by Ken McCormick
A
lady in a place I used to work used to give me and my family a turkey every
Christmas and Thanksgiving. It wasn’t
that she was rich and generous. The
reason she would give us turkeys was that she was supposedly poor with six
kids, would receive the turkeys from charitable organizations, but didn’t like
taking the time to cook them, and her kids didn’t like turkey. This is an example of what it is like to be
“poor” in America. In addition to
charitable organizations, there is a safety net provided by the
government. Malnutrition among the poor
in the United States is usually the result of squandering the financial aid
provided by the government on relatively expensive processed foods of little
nutritional value like potato chips and candy rather than carefully husbanding
resources.
Malnutrition
in Guatemala is a much more difficult and widespread problem. Government-sponsored studies in 2001 and
2002 found that in the poorest one-quarter of the districts of the nation, a
full 70% of the children entering the first grade had suffered significant
growth retardation due to malnutrition.
This was not the result of poor choices of foodstuffs, but of outright
starvation. This is a long-term problem
in Guatemala, but it has been made much worse in the past few years by the
collapse of the price of coffee, one of the country’s main products.
Thanks
to aid from America, Vietnam has been able to increase its coffee production in
the past few years, producing several times as much now as in years past. It is now the second largest producer of
coffee in the world. Being a communist
nation, the coffee is grown on public land, so there are no mortgage payments,
and there are no export duties on the coffee.
The market is therefore awash in cheap coffee. The price of a hundred-pound sack of coffee beans in Guatemala
has fallen from 120 quetzales to 60 quetzales.
Because of this and higher taxes, it is often not worth a coffee
plantation owner’s effort to grow and harvest the coffee. Nine hundred coffee plantations have been
abandoned, and another two hundred and fifty embargoed for lapse of mortgage
payments. A large percentage of the
coffee workers, never a well-paid group to start with, are without work.
Alicia,
my Guatemalan Spanish teacher from Antigua, and I took up a collection, bought
and delivered a few hundred pounds of foodstuffs to the laid-off workers of two
particular plantations in El Tumbador in the district of San Marcos after
reading an article on their plight in one of the nation’s leading
newspapers. I would reproduce a
translation of the article right here for you, dear reader, if I were somehow
able to get a response out of the newspaper to my repeated inquiries about
reprint rights, but short of going to Guatemala City and holding a gun to the
head of the editor, I don’t think I am going to be able to get their attention,
so I’ll just quote as much of the article as I can without violating their
copyright, and I’ll summarize the rest.
From Prensa Libre, Guatemala City,
Monday May 5, 2003, page 6:
Crisis: hunger, malnutrition, and disease affect the ex-workers of the coffee sector
By
Pedro Pop Barillas
Forgotten among
the coffee groves of the plantations of El Tumbador and Nuevo Progreso, in the
district of San Marcos, one encounters hundreds of people who suffer from
hunger, malnutrition, sickness and unemployment.
The good times
are no more, and now the peones or colonos of the coffee plantations that until
a few years ago were very prosperous, have fallen on hard times due to the
coffee crisis.
The majority
have nothing to eat and look with suffering upon the way their wives and
children go without necessities, fall ill, or in the worst cases die of
malnutrition. Because of this, they now
clamor for help.
The article
went on to describe the reporter’s visit to the abandoned plantation “Doble J”
in San Marcos:
Silence floods
the place, and it would seem that there were no inhabitants, but soon, some
children pass on two old bicycles, and some timid women come out from someplace
to see who has arrived in the car, for no one has arrived here in months, and
they call to someone else to answer the inquiries.
Nobody wants to
speak. When questioned, they defer to
Delfina Inocencia Mérida, the wife of a leader of the community.
The woman, who
appears pallid, indicates that it has been years since there has been work on
the plantation, and that now the men travel far to see if they can find
something, but “sometimes they don’t bring back anything.”
Meanwhile,
weeds have taken hold of the place, covering everything in their path and even
destroying the edible wild herbs that serve to sustain the people.
Also
hard-hit by the coffee crisis were the workers of the nearby plantation
“Carolina,” where the families of the workers remained in place only for fear
of losing the unpaid wages owed them since April of 2000. One of the people interviewed there was
Reina Maribel Tomás, who told the reporter:
“Today we
breakfasted on some little herbs we found around here. For days, the mealtimes have been reduced to
two, but there’s nothing for dinner, and the men can’t succeed in getting money
to buy food, much less to take the sick to a doctor or to buy medicine.”
Upon
reading this in the paper, I asked Alicia if she had any idea how aid could be
got directly to these people without falling into the black hole of corruption
that exists here at all levels of government.
It turned out she had been involved in two such efforts mounted by
private groups in the past. She and
everyone else asked said sending money was not recommended, as it is likely to
disappear somewhere along the way, and that the best thing to do was to buy the
food in bulk and ship it to someone who could be relied upon to deliver
it. The big question, though, was who
could be relied upon. I offered to put
up a hundred and thirty dollars if Alicia would find out how it could be
delivered to the people who needed it.
Alicia knows her way around Guatemala a lot better than I do.
I
plunked down some money for phone calls, and Alicia was soon on the telephone
with the secretary of the public health center in El Tumbador. The person deemed most likely to succeed in
getting the food distributed to the needy was a certain lady doctor from Cuba
who worked in San Marcos. Alicia
figured this settled the issue, as in her opinion, Cubans can always be relied
upon for upright dealing and selfless devotion to social justice.
Being
at some variance with Alicia’ opinion on a lot of issues, I was a little
hesitant to accept her view that any person who came from Cuba could be relied
upon just on the basis that that was where they were from. Alicia is an anti-American, man-hating
radical feminist (Radical feminist:
someone who seriously believes the Guatemalan government should
establish an agency with police powers to oversee the forcible sterilization of
all male children at the age of puberty, as well as all males over that age, to
be granted an operation to have their reproductive functions restored
temporarily upon the request of any woman who wished to become inseminated by
them, and to have their reproductive functions again removed, forcibly, if need
be, upon her notification to the government that she was done with them. Radical feminist: someone who believes that families should consist only of mothers
and children, so that male children will not be in a position to learn
“machismo” from older males, and can be trained to be like girls, so that the
world can become a better place, as all the problems of the world are men’s
doing. Radical feminist: someone who believes the government should mandate
permanent policies to favor women’s advancement in education and place women on
the fast track in all major money-making careers of both the public and private
sectors, regardless of their comparative ability or performance, so that they
can eventually supersede males, who are, of course, the source of all the
world’s ills. Oh, wait! Is that really that radical a program? It’s already been in place in the U.S. for
decades. Maybe I’m just behind the
times in my thinking.), but Alicia does think Cuba is just a great place,
not like that nasty U.S.A. at all.
I
figured the Cuban doctor probably could be relied upon to distribute the food to the poor of El
Tumbador, although she might tell everyone it was a gift from the happy and
generous people of Cuba. But still, I
wasn’t that enthused with the plan. It
was going to cost fifteen to thirty dollars or maybe more to carry all the
stuff to Guatemala City and turn it over to the “Macarena” bus line to go to
the doctor in San Marcos, who would then oversee its distribution. I figured for not much more than that, I
could rent a car and hand the stuff out myself, telling everyone it was a gift
from the happy and generous people of the United States. The main thing was that if I delivered it
myself, I would be a hundred percent sure I hadn’t thrown my money down some
rat-hole of corruption. As it turned
out that everything Alicia had been told on the phone was wildly inaccurate,
I’m sure in retrospect that delivering the food in person was the right thing
to do.
So
I put the proposition to Alicia that if she would show me what kind of
foodstuffs to get (if it were up to me, I might be inclined to send cans of
tuna fish, jars of peanut butter, and granola bars instead of corn flour for
tortillas, black beans, and other things appropriate to the Guatemalan diet)
and help me buy it (Guatemalans can always get a better price than extranjeros)
I would take it to San Marcos, myself.
I didn’t have any idea at all where San Marcos was, much less El
Tumbador or the Doble J, but Alicia, warming to the idea, assured me it was
“not far.”
Alicia
got back on the phone to the public health center and set up an appointment for
us – she had by now decided she wanted to go – to meet two nurses and another
public health worker in El Tumbador on Saturday morning. We would all ride out to Carolinas plantation
together. We had decided we couldn’t
help the people of the Doble J because, according to Alicia’s interpretation of
what the secretary had told her on the phone, there were three hundred and
fifty families at the Doble J, and we didn’t have enough money to provide more
than a mouthful for that many people.
Where this fantasy of three hundred and fifty families came from, I
don’t know. The number was different
every time a different person was asked.
The actual number by my count was twenty-six. It just goes to show how elusive facts tend to be in Latin
America.
There
is a wholesale dealer in the back of the Mercado in Antigua, and there we
bought a hundred-pound sack of corn flour, 125 pounds of salt in one-pound
bags, 110 pounds of sugar in two-pound bags, 300 bags of Incaparina, a
vitamin-enriched soy-based protein drink for children, and a pound of raw
cinnamon for flavoring the Incaparina.
We still needed 200 hundred pounds of black beans, but I took up a
collection at the language school that paid for the beans and the auto rental.
A
young doctor and his girlfriend, both from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, chipped
in $63 in dollars, quetzals and spare change.
Two American women, Pam and Sue Marie, each contributed 100 quetzals, or
$13 each. I sold a seat in the rented
car to a Canadian immigrant from Austria for another $20. He was a Rotarian who had come to Central
America to look into charitable projects, and he wanted to help hand out the
food, although he said he couldn’t afford to actually pay for any of it. Most of the rest of the people in the school
were from Europe, and so did not contribute a red cent to feed the poor.
Everybody
I have spoken with about this in Guatemala has noticed that it is usually
people from the United States who give freely.
Europeans, Australians, and Canadians are also found here in large
numbers. They often strike a superior,
self-appreciating, idealistic posture, and they are often involved in volunteer
projects as adjuncts to their language study programs, but when it comes to
actually spending any money, they are usually nowhere to be found. I have seen this again and again. Even anti-American Alicia had to agree with
my assessment “Hablan mucho pero hacen poco,”
“They talk big, but do little.”
If
I had had more time, I may have been able to go around to other language
schools in Antigua and raise more money, but we were pressed for time as it
was. Alicia brought some other people
over to my apartment, and we spent a couple of hours scooping the flour and
beans into individual bags. Finally,
everything was divided into fifty separate grocery bags to be handed out, with
some extra bags of salt and sugar to be handed out separately.
We
gathered and set off the next morning with Christof, the Canadian/Austrian
Rotarian, at the bright, cheery hour of 5:30 AM to go meet the two nurses and
other public health worker in El Tumbador.
I had discovered that Alicia’s idea of “not far” was a four-hour drive
at high speed to San Marcos, which is right on the Mexican border. We dropped down to the Pacific coast road, a
somewhat faster route than the Pan American Highway, which winds through the
mountains. After having spent so much
time in the highlands, it was a delight to see how richly tropical was the area
around El Tumbador.
We
made the rendezvous at the public health center of the colorful mountain town
of El Tumbador more or less on time, despite a storm-dropped tree that had
taken with it a row of six concrete electric poles across the road, creating a
titanic traffic jam. The streets of El
Tumbador were at least as steep as those of San Francisco. It was market day, and so the streets were
thronged with people. Since people were
in the way, the rented Honda couldn’t keep up speed, and the engine couldn’t
take the hills at walking speed, so it did a lot of engine revving and clutch
burning trying to wend its way through the crowd.
We met a single
funcionario of the health center in front of the closed-down building. He looked at us like we were crazy when we
asked where the nurses and health worker were who were going to go with us out
to Carolina Plantation. Today was
Mother’s Day, he said (Mother’s Day is on a Saturday in Guatemala), and no
nurses were going to go to Carolina or anywhere else. Everybody had taken the day off.
Where had we got the idea that anyone was going to take us anywhere? he
wanted to know.
The
funcionario recommended hiring a picop, as the road to the plantations was too
rugged for our rented sedan. This would
cost another fifteen or so dollars, but he urged us to pay a few dollars more
to take the food out to the Doble J, where he said the people were in much
greater need. We said we didn’t have
enough for 350 families. He again
looked at us like we were crazy, and said there were about 35 families
there. He said there were 60 families
at Carolina. The newspaper had said
there were 40 families at Carolina.
Later, the picop driver said there were 30 or so. I counted 14. This was fortunate, because there were actually 26 at the Doble
J, and so we ended up being able to feed everybody, with two grocery bags going
to the most needy.
The
funcionario had been right about the road’s being too rough for the rented
sedan, all right. It was of
carefully-laid cobblestone through mile after mile of coffee groves out to
Alabama plantation, a well-run if militaristic-looking place within a
razor-wire encirclement, but after Alabama, no one had tended the road for a
while, and it was not only steep and narrow, but badly washed-out in
places. It wound up and down the sides
of high hills and forded several streams.
Not long after Alabama, we encountered two men with machetes returning
to their homes on the Doble J after having been off somewhere searching for
work. We stopped to let them climb
aboard. It was another hour’s drive to
the Doble J, and it would have been a long walk. We didn’t ask if they had had any success in finding work. They couldn’t take their eyes off the fifty
bags of food.
The
Doble J was at the very end of the road.
It consisted of a village of unpainted wooden cabins with tin roofs for
the workers, a big empty storehouse in which the bags of coffee beans used to
be stored, and some other abandoned utility buildings. Since seeing the article, the school
teachers of two different secondary schools in San Marcos district had got
their students to each bring in a pound of corn flour or beans for the Doble J
and Carolina, and we were the third truckload of food to arrive that day. With the sudden influx of outsiders, the
people were no longer quite as shy as described. The extra help was good, for our grocery bags only contained
enough food for a few days to a week, and I had to wonder what would become of the
quiet, shy people of the Doble J when the flurry of attention from the news
article would die down in another week or two.
One
of the needier families was that of Señora María García López, whose seven
children included young Julio, who looked to be about six or seven, but who was
actually twelve years old, according to Señora García. Slung in a cloth on Julio’s back was the
listless body of his two-year-old brother Eliseo, who due to malnutrition was
still unable to walk.
Christof
proved his worth by getting the picop started again when we were ready to leave
the Doble J. It had been starting to
look like we were going to have a very long walk back to El Tumbador. We pulled slowly away after a round of
hand-shaking and “God bless you”s.
The families of
the Carolinas plantation live in two long concrete block single-story row house
sections. The houses, like those of the
Doble J, have dirt floors and little furniture. Apparently, most people only own the clothes on their backs,
because no extra clothing was in evidence inside the Spartan quarters. The only things the women there have to be
proud of are their children and the flowers they tend in the fronts of their
houses. Since I was running around
snapping pictures of the children already, one woman invited me to take a
picture of the flowers covering the front of her porch. Everyone was visibly and audibly delighted
when I shot a close-up of the flowers in the dim light of a rainy afternoon.
On
the way back, the picop driver explained that the Doble J and Carolina families
were worse off than others because of bad management of their plantations. The owners of the Doble J had died, he said,
and the heirs had squandered all the cash and took no interest in growing
coffee. There is some talk of the
government’s taking over defunct plantations and redistributing the land to
poor farmers, but it is hard for me to see how that will improve the lot of the
people on the Doble J, who have plenty of vacant land around them right now.
He
said before the school teachers had taken up the collection, the only people he
knew of who had provided aid were from the church. Alicia piped up and said to me that this was the Evangelistic
Protestant church, as the Catholic Church never did anything to help the poor. She was warming to her subject and seemed
about ready to launch into an anti-Catholic tirade when the picop driver cut in
and said that the local Evangelists generally did nothing to help the poor, and
that it was the Catholic church that sent aid from time to time to the Doble J
and Carolina, even though the families there are all Protestants.
Prior to this
conversation, the driver and I had been trading war stories, and the
testosterone level in the cab of the truck had probably become uncomfortably
high for Alicia. Now thoroughly chastened,
she for the rest of the day offered no further observations on Roman
Catholicism, the warmonger Bush, Cuba, or putting an end to machismo.