My recent trip to Guatemala with
Save the Children was the kind of
experience that cannot easily be processed and captured in tidy sentences and paragraphs.
But, after almost two weeks of rumination, I've tried to spit it back out for you here:
Things I observed and learned and thought about in Guatemala:
Women and girls carry babies. Men and boys carry machetes.
The women were all stunningly beautiful to me in their traditional, color-filled dresses. I often felt as if I was
dressed like a boy, lacking color or any semblance of traditional femininity.
I saw very few mirrors. Do they know they are beautiful? Do they care?
The women wore traditional dress while the men wore normal western style
clothes. This strikes me as completely sexist, macho, and patriarchal.
Probably because it is.
Girls get married as young as 13. Some are considered too old for marriage at 16.
When girls get married they go to the home of their husbands. They leave
their own mother and father and siblings behind and become a part of
the in-laws family. The mother in law has all the say in child rearing.
Could you imagine this?
Children take care of each other. Little
kids everywhere were taking care of even smaller kids. Young girls
carried their siblings in a sling, walked them down the road, always
took them by the hand, and acted very motherly towards them. My daughters do this as well, but this is taken to another level. Their mothers are far less available to give them the kind of attention we are used to getting.
Siblings are expected to look out for each other, sometimes at the
expense of their own future. The trained health worker we met, Elena, said she would love to go
to nursing school but cannot because, since she is not married, it's her duty to stay home and look after her younger siblings.
When I see big sisters looking out for, mothering, little brothers, I
can’t help but wonder what it is like for these little boys to lose
their sisters/ mothers to marriage at 13.
The mother we stopped in on in a high mountain village, and her son Benito, and the little boy
who claimed to be her son, but turned out to be her little brother, is a
good example. Turns out the date spray painted on the wall, was a
reminder that their parents died that day. Another brother wrote it down
so no one would forget.
There is no such thing as a helicopter parent in Guatemala. Children are
everywhere, next to roads, which hardly ever have cars on them, near
wood stoves, climbing ladders and trees, no one seems to be telling them to get
down, look out, be careful. Not like you would see in America.
Guatemalan mothers generally
don’t push when giving birth. Childbirth happens at home, women labor mostly alone, a midwife helps deliver the child.
Going to the hospital to give
birth is associated with dying. Women often die on the way, or were
already having complications, and it is not the hospital at fault, but
that is the association. Save the Children does all they
can do to make sure these moms get good pre- and post- natal care, by trained volunteers, to
assure they are healthy and their babies are healthy.
New mothers and babies use a steam bath as part of a post- partum
ritual. They build a fire in the shower, like a sauna cave, and bring
their babies in there to sweat out the toxins. I learned the word for this sauna but don't know how to spell it.
The rural
Guatemalan women will not take off their clothes when having babies,
mostly because the husband forbids it One doctor we met at a clinic
refers to it as machismo.
I never once saw a mother disciplining a child in any harsh way. The children were generally docile, and self sufficient. Still childish and adorable, but I did not witness any blatant naughtiness. I had to wonder how much of this had to do with how much babies are worn when they are young, then how quickly they must adapt, in order to survive, to being self sufficient.
Dogs are treated like rodents or wild animals. They are everywhere, scrounging, skinny,
mangy, even dead in the road with no one seeming to care. Domestic pets
are the luxury of a wealthy society. When you don’t have enough food for
your children, you aren’t going to give it to a dog.
The real meaning of hand to mouth is not the same as paycheck to
paycheck. These people chop wood, carry water, walk and walk and walk
everywhere carrying heavy loads, plant the corn, harvest the corn, grind
the corn, make the tortillas, cut the firewood, carry the firewood,
build the fire to cook the tortillas, fetch the water from the stream to
bathe the children and cook and drink.
I saw no one smoking.
Indigenous Guatemalans are tiny. 80 percent of rural Guatemalans are said to be chronically
malnourished, living on a diet of corn, which affects their physical and mental development, yet
they all have shiny black hair and bright eyes and white teeth. From my
pictures you will not see unhealthy people. But what you don’t see is
what the chronic malnourishment is doing to limit the mental
development, and intellectual capacity of these people.
Without the
proper combination of nutrients, which Save the Children is doing
everything they can to remedy, including introducing a farming education program,
teaching families how to farm, smarter --permaculture, these
people will never "evolve."
Most of us who were lucky enough to have been born into the developed
world take our sufficient diets and fully developed brains for granted.
The progress we have enjoyed because of this, is the cause of great joy,
and, yes, sorrow. These mothers deserve to see their children be more and have more. To give birth to children, only to see them lead
a life as full of hard work as their own...
There is no garbage in the houses because nothing is wasted. Food does
not come in packaging in Guatemala. The only waste I saw was the occasional litter of candy wrappers and soda pop bottles. Things that are exported into their world from our world.
Crocs are perfect shoes for little Guatemalan children.
Women carry things, all sorts of things, on their heads.
People have pigs and goats and chickens. Goats milk can change a malnourished kid into a perfectly healthy kid in a very short time.
Being busy, being purposeful is human nature, born by necessity. Rural
Guatemalans are all going somewhere, doing something, all the time. Now,
back in the developed word, I see the same in our world, in the
glowing snake of headlights I saw from the plane landing in Heathrow at
6:30 a.m. And in the endless stream of people walking past shop windows,
carrying shopping bags, consuming, consuming all the time, and I
understand why. That habit of moving, of being busy, out hunting and gathering, is so
ingrained in us, we make up reasons to keep moving, to keep busy, even
though we don’t want for anything.
Charities like Save the Children are amazing in the breadth and scope of
what they are trying to accomplish. The change they hope to affect, the
challenges they take on, the research they conduct.
Cultures are so
complicated, such an intricate web of environment, geography, language,
tradition, mores, it is amazing to me that anyone knows how to help
them. But I saw people, mothers, children being helped with my own eyes.
People generally don’t give enough. I don’t give enough. I claim to be
broke, yet I pay $3 for a cup of coffee, and $3 in an airport for a bag
of chips. If I forget something, I buy a new one. I bought a raincoat
for $100 on the way to Guatemala. That gnawed at me the whole time I was
there.
Read more about my trip to Guatemala with Save the Children
at Million Moms Challenge, and at
Momformation.
