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.