when Almanzo decides to forgo an apprenticeship with a buggy-maker in town for the farming life of his father he is making a cultural choice, even in an ethnically homogenous community like upstate New York.
For me however, Guatemala was also significant because it gave me a hint of some things I was born too late to experience in the US. The intercity transportation system, consisting of irregular buses and pickups, has many more breakdowns than a European rail system, but for many destinations service is frequent enough that you don’t need a schedule, even when making three or four connections. The day after New Years I traveled from Lake Atitlan to the Salvadoran border, about 7 transfers, just on faith that I could encounter a bus. A whole country where you could still travel without a car, where even towns of ten-thousand people have service to the capital every half hour, where in some major cities minibuses go by every minute, was quite an experience for a public transport geek like me.
There are lively markets with hundreds of people selling their wares: everything from pigweed amaranth (generally considered a weed in the US) to Mangos to jeans to CDs, from hand woven baskets, to plastic lawn chairs. I got to experience the thrill of looking forward to a market day, and traveling to markets. And living in town I got a sense of what it might have been like to live in a town without a single stop light, but which was still vibrant enough that you could go to the market square at eight to eat dinner, women selling the corn drink atol under the full moon. To walk through a human settlement that had not been drained of streetlife, or destroyed by the lure of the TV and automobile like so many US small towns. TVs and motor vehicles were still rare enough to build community rather than promote isolation. Dozens of people clustered around the bike repair shops to watch soccer matches—several families ride pickups together.
I was also impressed by the use of natural and biodegradable materials. Tamales are usually wrapped in shiny, smooth banana leaves. Cheese comes wrapped in a different fuzzier leaf from a knee-high plant. Atol, coffee, and other hot drinks are served in hollowed out and painted gourds. But the use of biodegradable materials is primarily a function of necessity rather than conviction. Nowadays many things are put in plastic bags, including things like hot French fries where the plastic does not seem completely appropriate. Entrepeneurs have figured out how to make money serving a latent demand for cheap mass-produced containers—which are currently made out of plastic and styrofoam. I realized how much I appreciated this when I crossed from Guatemala, where filtered water can be bought in sealed plastic bags for 12c to Mexico, where water is sold in bottles for $1. “Agua en bolsa” doesn’t taste as good, but for one-eighth the price per unit, I found it preferable.
These non-biodegradable containers made in factories are treated the same way as the biodegradable containers made by nature were. On buses the driver’s helper sweeps bottles, potato chips bags and plastic bags to the front of the bus and opens the door on the side of the highway to dispose of it. People tell me that in recent years, plastic bags have often gotten caught in drainage systems, causing floods. Even in small villages, you can see ugly messes of colorful plastic bags in ditches, behind houses, or even in the middle of cornfields. There is money to be made in selling plastic items, but so far no one has figure out how to make money gathering it up once they have outlived their usefulnesss, or making people more careful with it.
Of course none of this is new. I live in the highlands of Pennsylvania and often see trash dumped along roadsides or in gullies. My neighbor avoided hauling fees by setting fire to his old couch in his back yard. Lady Bird Johnson had to urge people to work at roadside beautification, because people in the US were no more immediately conscious of the need to treat plastic trash differently when it was first introduced here, than people in Guatemala are today a decade after its introduction. But I can’t help thinking making people more conscious would be a good thing.
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England there was what was known as the “Putting Out System.” People would put off small handicrafts to rural cottages and collect and sell the results. Sometimes after dinner I joined the family despepitando, squeezing squash seeds so they would pop out of the shell, and the green nutty inside would be left. Entrepeneurs give people baskets of pepita and buy back the finished product. I’m not convinced the money earned was all that much for the time it took, but the family talked and laughed and earned some money from being sociable and it was certainly more money than one earns watching TV.
In the US we tend to think of shopping solely as a means of distributing goods. But going to market days in Central America I was struck by the fact that in addition to distributing goods, they provided an excuse to see town, for small scale producers to do some shopping of their own, and social occasions for people in far scattered villages to meet each other. I gave my coins to the vendors and received my change (unlike the checkout clerks at a modern grocery who are essentially appendages to the cash register, vendors in a market exercise their brain to calculate change, practicing mathematics with every purchase). When I spent my coins, I often wondered how often they might be respent. I imagine the coins I spent buying cookies with pepita being used by that vendor to buy cheese, the cheesemaker to buy tomatoes, and so on—the metal occupying various locations and catalyzing a cascade of mutually beneficial exchanges. Thinking of the way the multiplier effect could work, I wonder if an economist could show whether money would be more liquid in this environment, than in a Walmart, where the money in the cash register is credited to an account in Bentonville and very little goes to a cashier or local producers. I suspect that a Walmart could easily distribute with 5 or 6 people, all the goods sold by the 500 or so vendors who thought it worth their while to converge in town for a Sunday morning, “efficiently” eliminating what made it worth their while to travel to town along with the bustle and laugher of the shoppers and vendors
In Guatemala I often found myself thinking of Orwell’s comment that he became a socialist not because he believed in a centrally planned economy, but because the socialists were the only ones interested in doing something about the poor. The appeal of communism in Central America almost certainly stemmed from a similar fact. The government did not care about educating peasants in the 1960s, Marxists did—and the fact that some people who wanted to educate their children allied with communists probably had less to do with a preference for planned economies, atheism, and Stalinist
totalitarianism than with understandable self-interest. Even today the Guatemalan government had to hold a telethon to raise enough money for schools to buy pencils for kids. Like the Communist rulers of my ancestral Chinese homeland I would generally reject the planned economy for the free enterprise system as a means of creating contemporary wealth but I would question whether school children should have to beg for pencils. Education is an investment in the future, and I believe government is better suited to provide the venture capital (given the multi-decade timeline for return)
than poor peasant families. And in China the investment in education which was part of a socialist vision is one of the things credited with their current economic success.
I often hear it said that people in Guatemala, or elsewhere, live on less than $2 a day. However I find myself distrusting that easy soundbite. It implies that if they moved away from their family and the graves of their ancestors to a shack in the city and worked in a factory for $4 a day, they would somehow be twice as well off. And while I don’t question the young fathers who make choices like that on a temporary basis, I question whether everyone in the community should buy into the value system implicit in using
money as an unquestioned proxy for quality of life. It shades into the idea that an investment banker who earns $15,000 a day has a life which is somehow much more worth living, and that if they die in a burning building it is thousands of times more of a tragedy. I earned less than $25,000 during the four years of the first Bush administration (a princely sum by Guatemalan standards). Because of where I went to school, I have friends who earned 100 times as much money as I did. But I would doubt their lives
are 100 times happier than mine. I am not sure they have 100 times as much control over their own lives. That extra money mostly gives them the power to influence OTHER peoples lives for good or for ill, and leverage government and legal machinery to insulate themselves from other people.
They are amazed by everyday things we live without. “You only see your parents once a year!” “You never eat tortillas.” Of course their assumption that we are worse off because we don’t eat tortillas reflects a certain ethnocentrism. But it may be that our reaction to Guatemalan living standards reflects ethnocentrism as well. Rich Bostonians would have clucked at the dirt floor of the cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born. To me the critical measure of their poverty is not how much money they make but their lack of access to infrastructure necessary for them to secure life and liberty and pursue the goals they choose. The most frequent reason people mentioned to me that they wanted more money was to pay for primary and secondary education their children. Something that a century ago was seen in this country, even by capitalists, as the governments’ duty to provide. They also mentioned water and access to life-saving medicines things which could be provided without dismantling the free enterprise system for goods distribution.
What I see as the critical aspects of their poverty has less to do with money to buy goods than with lack of access to services which could grant them the autonomy of full citizenship. Twenty years ago people in some villages were butchered like dogs and forced to flee into the woods. Others were uprooted from the land of their ancestors to make way for a dam. Today other communities are targeted for mining projects where a small amount of money will go to the government, a large amount to a Canadian corporation, and poisoned runoff will go to the community. Unlike twenty years ago, this conflict is mentioned in the newspaper, along with government responses that people are being unreasonable. These things are not numbers, but I think they do a better job of reflecting the true nature of the inequities in Guatemala. Of course, even in the US, where people make more than two dollars a day, the law may not protect people from the decisions of those who would use eminent domain to dictate what the highest and best use of their land should be.
Guatemala gave me a hint of another culture, the Maya peasant culture which still survives in these isolated “backwards” areas. It is in the highlands, where peasants have continued to live most “primitively” as town-dwelling Americans would define it, that the Maya people have best preserved their race, their language, and their culture. I am not saying that all possible forms education and development inevitably lead to assimilation and loss of unique cultural characteristics, but given the assumptions of education for most of the twentieth century, being “backwards” could be seen as a functional bulwark against the values and society of the European conquistadors. Places like Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala, and southern Mexico had the most advanced cultures in the centuries before Europeans arrived, but have remained economically under-developed in the centuries since. On the other hand in places like Argentina or the United States, economic development has gone hand in hand with the dilution or disappearance of indigenous blood, language, settlement, and culture.
I watched as a Maya shaman critiqued education for drawing children away from their traditions. In the US this happens too. It is why the Amish went to jail rather than allow their children to go to consolidated High School—or why others have decided to home-school. Even in the 19th century, Laura Ingalls Wilder's book Farmer Boy describes education remaking children. A daughter attending the academy five miles away returns to scoff at the table manners of her backwards father. She was not inculcating the values of a different ethnicity, but education still helped instill the “values of the town.” And at the end of the book, when Almanzo decides to forgo an apprenticeship with a buggy-maker in town for the farming life of his father he is making a cultural choice, even in an ethnically homogenous community like upstate New York.
For me however, Guatemala was also significant because it gave me a hint of some things I was born too late to experience in the US. The intercity transportation system, consisting of irregular buses and pickups, has many more breakdowns than a European rail system, but for many destinations service is frequent enough that you don’t need a schedule, even when making three or four connections. The day after New Years I traveled from Lake Atitlan to the Salvadoran border, about 7 transfers, just on faith that I could encounter a bus. A whole country where you could still travel without a car, where even towns of ten-thousand people have service to the capital every half hour, where in some major cities minibuses go by every minute, was quite an experience for a public transport geek like me.
There are lively markets with hundreds of people selling their wares: everything from pigweed amaranth (generally considered a weed in the US) to Mangos to jeans to CDs, from hand woven baskets, to plastic lawn chairs. I got to experience the thrill of looking forward to a market day, and traveling to markets. And living in town I got a sense of what it might have been like to live in a town without a single stop light, but which was still vibrant enough that you could go to the market square at eight to eat dinner, women selling the corn drink atol under the full moon. To walk through a human settlement that had not been drained of streetlife, or destroyed by the lure of the TV and automobile like so many US small towns. TVs and motor vehicles were still rare enough to build community rather than promote isolation. Dozens of people clustered around the bike repair shops to watch soccer matches—several families ride pickups together.
I was also impressed by the use of natural and biodegradable materials. Tamales are usually wrapped in shiny, smooth banana leaves. Cheese comes wrapped in a different fuzzier leaf from a knee-high plant. Atol, coffee, and other hot drinks are served in hollowed out and painted gourds. But the use of biodegradable materials is primarily a function of necessity rather than conviction. Nowadays many things are put in plastic bags, including things like hot French fries where the plastic does not seem completely appropriate. Entrepeneurs have figured out how to make money serving a latent demand for cheap mass-produced containers—which are currently made out of plastic and styrofoam. I realized how much I appreciated this when I crossed from Guatemala, where filtered water can be bought in sealed plastic bags for 12c to Mexico, where water is sold in bottles for $1. “Agua en bolsa” doesn’t taste as good, but for one-eighth the price per unit, I found it preferable.
These non-biodegradable containers made in factories are treated the same way as the biodegradable containers made by nature were. On buses the driver’s helper sweeps bottles, potato chips bags and plastic bags to the front of the bus and opens the door on the side of the highway to dispose of it. People tell me that in recent years, plastic bags have often gotten caught in drainage systems, causing floods. Even in small villages, you can see ugly messes of colorful plastic bags in ditches, behind houses, or even in the middle of cornfields. There is money to be made in selling plastic items, but so far no one has figure out how to make money gathering it up once they have outlived their usefulnesss, or making people more careful with it.
Of course none of this is new. I live in the highlands of Pennsylvania and often see trash dumped along roadsides or in gullies. My neighbor avoided hauling fees by setting fire to his old couch in his back yard. Lady Bird Johnson had to urge people to work at roadside beautification, because people in the US were no more immediately conscious of the need to treat plastic trash differently when it was first introduced here, than people in Guatemala are today a decade after its introduction. But I can’t help thinking making people more conscious would be a good thing.
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England there was what was known as the “Putting Out System.” People would put off small handicrafts to rural cottages and collect and sell the results. Sometimes after dinner I joined the family despepitando, squeezing squash seeds so they would pop out of the shell, and the green nutty inside would be left. Entrepeneurs give people baskets of pepita and buy back the finished product. I’m not convinced the money earned was all that much for the time it took, but the family talked and laughed and earned some money from being sociable and it was certainly more money than one earns watching TV.
In the US we tend to think of shopping solely as a means of distributing goods. But going to market days in Central America I was struck by the fact that in addition to distributing goods, they provided an excuse to see town, for small scale producers to do some shopping of their own, and social occasions for people in far scattered villages to meet each other. I gave my coins to the vendors and received my change (unlike the checkout clerks at a modern grocery who are essentially appendages to the cash register, vendors in a market exercise their brain to calculate change, practicing mathematics with every purchase). When I spent my coins, I often wondered how often they might be respent. I imagine the coins I spent buying cookies with pepita being used by that vendor to buy cheese, the cheesemaker to buy tomatoes, and so on—the metal occupying various locations and catalyzing a cascade of mutually beneficial exchanges. Thinking of the way the multiplier effect could work, I wonder if an economist could show whether money would be more liquid in this environment, than in a Walmart, where the money in the cash register is credited to an account in Bentonville and very little goes to a cashier or local producers. I suspect that a Walmart could easily distribute with 5 or 6 people, all the goods sold by the 500 or so vendors who thought it worth their while to converge in town for a Sunday morning, “efficiently” eliminating what made it worth their while to travel to town along with the bustle and laugher of the shoppers and vendors
In Guatemala I often found myself thinking of Orwell’s comment that he became a socialist not because he believed in a centrally planned economy, but because the socialists were the only ones interested in doing something about the poor. The appeal of communism in Central America almost certainly stemmed from a similar fact. The government did not care about educating peasants in the 1960s, Marxists did—and the fact that some people who wanted to educate their children allied with communists probably had less to do with a preference for planned economies, atheism, and Stalinist
totalitarianism than with understandable self-interest. Even today the Guatemalan government had to hold a telethon to raise enough money for schools to buy pencils for kids. Like the Communist rulers of my ancestral Chinese homeland I would generally reject the planned economy for the free enterprise system as a means of creating contemporary wealth but I would question whether school children should have to beg for pencils. Education is an investment in the future, and I believe government is better suited to provide the venture capital (given the multi-decade timeline for return)
than poor peasant families. And in China the investment in education which was part of a socialist vision is one of the things credited with their current economic success.
I often hear it said that people in Guatemala, or elsewhere, live on less than $2 a day. However I find myself distrusting that easy soundbite. It implies that if they moved away from their family and the graves of their ancestors to a shack in the city and worked in a factory for $4 a day, they would somehow be twice as well off. And while I don’t question the young fathers who make choices like that on a temporary basis, I question whether everyone in the community should buy into the value system implicit in using
money as an unquestioned proxy for quality of life. It shades into the idea that an investment banker who earns $15,000 a day has a life which is somehow much more worth living, and that if they die in a burning building it is thousands of times more of a tragedy. I earned less than $25,000 during the four years of the first Bush administration (a princely sum by Guatemalan standards). Because of where I went to school, I have friends who earned 100 times as much money as I did. But I would doubt their lives
are 100 times happier than mine. I am not sure they have 100 times as much control over their own lives. That extra money mostly gives them the power to influence OTHER peoples lives for good or for ill, and leverage government and legal machinery to insulate themselves from other people.
They are amazed by everyday things we live without. “You only see your parents once a year!” “You never eat tortillas.” Of course their assumption that we are worse off because we don’t eat tortillas reflects a certain ethnocentrism. But it may be that our reaction to Guatemalan living standards reflects ethnocentrism as well. Rich Bostonians would have clucked at the dirt floor of the cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born. To me the critical measure of their poverty is not how much money they make but their lack of access to infrastructure necessary for them to secure life and liberty and pursue the goals they choose. The most frequent reason people mentioned to me that they wanted more money was to pay for primary and secondary education their children. Something that a century ago was seen in this country, even by capitalists, as the governments’ duty to provide. They also mentioned water and access to life-saving medicines things which could be provided without dismantling the free enterprise system for goods distribution.
What I see as the critical aspects of their poverty has less to do with money to buy goods than with lack of access to services which could grant them the autonomy of full citizenship. Twenty years ago people in some villages were butchered like dogs and forced to flee into the woods. Others were uprooted from the land of their ancestors to make way for a dam. Today other communities are targeted for mining projects where a small amount of money will go to the government, a large amount to a Canadian corporation, and poisoned runoff will go to the community. Unlike twenty years ago, this conflict is mentioned in the newspaper, along with government responses that people are being unreasonable. These things are not numbers, but I think they do a better job of reflecting the true nature of the inequities in Guatemala. Of course, even in the US, where people make more than two dollars a day, the law may not protect people from the decisions of those who would use eminent domain to dictate what the highest and best use of their land should be.
Friday 5 November 2004
Seven scenes from Rabinal
In May, before corn planting began I walked out to help prepare the fields. People talk about how the Maya are amazing walkers, but I usually went walking with other foreigners and seldom saw them make the impressive treks to work in their cornfields. This day, however, I followed a boy of about ten to his father’s cornfields. The trail followed the top of a descending ridge for about an hour. There were cornfields on the opposite hillside, irrigated from the creek running in the gully between the ridges. We descended the sloping field towards the gully and begun cutting vegetation with our machetes to clear the ground. Ferns and brushes we sliced like weed-whackers, along with shorter trees. When we came to thicker trees we cut off their limbs. I watched the boy who had guided me climb up a pine tree, cutting off limbs as he climbed. He cut several inches from the trunk so the remaining stubs could serve as a ladder the next time some one climbs the tree. The tree was short and he only climbed about thirty feet, but I have seen men climb much higher. Sometimes people strip the needles from pine branches to carpet their houses or patios in green for birthday parties or religious festivities. Meanwhile his father worked on a deciduous tree, but caught the branches before they fell and hung them from the stubs so the large branches wouldn’t have to be hauled out of the way for planting.
A few hours later the mother came down the trail carrying a large basket on her head. We ate rice and beans with tortillas, sitting on the ground that would provide next years beans and corn. The basket was woven, but the food and drink were in plastic jars. I remember months ago seeing the omnipresent plastic water jugs and being saddened that people had abandoned their traditional pottery. After realizing how much more breakable and more expensive earthenware jugs are I understood why plastic would be favored for everyday use and abuse even if it is disappointing to tourists. And I realized that the earthenware jugs were used because they were available and functional just as plastic jugs are today. And if the colorful plastic tinajes aren’t historical, they are part of contemporary culture in the villages. However while the coffee was transported in plastic, we drank it out of guacales. Guacales are bowls made from the thick fruit of the moro tree, which plays a key role in the Maya foundational legend, the Popol Vuh. The hard globular fruit is cut into hemispheres, hollowed out, painted, and coated with a natural shellac made from a local river-dwelling insect. In the Rabinal area, the red bowls with black and yellow designs are used to drink almost every hot beverage. These drinking bowls are slightly cheaper than modern mugs, not to mention prettier, and functional when you hold a drink and your hand and blow across the wide surface to cool it off. They are less functional around tables, since the rounded bottoms can be difficult to balance on the table when eating a meal, however. Unlike the water jugs this traditional item has not been displaced by a plastic or mass-produced equivalent.
After enjoying lunch we worked on, pausing for a snack of a few sweet mangoes about midday. Then, after weed whacking about an acre, the seven of us started up hill as the chill of evening set in.
I should point out that many families lack access to land, or have fields much farther than the one hour walk I took. These fields were put up for sale about ten years ago and many families in the village bought adjoining parcels. On the other hand, slightly more affluence has its own pitfalls. The family I worked with that day can’t afford chemical sprays. In another community where many people have relatives in the states, and thus nicer houses and disposable income I walked with the women carrying baskets of food to the workers at lunch time. In this one family three of the men were traversing the steep stony fields with backpack sprayers. In a few hours the herbicide eliminates days of machete work. As in much of the third world, chemicals which have been banned in the US for years are available at cut-rate prices in Guatemala. No one was wearing gloves, or goggles, or masks, though everyone carefully rinsed their hands before sitting down to eat the delicious-smelling chicken soup—sitting on the rocks of the cornfield they were spraying.
II
Electrical bills can be a problem, not because people use a lot of electricity, but because the hook up fee is usually six times the marginal usage. This would still arguably be cheaper than buying candles, though of course the money goes to the city. However there are some inconsistencies in the bills: bills for one month were sometimes inexplicably seven times greater than other months. And because there is no mail service in the villages, paying bills often means taking a day off to pay in person. Most of the houses have electricity, but some of the more memorable dinners took place in those which did´t.
We ate our tortillas as darkness fell, our faces painted orange and gray by the dancing flames of the cooking fire. Then the father dipped a small scrap of wood in the fire and set it on a rock. The brightly burning five inch piece of wood illuminated the whole room with an amber glow much brighter than a candle. This was first time I saw ocote, another item mentioned in the Popol Vuh. Ocotes are pieces of pine wood cut from trees heavy in resin, so they burn readily with a great deal of light. They are used to start fires and also as torches, and give a distinctive smell. After an evening of prayer at church, each family group often carries a bundle of ocote. It feels very different than the focused white-yellow beam of a flashlight, and watching sets of orange flames on a far hill moving with the half-illumined family groups can be amazingly beautiful for an observer. That night several shims of ocote, each in their turn, illuminated our dinner, and our conversation.
III
I am halfway down the mountain and sitting on a stool cut from a tree trunk and watching a man twist fibers over an upturned sandal over his knee. Little by little the eighteen inch strands form a rope, which will in turn be woven into a string bag. A generation ago the fibers were made from the leaves of maguey, but few people raise the plant in these parts anymore, and the man is using thin plastic pieces of a modern “burlap sack.” This is another example of evolving tradition, the raw materials have changed, but the process has been preserved. The man complains that few of his sons’ generation know how to make these bags, that few still wear the broad-brimmed hat, that among their peers many prefer to speak Spanish rather than their Maya mother tongue.
IV
I am sitting outside an adobe hut in the valley talking to a woman about the disappointing corn harvest, and the latest episode of pig-stealing. I ask about the sewing machine in the corner. It is an old treadle Singer, with intricate curving ironwork supporting a nicely detailed wooden box and the old black mechanism with shiny inlay. In our country these machines sewed many handmade clothes in our grandparents’ day and now sit in antique stores, perhaps awaiting a new life as a table, but unlikely to ever return to their original purpose. Here in Guatemala not only are old ones still working, I’ve even seen stores with new models. The ironwork supports are much simpler and all the lines are straighter, but they are immediately recognizable. Part of the story of Central America is told when you walk past a store and see a pedal sewing machine being sold next to a large flat screen TV.
“It was that and my azodon which kept my family alive after my husband was killed. I sewed blouses for cash to buy firewood, and used the azodon in my cornfields.” Today she is using the sewing machine to make a long purple skirt to be worn by schoolgirls in the independence day parade of a local school.
V
I once thought I heard the sound of a dot matrix printer as I sat shelling squash seeds by a cooking fire in a dirt-floor adobe house. The next day I wandered inside and found out why. The computer sat on a makeshift wooden table, with the cover off while some one repaired the disk drive. It seemed an odd artifact in a village where the doors don´t have hinges and the few windows have shutters but no glass. It turns out people decided the computer for the local school would be safer in a house full of people than in a school building empty and unguarded at night.
VI
There are few foreigners in Rabinal, but almost all stop off at the internet café at some point. Nonetheless, a majority of the patrons are Guatemalan, some playing games, some sending emails, and some writing on reports for school. (In the anonymous crush of the capital, some patrons of internet cafes are also viewing pornographic movies, but that seldom happens in the close environment of provincial towns). Sitting at the terminal I send emails to friends, read political commentary, google William Morris, and read weblogs from Iraq. Then I walk by the cashier to pay.
A few weeks before a friend saw a man in the café staring at a large black and white photo of a man’s face. You often see these framed in people’s houses—enlargements of photos from old identity documents, made to memorialize those who died in the violence twenty years ago. Some were killed in sudden massacres in the villages, others abducted on the streets of town and never seen again. A recent excavation at the army base on the west side of town uncovered seventy-eight corpses tossed into a well. In most cases their clothes had not rotted although the bodies had. After two decades all that remained of the dead were pieces of cloth and these would be laid out in the town hall in a few days in hopes that people might come to identify their deceased relatives by their clothing. This man is contemplating the photo of his disappeared father and debating whether he dares to go to look for him in this grim exhibition. Many of those responsible for the deaths are still in positions of power and influence and unlikely to look kindly on anything which might lead people to discussions of things they might have been involved in. Witnesses had identified the parts of the base most likely to contain other mass graves, but excavations had to be postponed when the mayor fenced off those areas to graze his cattle. He graciously allowed the forensic team to excavate elsewhere on the base.
At the end of the exhibition the half of the bodies remain unidentified.
VII
Leaving the internet café I walk out into the market square at night. The east side is dominated by the white triangle of the tallest building in town, the Catholic church. Four chapels, Santos Domingo, Sebastian, Pablo Apostol and Pablo Martir flank the stone-paved market at the four corners. I walk past a few brightly lit metal carts with gas grills offering french fries, fried chicken and tacos. Further on another well-lit counter has blenders for smoothies. Along the south edge is a band of twelve foot square shops in the one story market buildng. A few merchants still have their wares set out under florescent lamps. I venture deeper into the market. Most of the light blue wooden tables are empty, but at a few women sell dinners of beans, eggs, or rice, potato turnovers or bowls of chicken soup. Here in the center of the market no one has electricity, so the tables are lit with candles stuck at odd angles between the baskets, bowls and trays. Women move the candles as necessary to get at the bowl of beet salad.
I head for the women selling atol—the traditional drink made from ground corn: a white, creamy beverage which tastes very good drizzled with chili sauce. Like the coffee brought to people working in the fields it is stored in blue plastic jugs insulated with towels. And like that coffee it is drunk from the traditional red guacal, made from the moro fruits which became the talking skull of a deceased hero in the Popol Vuh. The women laughingly exchange with me the few words of Achi I know. “Ah Nayo, Utz a Wach?” The atol is cheap, about 6c, and I am a regular customer. They scoop my atol out with one guacal and pour it into another to cool it down, like the practiced moves of an expert pizza-maker spinning the dough. As the bowls move up and down, the atol pouring between them looks more like white taffy expanding and contracting than the liquid it is. I sit against a table opposite the atol venders, along with a few others enjoying the night. I look above the tarps which stretch above the stalls to protect them from rain, over the one-story shops at the edge of the market and see the half-moon hanging in the sky. Sitting at the computer screen two hundred feet away I was connected to people doing the same in other countries and continents. Sitting here in the candlelit market, sipping atol from a guacal and looking up at the moon, I feel my link with those in this valley who doing the same in other centuries.
A few hours later the mother came down the trail carrying a large basket on her head. We ate rice and beans with tortillas, sitting on the ground that would provide next years beans and corn. The basket was woven, but the food and drink were in plastic jars. I remember months ago seeing the omnipresent plastic water jugs and being saddened that people had abandoned their traditional pottery. After realizing how much more breakable and more expensive earthenware jugs are I understood why plastic would be favored for everyday use and abuse even if it is disappointing to tourists. And I realized that the earthenware jugs were used because they were available and functional just as plastic jugs are today. And if the colorful plastic tinajes aren’t historical, they are part of contemporary culture in the villages. However while the coffee was transported in plastic, we drank it out of guacales. Guacales are bowls made from the thick fruit of the moro tree, which plays a key role in the Maya foundational legend, the Popol Vuh. The hard globular fruit is cut into hemispheres, hollowed out, painted, and coated with a natural shellac made from a local river-dwelling insect. In the Rabinal area, the red bowls with black and yellow designs are used to drink almost every hot beverage. These drinking bowls are slightly cheaper than modern mugs, not to mention prettier, and functional when you hold a drink and your hand and blow across the wide surface to cool it off. They are less functional around tables, since the rounded bottoms can be difficult to balance on the table when eating a meal, however. Unlike the water jugs this traditional item has not been displaced by a plastic or mass-produced equivalent.
After enjoying lunch we worked on, pausing for a snack of a few sweet mangoes about midday. Then, after weed whacking about an acre, the seven of us started up hill as the chill of evening set in.
I should point out that many families lack access to land, or have fields much farther than the one hour walk I took. These fields were put up for sale about ten years ago and many families in the village bought adjoining parcels. On the other hand, slightly more affluence has its own pitfalls. The family I worked with that day can’t afford chemical sprays. In another community where many people have relatives in the states, and thus nicer houses and disposable income I walked with the women carrying baskets of food to the workers at lunch time. In this one family three of the men were traversing the steep stony fields with backpack sprayers. In a few hours the herbicide eliminates days of machete work. As in much of the third world, chemicals which have been banned in the US for years are available at cut-rate prices in Guatemala. No one was wearing gloves, or goggles, or masks, though everyone carefully rinsed their hands before sitting down to eat the delicious-smelling chicken soup—sitting on the rocks of the cornfield they were spraying.
II
Electrical bills can be a problem, not because people use a lot of electricity, but because the hook up fee is usually six times the marginal usage. This would still arguably be cheaper than buying candles, though of course the money goes to the city. However there are some inconsistencies in the bills: bills for one month were sometimes inexplicably seven times greater than other months. And because there is no mail service in the villages, paying bills often means taking a day off to pay in person. Most of the houses have electricity, but some of the more memorable dinners took place in those which did´t.
We ate our tortillas as darkness fell, our faces painted orange and gray by the dancing flames of the cooking fire. Then the father dipped a small scrap of wood in the fire and set it on a rock. The brightly burning five inch piece of wood illuminated the whole room with an amber glow much brighter than a candle. This was first time I saw ocote, another item mentioned in the Popol Vuh. Ocotes are pieces of pine wood cut from trees heavy in resin, so they burn readily with a great deal of light. They are used to start fires and also as torches, and give a distinctive smell. After an evening of prayer at church, each family group often carries a bundle of ocote. It feels very different than the focused white-yellow beam of a flashlight, and watching sets of orange flames on a far hill moving with the half-illumined family groups can be amazingly beautiful for an observer. That night several shims of ocote, each in their turn, illuminated our dinner, and our conversation.
III
I am halfway down the mountain and sitting on a stool cut from a tree trunk and watching a man twist fibers over an upturned sandal over his knee. Little by little the eighteen inch strands form a rope, which will in turn be woven into a string bag. A generation ago the fibers were made from the leaves of maguey, but few people raise the plant in these parts anymore, and the man is using thin plastic pieces of a modern “burlap sack.” This is another example of evolving tradition, the raw materials have changed, but the process has been preserved. The man complains that few of his sons’ generation know how to make these bags, that few still wear the broad-brimmed hat, that among their peers many prefer to speak Spanish rather than their Maya mother tongue.
IV
I am sitting outside an adobe hut in the valley talking to a woman about the disappointing corn harvest, and the latest episode of pig-stealing. I ask about the sewing machine in the corner. It is an old treadle Singer, with intricate curving ironwork supporting a nicely detailed wooden box and the old black mechanism with shiny inlay. In our country these machines sewed many handmade clothes in our grandparents’ day and now sit in antique stores, perhaps awaiting a new life as a table, but unlikely to ever return to their original purpose. Here in Guatemala not only are old ones still working, I’ve even seen stores with new models. The ironwork supports are much simpler and all the lines are straighter, but they are immediately recognizable. Part of the story of Central America is told when you walk past a store and see a pedal sewing machine being sold next to a large flat screen TV.
“It was that and my azodon which kept my family alive after my husband was killed. I sewed blouses for cash to buy firewood, and used the azodon in my cornfields.” Today she is using the sewing machine to make a long purple skirt to be worn by schoolgirls in the independence day parade of a local school.
V
I once thought I heard the sound of a dot matrix printer as I sat shelling squash seeds by a cooking fire in a dirt-floor adobe house. The next day I wandered inside and found out why. The computer sat on a makeshift wooden table, with the cover off while some one repaired the disk drive. It seemed an odd artifact in a village where the doors don´t have hinges and the few windows have shutters but no glass. It turns out people decided the computer for the local school would be safer in a house full of people than in a school building empty and unguarded at night.
VI
There are few foreigners in Rabinal, but almost all stop off at the internet café at some point. Nonetheless, a majority of the patrons are Guatemalan, some playing games, some sending emails, and some writing on reports for school. (In the anonymous crush of the capital, some patrons of internet cafes are also viewing pornographic movies, but that seldom happens in the close environment of provincial towns). Sitting at the terminal I send emails to friends, read political commentary, google William Morris, and read weblogs from Iraq. Then I walk by the cashier to pay.
A few weeks before a friend saw a man in the café staring at a large black and white photo of a man’s face. You often see these framed in people’s houses—enlargements of photos from old identity documents, made to memorialize those who died in the violence twenty years ago. Some were killed in sudden massacres in the villages, others abducted on the streets of town and never seen again. A recent excavation at the army base on the west side of town uncovered seventy-eight corpses tossed into a well. In most cases their clothes had not rotted although the bodies had. After two decades all that remained of the dead were pieces of cloth and these would be laid out in the town hall in a few days in hopes that people might come to identify their deceased relatives by their clothing. This man is contemplating the photo of his disappeared father and debating whether he dares to go to look for him in this grim exhibition. Many of those responsible for the deaths are still in positions of power and influence and unlikely to look kindly on anything which might lead people to discussions of things they might have been involved in. Witnesses had identified the parts of the base most likely to contain other mass graves, but excavations had to be postponed when the mayor fenced off those areas to graze his cattle. He graciously allowed the forensic team to excavate elsewhere on the base.
At the end of the exhibition the half of the bodies remain unidentified.
VII
Leaving the internet café I walk out into the market square at night. The east side is dominated by the white triangle of the tallest building in town, the Catholic church. Four chapels, Santos Domingo, Sebastian, Pablo Apostol and Pablo Martir flank the stone-paved market at the four corners. I walk past a few brightly lit metal carts with gas grills offering french fries, fried chicken and tacos. Further on another well-lit counter has blenders for smoothies. Along the south edge is a band of twelve foot square shops in the one story market buildng. A few merchants still have their wares set out under florescent lamps. I venture deeper into the market. Most of the light blue wooden tables are empty, but at a few women sell dinners of beans, eggs, or rice, potato turnovers or bowls of chicken soup. Here in the center of the market no one has electricity, so the tables are lit with candles stuck at odd angles between the baskets, bowls and trays. Women move the candles as necessary to get at the bowl of beet salad.
I head for the women selling atol—the traditional drink made from ground corn: a white, creamy beverage which tastes very good drizzled with chili sauce. Like the coffee brought to people working in the fields it is stored in blue plastic jugs insulated with towels. And like that coffee it is drunk from the traditional red guacal, made from the moro fruits which became the talking skull of a deceased hero in the Popol Vuh. The women laughingly exchange with me the few words of Achi I know. “Ah Nayo, Utz a Wach?” The atol is cheap, about 6c, and I am a regular customer. They scoop my atol out with one guacal and pour it into another to cool it down, like the practiced moves of an expert pizza-maker spinning the dough. As the bowls move up and down, the atol pouring between them looks more like white taffy expanding and contracting than the liquid it is. I sit against a table opposite the atol venders, along with a few others enjoying the night. I look above the tarps which stretch above the stalls to protect them from rain, over the one-story shops at the edge of the market and see the half-moon hanging in the sky. Sitting at the computer screen two hundred feet away I was connected to people doing the same in other countries and continents. Sitting here in the candlelit market, sipping atol from a guacal and looking up at the moon, I feel my link with those in this valley who doing the same in other centuries.
Sunday 5 September 2004
Jobs in Guatemala
Many of the cornstalks dominating the introduction to my last letter have now dried up. Some are still standing, some have been cut to fed by cows, and a few are still green and growing. The finely grained patchwork is much more intricate than in cornfields in the US, as is the connection between the cornfields and the people who depend on them to live. A similar thing has happened with the threats I mentioned. None of the details I presented last month are false, but we are now on our third interpretation about what they mean, I am not sure that a nice tidy explanation is what I should be looking for in my remaining time down here.
This essay contains a lot of numbers. I often convert between dollars in Quetzals. Although I use the official exchange rate of 1:this does not tell the whole story. Computers and gasoline cost slightly more in Guatemala, but living expenses and food other than meat are much less. I confronted this disconnect when I went to El Salvador (which now has a dollar economy) and had to change 160Q to buy a twenty dollar bill. Thinking about how long I could live with 160 Quetzals in Guatemala, it felt like a horrible deal. You can eat out for 3-5Q in the market, though restaurants cost more. Rice is 2Q a pound, tomatoes 1-3Q, many rolls are 25 centavos (about 3 cents). In rural areas you could probably live fairly well (hotels, restaurants, a few beers) for two or three days on 160 Quetzals. Since my lodging is paid for, and I have a kitchen, I could live for weeks. Living for weeks on twenty dollars would be slightly harder. So although I generally convert between dollars and Quetzals, you should remember that other systems forconverting between the currencies (how many pounds of tomatoes you could buy, how much work you would have to do) would produce a different comparison.
A Difficult Job
My mother and I spent some time in Lago Atitlan, a beautiful lake in a volcanic crater, now edged by three volcanic peaks. One hotel offers a view with the three cones perfectly framed and rising above the swimming pool for $140 a night. We stayed in a more modest room, still lakeside for Q140, one-eighth the price.
Of course there are many tourists: vendors make their pitch in English. But if you walk five minutes uphill, the throngs of tourists become lone individuals, and the beggars and vendors disappear. My mother and I were walking on a narrow footpath about seventy feet above the lake when we came upon a man sitting on the side of the path, staring at the tall grass in front of him. He was also sweating profusely from the 8 cinderblocks on his back. He was carrying them from the boat dock, where the tourist hotels are, to a village about an hour away. He said he made about 5Q (62c) a trip. Most cinderblocks I’ve seen weigh about 15 pounds, so his load would have been about 120 pounds, which explained why he was resting alongside the path and sweating profusely. Lake Atitlan is far from Rabinal and when I asked a man here, he said that the going rate for hauling cinderblocks in Rabinal would be 15Q per substantial trip or 35Q a day. I don’t know if labor is cheaper at Lago Atitlan, if the man was trying to make us feel sorry for him, or if he was being taken advantage of. Even at the Rabinal rate, to spend one night in the $140 hotel, he would have to make 75 trips, enough to build a 500 square foot house. Even to spend a night in our modest room would mean hauling half a ton of cinderblocks on his back.
A Good Job
At one point several months ago I met a young man who seemed to be doing fairly well—he had a job with a development organization which paid 2200 Q a month, enough to buy a motorcycle for the nights he had to work in town until 10 o’clock, long past the hour he could find a pickup truck back to his village. His work involved pairing rich country donors with children in communities. Part of his job involved taking photos of the children—posed so donors could see that the things they had given: backpacks, pencils, or food were being put to good use. I was impressed by his energy and insight into \the reality of his work, and was looking forward to seeing him again when I returned to Chimaltenango.
As it turned out he, like many enterprising young men, had left. He wanted to build a house, and provide for the family he hoped to have. In the United States education is the “ticket” people save and borrow money for. Here in Guatemala, this young man used his salary and money borrowed from relatives to pay his passage for the 30 day trip across the border to the United States.
The money you pay for this trip usually includes two to three attempts—like the chance to shoot the target at a carnival, but for much bigger stakes. If you get stopped once, you can try again at no additional cost, but not forever. And the reason it takes 30 days is that the obstacles don’t start at the US border. In one case a truckload of migrants was deported after one guy with a headache wandered into a pharmacy and asked for some pills.
Mexican’s use a different word for pills, so the druggist tipped off the police (too many illegal Central Americans in the US means competition for the illegal Mexicans) who roughed them up and sent them south. Gangs often targets migrants, forced to carry large amounts of cash for expenses and bribes. And the journey itself, hidden in suffocating trucks, hanging onto freight trains for hours, crawling through the desert—is filled with non-human dangers as well. Newspapers are filled with stories of people who die, or lose their limbs chasing their “American Dream.” But you also meet some who made it. I met a man who worked for a decade in restaurants in Connecticut, saved up for a small plot of land and works 14 hour days driving a taxi he bought with his earnings.
Especially in the case of the young man I met case, I wonder about the math. The 40,000Q ($5,000) he had to come up with to travel in that style would have built a decent house without the risk, though it might be hard to pay off the loans on $275 a month. I have also heard several reports that employment in the US is harder to find and less regular than it used to be. I sometimes wonder whether I should offer sobering statistics about how people suffer on the journey, or in the US, throwing cold water when people confide about their “American dream.” Nonetheless, remembering our conversation in March, I doubt it was an ignorant or sudden decision on his part. It was an investment, and I suspect he understands the tradeoffs for his life far better than some one born in the United States could. Guatemalan migrants sending money home are a larger section of the economy than coffee or tourism—industries dominated by the already rich. And my ancestors spent their weeks on that crowded, death-filled, and for some illegal trip decades and centuries ago.
A Job close to home
The cash source for many of the mountain communities is wood. Where one mountain path meets the road I once saw four different men guarding individual piles of timber: 1x12 planks, 4x4 studs, and firewood loose and tied in bundles waiting for a pickup driver to haul their wood to town. Freight charges can be as much as 40% the value of the wood, but the much larger and more affluent market forty-five minute truck ride (five miles) away makes it worthwhile for both buyer and seller.
My first chance to see where this wood comes from came when Tomas offered to take us to see his father. We left the road and walked above one steeply sloped cornfield to a rocky outrcropping. The view across the valley was clear, and there was a sheer drop to the tall pine trees two hundred feet below. Then we walked to where his father was working. This slope was not as sheer as as the cliff face, but the vertical drop was greater than the horizontal, and my Irish companion stayed decided not to descend. Below Tomas’ father was using a chainsaw on an 8 foot long pine log 14-16 inches in diameter. To hold the log flat there was a platform supported on the downhill side by forked poles stuck in the ground. Tomas’ father was cutting the bark-covered sides to make the round log into something square.
Not long after I arrived, one of the supports collapsed; the log tumbled downhill, and the father had to scramble to avoid falling with his chainsaw. It took forty-five minutes to construct a new work platform and use ropes to pull the log into place. The squared off side was marked with a chalkline (actually a string dipped in burnt engine oil) at one inch
intervals to guide the chainsaw so it could be sawn into boards. This operation explains why chainsaws here have longer blades than the ones I remember from the states—it helps keep the cut straight when cutting timber into planks. So with only the chalkline to guide him, Tomas’ father went at it freehand, slicing a 1x12 off the side of the log the way we might slice a piece of cheese. He finished the first board in a little over half an hour. After watching this process for a while, Tomas and his brothers gathered some boards already cut and situated them in the forehead harness that is the standard way of carting heavy loads in Guatemala. Then, three boards to a brother, they started up the hill.
According to a friend of mine who works in forestry, each board probably weighed 20-30 pounds. So that was a lot of weight to carry UP a slope most westerners would balk at descending unburdened. Half of that weight is water, and evaporates if you leave the wood out to dry awhile. That may explain why the next time I saw Tomas’ father at work, there were dozens of boards laid out to dry before their long and arduous journey uphill. This worksite was along a much easier path, but was also along a path it had taken me
forty-five minutes to descend.
Cutting lumber this way is hard work. Each board brings about $1.25, and some of that must be used to pay for transport, and fuel, and maintenance of the chainsaw. Nonetheless the going agricultural wage in the community is about $2.50 a day, so some one with a chainsaw can do fairly well. And when he runs out of trees on his own land, he can also work for others. People pay $3 for as much as you can cut down on a tank of gas. Not every family owns a chainsaw, but almost every one owns an axe, so the tree owner can then split and haul the firewood to sell for his own profit. It seems a pretty good microenterprise, though there is probably an upper limit to the number of chainsaws that can be at work in a single village—especially given how scarce land is.
I can’t resist comparing it to situations in the US where I knew people cutting their own boards. At the farm where I work in Pennsylvania the farmer sometimes cuts down trees and loads the trunks on a wagon to haul to a sawmill to be cut into boards. In Guatemala neither people nor horses could haul entire trunks up the narrow mountain paths, so any lumber taken out of the woods has to be cut in place, and hauled out by human labor. I have never heard anyone mention a sawmill. In Alaska the old sourdoughs claimed to be able to cut logs flat using only a chalkline, but that was to make the edges flat for log cabins. Even there, however, I doubt anyone made a habit of using a chainsaw to cut one inch thick boards.
The journey of the boards illustrates the way in which technology has reached Guatemala in uneven ways. Trees are felled and sawn with a chainsaw—then hauled by people using a centuries old forehead harness. At roadside they reenter the world of twentieth century technology and are loaded to a pickup truck to town. Many are used for concrete forms for construction. When these buildings are built, you may find people cooking with firewood but using computers, teaching typing on manual typewriters while they talk on cellphones.
This essay contains a lot of numbers. I often convert between dollars in Quetzals. Although I use the official exchange rate of 1:this does not tell the whole story. Computers and gasoline cost slightly more in Guatemala, but living expenses and food other than meat are much less. I confronted this disconnect when I went to El Salvador (which now has a dollar economy) and had to change 160Q to buy a twenty dollar bill. Thinking about how long I could live with 160 Quetzals in Guatemala, it felt like a horrible deal. You can eat out for 3-5Q in the market, though restaurants cost more. Rice is 2Q a pound, tomatoes 1-3Q, many rolls are 25 centavos (about 3 cents). In rural areas you could probably live fairly well (hotels, restaurants, a few beers) for two or three days on 160 Quetzals. Since my lodging is paid for, and I have a kitchen, I could live for weeks. Living for weeks on twenty dollars would be slightly harder. So although I generally convert between dollars and Quetzals, you should remember that other systems forconverting between the currencies (how many pounds of tomatoes you could buy, how much work you would have to do) would produce a different comparison.
A Difficult Job
My mother and I spent some time in Lago Atitlan, a beautiful lake in a volcanic crater, now edged by three volcanic peaks. One hotel offers a view with the three cones perfectly framed and rising above the swimming pool for $140 a night. We stayed in a more modest room, still lakeside for Q140, one-eighth the price.
Of course there are many tourists: vendors make their pitch in English. But if you walk five minutes uphill, the throngs of tourists become lone individuals, and the beggars and vendors disappear. My mother and I were walking on a narrow footpath about seventy feet above the lake when we came upon a man sitting on the side of the path, staring at the tall grass in front of him. He was also sweating profusely from the 8 cinderblocks on his back. He was carrying them from the boat dock, where the tourist hotels are, to a village about an hour away. He said he made about 5Q (62c) a trip. Most cinderblocks I’ve seen weigh about 15 pounds, so his load would have been about 120 pounds, which explained why he was resting alongside the path and sweating profusely. Lake Atitlan is far from Rabinal and when I asked a man here, he said that the going rate for hauling cinderblocks in Rabinal would be 15Q per substantial trip or 35Q a day. I don’t know if labor is cheaper at Lago Atitlan, if the man was trying to make us feel sorry for him, or if he was being taken advantage of. Even at the Rabinal rate, to spend one night in the $140 hotel, he would have to make 75 trips, enough to build a 500 square foot house. Even to spend a night in our modest room would mean hauling half a ton of cinderblocks on his back.
A Good Job
At one point several months ago I met a young man who seemed to be doing fairly well—he had a job with a development organization which paid 2200 Q a month, enough to buy a motorcycle for the nights he had to work in town until 10 o’clock, long past the hour he could find a pickup truck back to his village. His work involved pairing rich country donors with children in communities. Part of his job involved taking photos of the children—posed so donors could see that the things they had given: backpacks, pencils, or food were being put to good use. I was impressed by his energy and insight into \the reality of his work, and was looking forward to seeing him again when I returned to Chimaltenango.
As it turned out he, like many enterprising young men, had left. He wanted to build a house, and provide for the family he hoped to have. In the United States education is the “ticket” people save and borrow money for. Here in Guatemala, this young man used his salary and money borrowed from relatives to pay his passage for the 30 day trip across the border to the United States.
The money you pay for this trip usually includes two to three attempts—like the chance to shoot the target at a carnival, but for much bigger stakes. If you get stopped once, you can try again at no additional cost, but not forever. And the reason it takes 30 days is that the obstacles don’t start at the US border. In one case a truckload of migrants was deported after one guy with a headache wandered into a pharmacy and asked for some pills.
Mexican’s use a different word for pills, so the druggist tipped off the police (too many illegal Central Americans in the US means competition for the illegal Mexicans) who roughed them up and sent them south. Gangs often targets migrants, forced to carry large amounts of cash for expenses and bribes. And the journey itself, hidden in suffocating trucks, hanging onto freight trains for hours, crawling through the desert—is filled with non-human dangers as well. Newspapers are filled with stories of people who die, or lose their limbs chasing their “American Dream.” But you also meet some who made it. I met a man who worked for a decade in restaurants in Connecticut, saved up for a small plot of land and works 14 hour days driving a taxi he bought with his earnings.
Especially in the case of the young man I met case, I wonder about the math. The 40,000Q ($5,000) he had to come up with to travel in that style would have built a decent house without the risk, though it might be hard to pay off the loans on $275 a month. I have also heard several reports that employment in the US is harder to find and less regular than it used to be. I sometimes wonder whether I should offer sobering statistics about how people suffer on the journey, or in the US, throwing cold water when people confide about their “American dream.” Nonetheless, remembering our conversation in March, I doubt it was an ignorant or sudden decision on his part. It was an investment, and I suspect he understands the tradeoffs for his life far better than some one born in the United States could. Guatemalan migrants sending money home are a larger section of the economy than coffee or tourism—industries dominated by the already rich. And my ancestors spent their weeks on that crowded, death-filled, and for some illegal trip decades and centuries ago.
A Job close to home
The cash source for many of the mountain communities is wood. Where one mountain path meets the road I once saw four different men guarding individual piles of timber: 1x12 planks, 4x4 studs, and firewood loose and tied in bundles waiting for a pickup driver to haul their wood to town. Freight charges can be as much as 40% the value of the wood, but the much larger and more affluent market forty-five minute truck ride (five miles) away makes it worthwhile for both buyer and seller.
My first chance to see where this wood comes from came when Tomas offered to take us to see his father. We left the road and walked above one steeply sloped cornfield to a rocky outrcropping. The view across the valley was clear, and there was a sheer drop to the tall pine trees two hundred feet below. Then we walked to where his father was working. This slope was not as sheer as as the cliff face, but the vertical drop was greater than the horizontal, and my Irish companion stayed decided not to descend. Below Tomas’ father was using a chainsaw on an 8 foot long pine log 14-16 inches in diameter. To hold the log flat there was a platform supported on the downhill side by forked poles stuck in the ground. Tomas’ father was cutting the bark-covered sides to make the round log into something square.
Not long after I arrived, one of the supports collapsed; the log tumbled downhill, and the father had to scramble to avoid falling with his chainsaw. It took forty-five minutes to construct a new work platform and use ropes to pull the log into place. The squared off side was marked with a chalkline (actually a string dipped in burnt engine oil) at one inch
intervals to guide the chainsaw so it could be sawn into boards. This operation explains why chainsaws here have longer blades than the ones I remember from the states—it helps keep the cut straight when cutting timber into planks. So with only the chalkline to guide him, Tomas’ father went at it freehand, slicing a 1x12 off the side of the log the way we might slice a piece of cheese. He finished the first board in a little over half an hour. After watching this process for a while, Tomas and his brothers gathered some boards already cut and situated them in the forehead harness that is the standard way of carting heavy loads in Guatemala. Then, three boards to a brother, they started up the hill.
According to a friend of mine who works in forestry, each board probably weighed 20-30 pounds. So that was a lot of weight to carry UP a slope most westerners would balk at descending unburdened. Half of that weight is water, and evaporates if you leave the wood out to dry awhile. That may explain why the next time I saw Tomas’ father at work, there were dozens of boards laid out to dry before their long and arduous journey uphill. This worksite was along a much easier path, but was also along a path it had taken me
forty-five minutes to descend.
Cutting lumber this way is hard work. Each board brings about $1.25, and some of that must be used to pay for transport, and fuel, and maintenance of the chainsaw. Nonetheless the going agricultural wage in the community is about $2.50 a day, so some one with a chainsaw can do fairly well. And when he runs out of trees on his own land, he can also work for others. People pay $3 for as much as you can cut down on a tank of gas. Not every family owns a chainsaw, but almost every one owns an axe, so the tree owner can then split and haul the firewood to sell for his own profit. It seems a pretty good microenterprise, though there is probably an upper limit to the number of chainsaws that can be at work in a single village—especially given how scarce land is.
I can’t resist comparing it to situations in the US where I knew people cutting their own boards. At the farm where I work in Pennsylvania the farmer sometimes cuts down trees and loads the trunks on a wagon to haul to a sawmill to be cut into boards. In Guatemala neither people nor horses could haul entire trunks up the narrow mountain paths, so any lumber taken out of the woods has to be cut in place, and hauled out by human labor. I have never heard anyone mention a sawmill. In Alaska the old sourdoughs claimed to be able to cut logs flat using only a chalkline, but that was to make the edges flat for log cabins. Even there, however, I doubt anyone made a habit of using a chainsaw to cut one inch thick boards.
The journey of the boards illustrates the way in which technology has reached Guatemala in uneven ways. Trees are felled and sawn with a chainsaw—then hauled by people using a centuries old forehead harness. At roadside they reenter the world of twentieth century technology and are loaded to a pickup truck to town. Many are used for concrete forms for construction. When these buildings are built, you may find people cooking with firewood but using computers, teaching typing on manual typewriters while they talk on cellphones.
Tuesday 4 May 2004
Arriving in Rabinal
Rabinal is the name of a town of about 10,000 people, and of the land surrounding it, an administrative district analogous to a county in the US, albeit smaller in size. Winding up the steep red dirt roads into the hills looming over the town you get a view of dusty hillside pastures marked by waist-high stone walls. As you continue you can look back on the green of irrigated cornfields and banana trees near the streams, the grid of town dominated by the white cathedral, a few clusters of adobe houses in villages outside town, and a few patches of trees. As you rise towards the clouds, the hills which loomed at the edge of town shrink into insignificance far below you, and you can look across the bowl of the valley to the mountains which enclose it on all sides. Five centuries ago, this valley was the land of a people called Achi. Their battles with surrounding kingdoms before the
arrival of the Spaniards are documented in the Rabinal Achi, a collection of speeches by warriors and kings from warring kingdoms that has been called the preColumbian Beowulf.
Because of the change in altitude the communities in the “county” are very different. The valley is much warmer, many plants like cotton, papaya, and mangos grow in the valley, but in the mountains they grow they are limited to things like broccoli, peaches, as well as many interesting fruits like matazans, granadillas, and jocote that I had never heard of before. I haven’t seen official statistics, but I know that I have gone from trying to
sleep in as little as possible in the valley, to putting a blanket over my sleeping bag and flannel pajamas next night in the mountains. Of course, I do not have a winter-ready sleeping bag, but it also illustrates the substantial differential in climate which can occur in six miles, when one rises almost 2000 feet.
It has also been interesting to compare the two areas I have worked in. The distance, 30 miles as the crow flies, belies clear differences in the way of life. The conflict in the Rabinal Achi is not with the Kakchiquels of Chimaltenango, but they were a rival group. Nowadays a visitor is likely to be struck by the smaller number cement houses in the villages of Rabinal. In Chimaltenango in the past few years, many families have built new houses of grey cinderblock, usually with money sent home by men working in the
United States. In Rabinal many young men express interest in going to the United States, but few have actually gone. I am much more aware of people struggling to participate in the local economy. Young fathers like those who go to the US if they lived in Chimaltenango, stack firewood or construction timber at roadside, negotiating with passing pickup drivers to carry it into town. Some journey to jobs in the capital, which allow them to see their family perhaps 2-3 days a month. One man worked on a large
construction project there to buy supplies so his brother could build him an adobe house in his hometown, and his family of seven could move from a house about 120 square feet to one of 450 square feet.
Adobe construction is still going on in Rabinal. In Chimaltenango, however, very few recently constructed houses are built wholly out of adobe: one of the few adobe house I remember had survived the 1976 earthquake. In contrast three of the two dozen families we work with in Rabinal built adobe houses this spring. In Chimaltenango there are many houses which incorporate knee-high adobe walls with cornstalks as “siding” up to the roof line. There, cornstalks tied together are a very common building material
and are also used for fences, or to protect young plants from chickens. In Rabinal cornstalks may be fed to animals, but I never saw anything built with them. This may reflect a different precolumbian tradition, or it may be an adaptation to poorer soils. I had few opportunities to compare them scientifically, but the few remaining cornstalks I standing when I arrived in Rabinal seemed thin, scarcely worth the trouble to cut, collect, and bind together. People in both communities proudly hang their seed corn from
the ceilings, but the cobs in Rabinal seem to average 8-10 inches, while they were nearly twice as long in Chimaltenango.
While the men in Rabinal still build with adobe bricks and red roof tiles as opposed to cinderblocks and corrugated aluminum, the women of Chimaltenango have conserved other traditions. There it is common to see mothers and daughters, or even three generations of women, seated around the house with the threads of a loom attached to a belt around their waist to weave the traditional top, called a huipil. In Rabinal few women know how to weave. Many wear machine-made blouses, and those with handwoven tradional tops have usually bought them.
One experience which most Guatemalan villages do share is planting corn. A few places with irrigation already have plants as tall as a person, but most of the communities we work with rely on the rains which began in mid May. I have witnessed much of the process of sowing corn, and even participated a little. One Tuesday most of the men in the village had gone to work on the water system: to clean the reservoir and see why the water ran only every four days instead of every other day. I showed up at the house of Don Joaquin to find his sons juggling a soccer ball in the small patio of hardened earth in front of his house. I wondered about our discussion about going to work in his fields as the boys playfully kicked the ball high. Suddenly the two oldest boys left the game, picked up azodons and headed out to the field. The English word for azodon is mattock, but if, like me, you have no idea what that is either, imagine an exremely large hoe. The metal blade was almost a foot wide and eight inches deep. Like a hoe, it is used to remove weeds from around growing plants, unlike a hoe, it is also used to remove weeds before planting.
Several weeks ago, I had the pleasure of cutting cornstalks with a machete. The blade cuts the stalks as easily as a jedi lightsabre: once to cut the stalks, once to trim the tops to a uniform length, and you throw them on a pile. That is the type of physical labor it is easy to enjoy. Working with an azodon is not. The azodon was heavy, the movements awkward, dust assaulted my nose, I sweated in the heat, the field was steeply sloped and I kept falling downhill, I wanted to quit. Only the shame of being outworked by two boys who between them had spent fewer than 25 years on the planet kept me going. After an hour the younger boys came by the bring water and joke, then headed downhill toward the stream. After two more hours, we headed in. The nine year old came up from the creek carrying an adult's load of 20-30 pounds of firewood on his back. I thought about the contrast between the way kids seemed with the soccer ball, and now seriously returning from work.
Another experience I got to observe was the dances for the festivities of the Santa Cruz. First I saw it in a village The dancers wore masks of a bull, a monkey, and various human faces colored red, blue, or pink, and enacting scenes to the music of a marimba, the huge wooden xylophone which is traditional to Guatemala. It was enjoyable experience, but it left me unsure of the strength of cultural traditions. There were three dozen people watching the dozen dancers, and an inescapable part of the experience was people taking pictures: both outsiders like me, and members of the community, including one of the dancers. One man explained the names of the masks, how the theme related the conquest, and how people had grown less serious and less willing to participate since his grandfather’s day.
Two days later, we went to another performance, not in a village, but at a crossroads, where four to five hundred people from the various hamlets within four or five miles crowded around to watch three different sets of masked dancers and marimba players. One set did the same dance with the bull, and two enacted a different masked dance involving Spaniards and Moors, Gilbert and Sullivan type hats, and much swordfighting. There were people selling snacks and drinks from baskets, hordes of people milling around four or five thick around the dancers, all enjoying a tradition which here seemed very alive. My camera’s batteries had run out and in a way I’m glad: I didn’t see a single camera, and though I couldn’t help being an outsider it felt good to be experiencing
it rather than frantically recording it so I and other outsiders could gawk
at it later. This was clearly a spectacle, but one which remained an integral and eagerly supported part of the cultural life—so much so that there were people selling snacks from baskets—admittedly some of them were bags of chips.
At the end of the dances two processions set off for the religious component of the festivities carrying the “ark” of the Santa Cruz. Later that afternoon we saw the end of a procession, a room full of people kneeling on a carpet of pine needles were reciting Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers. I was standing near Don Joaquin, and as people made their personal prayers I heard his prayer, that what had happened to him would not happen to his children
I thought about his kids, at work and at play. I also thought about the story he had told us several weeks before. When the army came twenty years ago, they left almost 200 people dead, including most of the women of the town: dumped in ravines or incinerated in their homes. It was a market day and many passing through the village were also killed, including those from many of the hamlets I had seen dancing and celebrating at the festival ofthe Santa Cruz. The details of what happened on the day of the massacre horrifying, but he talked about what he faced for the next few years as a survivor who had evaded the army. His home was destroyed, his crops torched in the fields, his chickens and other animals stolen he was left, “without a half a plate.” They may not have had much by our standards, but they had worked hard to obtain what they needed to live like human beings. Now instead of the roof in the houses they had built, they had to sleep in a cave or under a leaky sheet of plastic. Instead of eating their own store of corn and beans, wrung through weeks of the work which broke my back that day, they had to scrounge the woods, or send a child to town, to beg from monks, or a sympathetic townsperson. If the child wrangled a tortilla the food had to stretch a long way. They woke before dawn to sneak back to replant their burned fields. Lookouts wouldn’t do much good with the roads which bring pickups through the villages today, but in those years there were only narrow mountain trails and lookouts could warn of the approach of a platoon on foot. After three years the survivors did come out of the mountains, and Don Joaquin turned himself in for compulsory military service. After being beaten because his name was on a list of suspected guerillas, he was eventually sent to the coast to complete his term of service, and he returned to rebuild his life five and a half years after everything went up in flames. He married, his first child died. One row of adobe at a time, he saved to build a house that wasn’t full of draughts. He and the other villagers worked to get back what they had had before: they built houses, they planted fields, they found pasture for their cows, they saved money to buy plates, and chairs, and beds. A long struggle to stand still any parent would hope to spare their children
Ironically one justification for the destruction of their minimal possessions was was the protection of private property. In Central America giving poor campesinos the rights they needed to participate in capitalist society as anything other than serfs has always been called communism, beginning with struggles to end obligatory unpaid labor for landowners. It is interesting to observe that in both regions I have been, the village that suffered the most because of the touted communist presence is the one which has organized to provide secondary education for their children, paying the teachers when the government won’t. The fight against communism in the eighties involved speeches with moral clarity in against the brutal communist governments in Eastern Europe. But it also involved eliminating Carter’s restrictions on sending arms to the brutal non-communist governments in Central America. It also involved massacres of women and children, rapes, assassination, forced disappearances, and wanton disrespect for the private property of poor people. The guerrillas did receive support from Cuba, but the guerrillas numbered a few thousand and the dead almost 200,000, with fewer than 10% of the massacres and similar crimes committed by the guerrillas. The bloodletting that followed Communist victories in Russia, or Cambodia, are always cited by those seeking to justify Washington's policy in Central America. In Guatemala, however, massacres committed by our adversaries in the Cold War are hypothetical, the violence and brutality which actually occurred was committed by military forces allied with Washington DC. Of course brutalization of peasants has a long history, and scorched earth tactics and all that goes along with it have been taking place since long before the Cold War.
But for now, may the dead rest in peace—and there is hope that Don Joaquin’s children will face only the burden of hard work and few resources rather than watching the results of that work go up in flames. The corn is growing, traditional Dances and Mayan language are easy to find, and kids are free-spirited kids when they have a soccer ball to kick around. Thank those of you who helped me be here, and I hope you have a productive growing season up north.
arrival of the Spaniards are documented in the Rabinal Achi, a collection of speeches by warriors and kings from warring kingdoms that has been called the preColumbian Beowulf.
Because of the change in altitude the communities in the “county” are very different. The valley is much warmer, many plants like cotton, papaya, and mangos grow in the valley, but in the mountains they grow they are limited to things like broccoli, peaches, as well as many interesting fruits like matazans, granadillas, and jocote that I had never heard of before. I haven’t seen official statistics, but I know that I have gone from trying to
sleep in as little as possible in the valley, to putting a blanket over my sleeping bag and flannel pajamas next night in the mountains. Of course, I do not have a winter-ready sleeping bag, but it also illustrates the substantial differential in climate which can occur in six miles, when one rises almost 2000 feet.
It has also been interesting to compare the two areas I have worked in. The distance, 30 miles as the crow flies, belies clear differences in the way of life. The conflict in the Rabinal Achi is not with the Kakchiquels of Chimaltenango, but they were a rival group. Nowadays a visitor is likely to be struck by the smaller number cement houses in the villages of Rabinal. In Chimaltenango in the past few years, many families have built new houses of grey cinderblock, usually with money sent home by men working in the
United States. In Rabinal many young men express interest in going to the United States, but few have actually gone. I am much more aware of people struggling to participate in the local economy. Young fathers like those who go to the US if they lived in Chimaltenango, stack firewood or construction timber at roadside, negotiating with passing pickup drivers to carry it into town. Some journey to jobs in the capital, which allow them to see their family perhaps 2-3 days a month. One man worked on a large
construction project there to buy supplies so his brother could build him an adobe house in his hometown, and his family of seven could move from a house about 120 square feet to one of 450 square feet.
Adobe construction is still going on in Rabinal. In Chimaltenango, however, very few recently constructed houses are built wholly out of adobe: one of the few adobe house I remember had survived the 1976 earthquake. In contrast three of the two dozen families we work with in Rabinal built adobe houses this spring. In Chimaltenango there are many houses which incorporate knee-high adobe walls with cornstalks as “siding” up to the roof line. There, cornstalks tied together are a very common building material
and are also used for fences, or to protect young plants from chickens. In Rabinal cornstalks may be fed to animals, but I never saw anything built with them. This may reflect a different precolumbian tradition, or it may be an adaptation to poorer soils. I had few opportunities to compare them scientifically, but the few remaining cornstalks I standing when I arrived in Rabinal seemed thin, scarcely worth the trouble to cut, collect, and bind together. People in both communities proudly hang their seed corn from
the ceilings, but the cobs in Rabinal seem to average 8-10 inches, while they were nearly twice as long in Chimaltenango.
While the men in Rabinal still build with adobe bricks and red roof tiles as opposed to cinderblocks and corrugated aluminum, the women of Chimaltenango have conserved other traditions. There it is common to see mothers and daughters, or even three generations of women, seated around the house with the threads of a loom attached to a belt around their waist to weave the traditional top, called a huipil. In Rabinal few women know how to weave. Many wear machine-made blouses, and those with handwoven tradional tops have usually bought them.
One experience which most Guatemalan villages do share is planting corn. A few places with irrigation already have plants as tall as a person, but most of the communities we work with rely on the rains which began in mid May. I have witnessed much of the process of sowing corn, and even participated a little. One Tuesday most of the men in the village had gone to work on the water system: to clean the reservoir and see why the water ran only every four days instead of every other day. I showed up at the house of Don Joaquin to find his sons juggling a soccer ball in the small patio of hardened earth in front of his house. I wondered about our discussion about going to work in his fields as the boys playfully kicked the ball high. Suddenly the two oldest boys left the game, picked up azodons and headed out to the field. The English word for azodon is mattock, but if, like me, you have no idea what that is either, imagine an exremely large hoe. The metal blade was almost a foot wide and eight inches deep. Like a hoe, it is used to remove weeds from around growing plants, unlike a hoe, it is also used to remove weeds before planting.
Several weeks ago, I had the pleasure of cutting cornstalks with a machete. The blade cuts the stalks as easily as a jedi lightsabre: once to cut the stalks, once to trim the tops to a uniform length, and you throw them on a pile. That is the type of physical labor it is easy to enjoy. Working with an azodon is not. The azodon was heavy, the movements awkward, dust assaulted my nose, I sweated in the heat, the field was steeply sloped and I kept falling downhill, I wanted to quit. Only the shame of being outworked by two boys who between them had spent fewer than 25 years on the planet kept me going. After an hour the younger boys came by the bring water and joke, then headed downhill toward the stream. After two more hours, we headed in. The nine year old came up from the creek carrying an adult's load of 20-30 pounds of firewood on his back. I thought about the contrast between the way kids seemed with the soccer ball, and now seriously returning from work.
Another experience I got to observe was the dances for the festivities of the Santa Cruz. First I saw it in a village The dancers wore masks of a bull, a monkey, and various human faces colored red, blue, or pink, and enacting scenes to the music of a marimba, the huge wooden xylophone which is traditional to Guatemala. It was enjoyable experience, but it left me unsure of the strength of cultural traditions. There were three dozen people watching the dozen dancers, and an inescapable part of the experience was people taking pictures: both outsiders like me, and members of the community, including one of the dancers. One man explained the names of the masks, how the theme related the conquest, and how people had grown less serious and less willing to participate since his grandfather’s day.
Two days later, we went to another performance, not in a village, but at a crossroads, where four to five hundred people from the various hamlets within four or five miles crowded around to watch three different sets of masked dancers and marimba players. One set did the same dance with the bull, and two enacted a different masked dance involving Spaniards and Moors, Gilbert and Sullivan type hats, and much swordfighting. There were people selling snacks and drinks from baskets, hordes of people milling around four or five thick around the dancers, all enjoying a tradition which here seemed very alive. My camera’s batteries had run out and in a way I’m glad: I didn’t see a single camera, and though I couldn’t help being an outsider it felt good to be experiencing
it rather than frantically recording it so I and other outsiders could gawk
at it later. This was clearly a spectacle, but one which remained an integral and eagerly supported part of the cultural life—so much so that there were people selling snacks from baskets—admittedly some of them were bags of chips.
At the end of the dances two processions set off for the religious component of the festivities carrying the “ark” of the Santa Cruz. Later that afternoon we saw the end of a procession, a room full of people kneeling on a carpet of pine needles were reciting Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers. I was standing near Don Joaquin, and as people made their personal prayers I heard his prayer, that what had happened to him would not happen to his children
I thought about his kids, at work and at play. I also thought about the story he had told us several weeks before. When the army came twenty years ago, they left almost 200 people dead, including most of the women of the town: dumped in ravines or incinerated in their homes. It was a market day and many passing through the village were also killed, including those from many of the hamlets I had seen dancing and celebrating at the festival ofthe Santa Cruz. The details of what happened on the day of the massacre horrifying, but he talked about what he faced for the next few years as a survivor who had evaded the army. His home was destroyed, his crops torched in the fields, his chickens and other animals stolen he was left, “without a half a plate.” They may not have had much by our standards, but they had worked hard to obtain what they needed to live like human beings. Now instead of the roof in the houses they had built, they had to sleep in a cave or under a leaky sheet of plastic. Instead of eating their own store of corn and beans, wrung through weeks of the work which broke my back that day, they had to scrounge the woods, or send a child to town, to beg from monks, or a sympathetic townsperson. If the child wrangled a tortilla the food had to stretch a long way. They woke before dawn to sneak back to replant their burned fields. Lookouts wouldn’t do much good with the roads which bring pickups through the villages today, but in those years there were only narrow mountain trails and lookouts could warn of the approach of a platoon on foot. After three years the survivors did come out of the mountains, and Don Joaquin turned himself in for compulsory military service. After being beaten because his name was on a list of suspected guerillas, he was eventually sent to the coast to complete his term of service, and he returned to rebuild his life five and a half years after everything went up in flames. He married, his first child died. One row of adobe at a time, he saved to build a house that wasn’t full of draughts. He and the other villagers worked to get back what they had had before: they built houses, they planted fields, they found pasture for their cows, they saved money to buy plates, and chairs, and beds. A long struggle to stand still any parent would hope to spare their children
Ironically one justification for the destruction of their minimal possessions was was the protection of private property. In Central America giving poor campesinos the rights they needed to participate in capitalist society as anything other than serfs has always been called communism, beginning with struggles to end obligatory unpaid labor for landowners. It is interesting to observe that in both regions I have been, the village that suffered the most because of the touted communist presence is the one which has organized to provide secondary education for their children, paying the teachers when the government won’t. The fight against communism in the eighties involved speeches with moral clarity in against the brutal communist governments in Eastern Europe. But it also involved eliminating Carter’s restrictions on sending arms to the brutal non-communist governments in Central America. It also involved massacres of women and children, rapes, assassination, forced disappearances, and wanton disrespect for the private property of poor people. The guerrillas did receive support from Cuba, but the guerrillas numbered a few thousand and the dead almost 200,000, with fewer than 10% of the massacres and similar crimes committed by the guerrillas. The bloodletting that followed Communist victories in Russia, or Cambodia, are always cited by those seeking to justify Washington's policy in Central America. In Guatemala, however, massacres committed by our adversaries in the Cold War are hypothetical, the violence and brutality which actually occurred was committed by military forces allied with Washington DC. Of course brutalization of peasants has a long history, and scorched earth tactics and all that goes along with it have been taking place since long before the Cold War.
But for now, may the dead rest in peace—and there is hope that Don Joaquin’s children will face only the burden of hard work and few resources rather than watching the results of that work go up in flames. The corn is growing, traditional Dances and Mayan language are easy to find, and kids are free-spirited kids when they have a soccer ball to kick around. Thank those of you who helped me be here, and I hope you have a productive growing season up north.
Saturday 3 April 2004
Postcard from Chimaltenango
I spent six years working as a professional transportation planner and in 2000 I took stock and decided that something was missing. I did not know exactly what I wanted to do with my life, but I was certain that there were certain experiences I wanted to have in the world beyond the cubicle. One was to work on a farm, and another was to experience life in Central America. After two years at Village Acres Organic Farm in Pennsylvania, I am spending this year in Guatemala. I am working with an I will be working in rural areas with people affected by the violence of the 1980s.
Guatemala is divided into different administrative districts. There are 22 departments, each of which contains 5-30 municipios, just as states in the US contain varying numbers of counties. For simplicity I will refer to these as counties, because they are the second governmental division, though smaller than in the US. For most of my time here I will be working in the county of Rabinal, in the Department of Baja Verapaz. I spent my first month, however, in the county of San Martin Jilotepeque in the Department of Chimaltenango, 40 miles from the Capital of Guatemala city. The County seats are only about 30 miles apart as the crow flies. The distance on the dirt roads which wind around the mountainsides is more than twice as long, and it would take almost four hours to travel the distance on a direct bus. Actual bus routes are focused on more central destinations and makng the journey would require transferring at least three times.Despite the proximity, the Chaucus the intervening mountain range, is an imposing barrier: traversing the distance was much more difficult in former times. Consequently in the two areas the descendents of the indigenous Maya, who are the clear majority in these highland areas, have maintained different languages and traditions. They have been influenced by five centuries of Spanish rule, but even so, they have maintained some of their own traditions, and the ones they absorbed from their overlods have not always been the same.
San Martin is smaller than a US county. It contains 60,000 people, as many as the suburban Virginia county I grew up in, into an area 1/5 the size (97 square miles). This is according to the official statistics, which almost certainly underestimate the population. Though it has a population density ten times the county I farmed in in Pennsylvania it feels similarly rural. Except where the hilltops provide open vistas, in most places none, or only a handful of houses can be seen from the road. A few miles outside the county seat?most roads see fewer than a dozen vehicles pass during a busy hour. Although we passed through the county seat?fairly regularly, most of our time was spent in these rural areas, in five of the more than 100 communities, of which I will concentrate on describing one. Here, the dusty road through town almost certainly has more traffic from four-legged animals than four-wheeled vehicles. A horse carries firewood, blue water tanks, or a load of washing, two or three cows walk to pasture.The places we went have all received electrical service over the past five years. In comparison the city of Xela (Quetzaltenango) Guatemala's second-largest city, where I studied Spanish, boasts that electrical service was instituted in 1886. This is emblematic of the huge inequity which exists in this country. The shock of traveling from the villages to the city is much greater than I felt going from the US to the Guatemalan cities where I began my journeys. In villages, people have electricity for a few light bulbs, a blender, a radio, and maybe a television. They may have a single spigot that provides water a few hours every day. Some have built two-three room structures of naked concrete block in addition to the older caña (trimmed bundles of corn stalk) houses topped with corrugated aluminum sheeting. But even with the new infrastructure there is a stark contrast with the middle class urban families I stayed with while studying Spanish. They had showers, toilets, refrigerators, stoves, cars, and private bedrooms. And the communities I have seen undoubtedly have more amenities than many parts of Guatemala much further from the capital.
Even the families with cement block houses usually keep a kitchen of caña.Few people have chimneys for their cooking fires, and the ones I saw didn't work well, so the gaps under the roof and the ventilation between the stalks become an advantage though the rooms are smoky and most women complain about their lungs. My first night in the village we ate with an older man I will call Don Ebenezer. Like most families he and his family had a pile of bricks which allowed them to bring the cooking fire to the more comfortable working height of a stovetop, but Don Ebenezer preferred to have the fire on the ground so more heat went into the room, we could sit around it while we ate, and he could relight the cigarette of tobacco he had fashioned from a corn leaf which kept going out. We talked about surveying: most fields in Guatemala are measured not in acres or hectares, but in units based on the vara, just less than 33 inches and roughly the distance between your outstretched fingers and the center of your chest. The vara is also used to measure firewood and the depth of wells. We talked about the Guatemalan history textbook he had studied in school, including lessons about the conquest he remembered vividly across fifty years. He showed me the two-tone machete handle he had fashioned from scrap plastic after his first one broke from 12 years of use. We talked about politics in Guatemala and elsewhere, he brought up events in Afghanistan and Bolivia. It is a clich?to talk about how intelligent and knowledgeable peasants with second grade educations can be, but as we talked around the fire that first night I felt the reality of the admiration which can only sound clichéd when put into inevitably inadequate words.
That week Don Ebenezer was doing carpentry work for a new community building. My companion complemented him on his craftsmanship. She had seen caskets he made. He smiled and said that the difficulty was the where the angled parts of the lid fit together, but that the really skillful carpenter was his older brother. He talked with pride of the church doors his brother had worked on. His brother had apprenticed to a carpenter in town and had picked up skills through years of practice, while Don Ebenezer had only been able to take occasional days away from working in his fields. And that is how easy it is to come upon the scars of the conflict of the eighties. When people warned the village that the army was coming, his brother was one of the ones who argued that they were villagers not guerillas and had no reason to be afraid. So while some fled, the carpenter remained—he was rounded up and shot with fourteen others in Ebenezer's house alone. The tools of the carpentry craft, the planes, the drills, the lathes, were looted or burned when the army set fire to the caña houses. Cows, chickens and livestock were slaughtered or taken, and the harvest torched in the fields.
And the coffins my companion had mentioned had been a small attempt to heal these scars. After twenty years, three of the mass graves in town had been opened and some people had been exhumed to be reburied with dignity and names. Don Ebenezer's coffins had been a part of that. Some bodies remain in the mass graves, their relatives uncomfortable with disturbing them, or still fearful that public acknowledgement of the violence might bring retribution in the present. The violence in Guatemala left an estimated 200,000 dead and over a million fleeing with the country or outside. Here in a community which even today has fewer than five hundred residents, more than one hundred died in February 1982. Although there were ostensibly two sides, the leftist insurgency was much smaller than the military response which often leveled indigenous villages with no discernible military objectives. Investigations by the UN and the Catholic Church showed that more than 90% of the massacres and other crimes were committed by the military or other state actors. Shortly after the Catholic Church report was released in 1998, Bishop Juan Gerardi, the director of the project was himself assassinated. Of course none of this is unique to Guatemala. We are all too familiar with similar acts of brutality perpetrated throughout the world. Some of those who perished have survivors who can express the unique loss which each death constituted, some do not. In Guatemala, however, there is now an attempt to put some of the people responsible on trial. For me there is the added factor that in this case my government wasn't simply sitting on the sidelines when the machetes were drawn, but actively engaged with the government planning this scorched earth campaign: rewarding the latest in a decades long succession of military leaders with guns and money for what our president characterized as their commitment to democracy. And some people in the villages still remember those statements from more than twenty years ago.
But though the community has been scarred by violence, like Don Ebenezer, it has many other things going on in the present. It is one of the few in the area to have not just an elementary school, but a high school. In the county overall, most residents are 4-15 miles from the schools in the county seatand students must pay for either transport or lodging to study beyond sixth grade. This village had a high school built, and even paid for teachers salaries for a while before the government took over.
The village has an ongoing relationship with one of the Spanish provinces, and has used the aid for infrastructure. Because this community lacks running water, the Spaniards provided matching funds for some in the community to construct cisterns to collect water during the rainy season to use in the dry season, when the only water sources are unreliable springs in the valley below. They also provided money to buy a communal farm to provide another source of employment. Unfortunately, like many aid projects in Guatemala, the requirements of the donors ended up being more important than the needs of the recipients. After allocating the money, the Spaniards wanted it spent rather than sitting in a bank account, and the only farm on the market was 15 miles away, without a water source, and with very rocky soil. Nevertheless the community has set up a dairy herd, hoping to improve the stock even of family cows and is looking into planting fruit trees. So far however, it hasn't provided many jobs.
In addition to traveling to the farm, I did small jobs in the rest of the community, using my machete to cut firewood, or the cornstalks which make caña siding. Because our house lacked a cistern, I also experienced the burden of carrying water from the spring in the valley. After a thirty minute journey with a 42 pounds water supported by my forehead and my back as I climbed the slope I had almost enough water to flush a toilet twice—or for two people to drink for several days. I learned about the economics of cornfields, the sharply rising cost of fertilizer and falling value of corn. Last year, fertilizer for a given area cost more than half of the market value of the corn from a good harvest. Although many people have animals they don't have enough to fertilize large plots, and people said organic fertilizer was even more expensive, something I'm hoping to look into in the coming months. Based on the numbers they gave me, six weeks of work might net $60 from an acre (which is all the cropland most people have), and then you have to buy fertilizer for next year. I did the math and realized why I saw almost so few men under 40 growing corn, and why so many willingly faced the risks and distance from their family entailed in working in the capital, or sneaking into the United States.
During Lent, I saw several processions. Much smaller than what takes place in the big cities: a few dozen pilgrims stopping by the clay banks alongside the roads where pine needles, purple flowers, and a few candles have made a small hollow into a place of beauty and grace. A catechist leads a prayer while a picture of Jesus stumbling for the second time is placed in the hollow carved out of the hillside, resting on the needles. All the elements are simple, but these simple elements have converted the dirt of the hillside into a place of worship, and beauty, one deserving the reverence of the villagers—as I too feel reverence for their simple act of communal celebration.
Guatemala is divided into different administrative districts. There are 22 departments, each of which contains 5-30 municipios, just as states in the US contain varying numbers of counties. For simplicity I will refer to these as counties, because they are the second governmental division, though smaller than in the US. For most of my time here I will be working in the county of Rabinal, in the Department of Baja Verapaz. I spent my first month, however, in the county of San Martin Jilotepeque in the Department of Chimaltenango, 40 miles from the Capital of Guatemala city. The County seats are only about 30 miles apart as the crow flies. The distance on the dirt roads which wind around the mountainsides is more than twice as long, and it would take almost four hours to travel the distance on a direct bus. Actual bus routes are focused on more central destinations and makng the journey would require transferring at least three times.Despite the proximity, the Chaucus the intervening mountain range, is an imposing barrier: traversing the distance was much more difficult in former times. Consequently in the two areas the descendents of the indigenous Maya, who are the clear majority in these highland areas, have maintained different languages and traditions. They have been influenced by five centuries of Spanish rule, but even so, they have maintained some of their own traditions, and the ones they absorbed from their overlods have not always been the same.
San Martin is smaller than a US county. It contains 60,000 people, as many as the suburban Virginia county I grew up in, into an area 1/5 the size (97 square miles). This is according to the official statistics, which almost certainly underestimate the population. Though it has a population density ten times the county I farmed in in Pennsylvania it feels similarly rural. Except where the hilltops provide open vistas, in most places none, or only a handful of houses can be seen from the road. A few miles outside the county seat?most roads see fewer than a dozen vehicles pass during a busy hour. Although we passed through the county seat?fairly regularly, most of our time was spent in these rural areas, in five of the more than 100 communities, of which I will concentrate on describing one. Here, the dusty road through town almost certainly has more traffic from four-legged animals than four-wheeled vehicles. A horse carries firewood, blue water tanks, or a load of washing, two or three cows walk to pasture.The places we went have all received electrical service over the past five years. In comparison the city of Xela (Quetzaltenango) Guatemala's second-largest city, where I studied Spanish, boasts that electrical service was instituted in 1886. This is emblematic of the huge inequity which exists in this country. The shock of traveling from the villages to the city is much greater than I felt going from the US to the Guatemalan cities where I began my journeys. In villages, people have electricity for a few light bulbs, a blender, a radio, and maybe a television. They may have a single spigot that provides water a few hours every day. Some have built two-three room structures of naked concrete block in addition to the older caña (trimmed bundles of corn stalk) houses topped with corrugated aluminum sheeting. But even with the new infrastructure there is a stark contrast with the middle class urban families I stayed with while studying Spanish. They had showers, toilets, refrigerators, stoves, cars, and private bedrooms. And the communities I have seen undoubtedly have more amenities than many parts of Guatemala much further from the capital.
Even the families with cement block houses usually keep a kitchen of caña.Few people have chimneys for their cooking fires, and the ones I saw didn't work well, so the gaps under the roof and the ventilation between the stalks become an advantage though the rooms are smoky and most women complain about their lungs. My first night in the village we ate with an older man I will call Don Ebenezer. Like most families he and his family had a pile of bricks which allowed them to bring the cooking fire to the more comfortable working height of a stovetop, but Don Ebenezer preferred to have the fire on the ground so more heat went into the room, we could sit around it while we ate, and he could relight the cigarette of tobacco he had fashioned from a corn leaf which kept going out. We talked about surveying: most fields in Guatemala are measured not in acres or hectares, but in units based on the vara, just less than 33 inches and roughly the distance between your outstretched fingers and the center of your chest. The vara is also used to measure firewood and the depth of wells. We talked about the Guatemalan history textbook he had studied in school, including lessons about the conquest he remembered vividly across fifty years. He showed me the two-tone machete handle he had fashioned from scrap plastic after his first one broke from 12 years of use. We talked about politics in Guatemala and elsewhere, he brought up events in Afghanistan and Bolivia. It is a clich?to talk about how intelligent and knowledgeable peasants with second grade educations can be, but as we talked around the fire that first night I felt the reality of the admiration which can only sound clichéd when put into inevitably inadequate words.
That week Don Ebenezer was doing carpentry work for a new community building. My companion complemented him on his craftsmanship. She had seen caskets he made. He smiled and said that the difficulty was the where the angled parts of the lid fit together, but that the really skillful carpenter was his older brother. He talked with pride of the church doors his brother had worked on. His brother had apprenticed to a carpenter in town and had picked up skills through years of practice, while Don Ebenezer had only been able to take occasional days away from working in his fields. And that is how easy it is to come upon the scars of the conflict of the eighties. When people warned the village that the army was coming, his brother was one of the ones who argued that they were villagers not guerillas and had no reason to be afraid. So while some fled, the carpenter remained—he was rounded up and shot with fourteen others in Ebenezer's house alone. The tools of the carpentry craft, the planes, the drills, the lathes, were looted or burned when the army set fire to the caña houses. Cows, chickens and livestock were slaughtered or taken, and the harvest torched in the fields.
And the coffins my companion had mentioned had been a small attempt to heal these scars. After twenty years, three of the mass graves in town had been opened and some people had been exhumed to be reburied with dignity and names. Don Ebenezer's coffins had been a part of that. Some bodies remain in the mass graves, their relatives uncomfortable with disturbing them, or still fearful that public acknowledgement of the violence might bring retribution in the present. The violence in Guatemala left an estimated 200,000 dead and over a million fleeing with the country or outside. Here in a community which even today has fewer than five hundred residents, more than one hundred died in February 1982. Although there were ostensibly two sides, the leftist insurgency was much smaller than the military response which often leveled indigenous villages with no discernible military objectives. Investigations by the UN and the Catholic Church showed that more than 90% of the massacres and other crimes were committed by the military or other state actors. Shortly after the Catholic Church report was released in 1998, Bishop Juan Gerardi, the director of the project was himself assassinated. Of course none of this is unique to Guatemala. We are all too familiar with similar acts of brutality perpetrated throughout the world. Some of those who perished have survivors who can express the unique loss which each death constituted, some do not. In Guatemala, however, there is now an attempt to put some of the people responsible on trial. For me there is the added factor that in this case my government wasn't simply sitting on the sidelines when the machetes were drawn, but actively engaged with the government planning this scorched earth campaign: rewarding the latest in a decades long succession of military leaders with guns and money for what our president characterized as their commitment to democracy. And some people in the villages still remember those statements from more than twenty years ago.
But though the community has been scarred by violence, like Don Ebenezer, it has many other things going on in the present. It is one of the few in the area to have not just an elementary school, but a high school. In the county overall, most residents are 4-15 miles from the schools in the county seatand students must pay for either transport or lodging to study beyond sixth grade. This village had a high school built, and even paid for teachers salaries for a while before the government took over.
The village has an ongoing relationship with one of the Spanish provinces, and has used the aid for infrastructure. Because this community lacks running water, the Spaniards provided matching funds for some in the community to construct cisterns to collect water during the rainy season to use in the dry season, when the only water sources are unreliable springs in the valley below. They also provided money to buy a communal farm to provide another source of employment. Unfortunately, like many aid projects in Guatemala, the requirements of the donors ended up being more important than the needs of the recipients. After allocating the money, the Spaniards wanted it spent rather than sitting in a bank account, and the only farm on the market was 15 miles away, without a water source, and with very rocky soil. Nevertheless the community has set up a dairy herd, hoping to improve the stock even of family cows and is looking into planting fruit trees. So far however, it hasn't provided many jobs.
In addition to traveling to the farm, I did small jobs in the rest of the community, using my machete to cut firewood, or the cornstalks which make caña siding. Because our house lacked a cistern, I also experienced the burden of carrying water from the spring in the valley. After a thirty minute journey with a 42 pounds water supported by my forehead and my back as I climbed the slope I had almost enough water to flush a toilet twice—or for two people to drink for several days. I learned about the economics of cornfields, the sharply rising cost of fertilizer and falling value of corn. Last year, fertilizer for a given area cost more than half of the market value of the corn from a good harvest. Although many people have animals they don't have enough to fertilize large plots, and people said organic fertilizer was even more expensive, something I'm hoping to look into in the coming months. Based on the numbers they gave me, six weeks of work might net $60 from an acre (which is all the cropland most people have), and then you have to buy fertilizer for next year. I did the math and realized why I saw almost so few men under 40 growing corn, and why so many willingly faced the risks and distance from their family entailed in working in the capital, or sneaking into the United States.
During Lent, I saw several processions. Much smaller than what takes place in the big cities: a few dozen pilgrims stopping by the clay banks alongside the roads where pine needles, purple flowers, and a few candles have made a small hollow into a place of beauty and grace. A catechist leads a prayer while a picture of Jesus stumbling for the second time is placed in the hollow carved out of the hillside, resting on the needles. All the elements are simple, but these simple elements have converted the dirt of the hillside into a place of worship, and beauty, one deserving the reverence of the villagers—as I too feel reverence for their simple act of communal celebration.
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