Malice

I think for one year in the third grade I was the second-to-smallest in the class for class pictures. It was a good year – never to be repeated. You might’ve noticed in a couple pics before that I am not so small in Guatemala. In this community in particular, I stand a full head taller than almost all the women, and have a couple inches on some of the men. They asked me to join them for a picture and waved me in front. I squatted down so I wouldn’t block them all... it was not a good feeling this time.

It didn’t take much research to find out that Guatemala has the third highest rate (54.5%) of stunting (stunted growth) in the world caused by chronic malnutrition. Among the indigenous populations, it's about 8 in 10.

Poverty has a lot of faces. You don’t have to look too hard for indicators in many of the rural communities in Guatemala. It’s quite visible. I am a walking giant measuring stick.

The situations around and underlying this poverty are complicated –historical, legal, political, which I’ll maybe share a bit more about later. And quite rather simple. People are mean. And believe that there is something worthwhile to gain from it.  Well..... maybe not that simple. But. Well. More later.

This is San Francisco. It is a beautiful, beautiful community. Why so beautiful? I don’t know. More than their colourful attire. More than their landscape. More than their strength and fortitude in the most dismal of circumstances. They were not necessarily overflowing with life and smiles and energy (though some of the kids certainly were)... nor should they have been. They were just beautiful. Because life is beautiful. Life is just beautiful. Every single one.

That morning, before we left the office, I had a walk-through of the community’s history (which, as I would learn and am now still learning, has everything to do with everything) since the earliest that eye-witness accounts could remember – since the 1940s. It was a whirlwind of names, land ownership changing hands, agreements (more like conflicts, actually), and actions that were hard to quite follow and piece together until I got there.

A lot happened over those decades. Way back historically as a backdrop, when the Spanish colonized Guatemala, they took over much of the indigenous land (hmmm.. sound familiar to us?). But by the 1940s at least, the Mayan community of about 80 families in this particular spot were working as servant farm laborers (slaves?) on the land, owned by, of course, a Spanish landlord (I didn’t realize that til on the way out that day... which then made much, much more sense of the “conflict”). The men and women worked day to night (NOT voluntarily, as the staff I previously mentioned do) – 4am til 10pm – planting beans, corn, sugar cane, taking care of livestock, carrying these goods 28 km to the town.... all this for the pay of $0. That’s one zero, with a bunch of zeros behind it. Put a decimal point where you may. They were given just a bit of the crops to eat, and sometimes sent to go work on other farms to earn a few pennies from their labour.

Along the way, the Mayan families tried unsuccessfully to fight for their rights. They also at some point had been able to negotiate some land transfer but that was never clear nor written and never came to pass. There was an armed civil war in the 1960's through to the 90's that basically was a government-sponsored (US-backed) genocide of the Mayan people.

A long, convoluted story cut short, after the settling-down of armed violence over this last decade or so, this community organized themselves once again and said they were no longer to keep working in such conditions of harsh slave labour, and were told, OK, fine, get off the land. And they were evicted. They were “given” a tiny parcel of land up in the mountain forests 3 km away to relocate to (how generous.).

So they did. And they are trying to rebuild their lives. Cutting down some trees and replanting corn (the food staple) to survive. 

The shorter, yellow shrubbery you see surrounding the house below the steeper mountainside is the corn.

Unfortunately, corn doesn’t grow well in the mountains.  The soil is hard and infertile. And there is no water, except during the rainy season which was exceptionally harsh this year. Their crops failed miserably. They were left with a dismal harvest of kernel-less corn. 

Harvest season is the final months of the calendar year. It is a long way until the next harvest.

Enter HOPE to support an emergency relief project. And enter me, into a meeting with the community. This is not a meeting for celebration. This was a meeting of unassuming plea. Our local staff had just made a delivery 4 days earlier, of emergency food supplies – some corn, rice, and beans for each family. Utmost gratitude was expressed – again, thank you HOPE and thank you Canada. [meager smile – heh... you’re welcome? No, more like, you deserve justice and dignity. Thank you for inviting us to be a part of sharing in your need in this small way - we are humbled (why am I even on a chair??).]

But there was so much more. The community needs investment into their land and agriculture. They need legal support. They need a water system – right now the closest water source is a spring on the other side of the mountain; water is a daily 4+ hour expedition. 

A woman at her home, talking about her trek over the mountain to fetch water

We (HOPE) haven’t committed to supporting such a water project for this community. A note.. HOPE International “Development” Agency does do emergency relief. But usually integrated within a model of long-term development.  I was glad to see that happening here, to some extent. The community does not need their food to arrive in a sack. They need to be able to provide for themselves, with security and dignity. Through our partners here, we will be (or are, by now) providing support and training to make those important investments into the land – clearing the land, agricultural techniques (diversifying crops, introducing fruit trees, using organic fertilizers and pesticides through an integrated farm system (that itself produces organic fertilizers), etc) to help the community make the absolute most of the little resources that they have.

At this point, that is the extent of our commitment. The local staff are still doing the technical assessments for a water system to see what will be feasible/most effective.  Later this year, they also hope to help the community to set up (infrastructure and training) a community grain bank – much like the banks we know, just with dried corn - so in the future, each family can deposit in seasons of excess, and be able to purchase in seasons of need at communal rates, rather than at the mercy of the market. They are doing something else very, very important as well, but I’ll write about that later.

And I am sitting there, seeing this great need, and knowing very well the straight-forward opportunities to invest in sustainable change that will help this uprooted community be able to make a home of their new land, meet their basic needs, and move forward. And knowing that we have not committed to more funding. And we do not commit to funding more projects without funds we have raised (or expect with considerable certainty to be able to raise). And so I'm speaking with this community, with compassion and understanding, and some encouragement... but with no promises. I just thought, how embarrassing. How embarrassing that in all of Canada, in this great land of flowing abundance and excess, I cannot promise that HOPE (or personally, I) can muster up even say $20,000. Or $10K. I don't know exactly how much they needed but miniscule amounts. Chump change in our 15 million iPads and 37 million iPhones bought just in the last weeks of 2011. (ok, I didn’t know that specifically then and there, I just looked it up). How embarrassing. And not that I have anything against Apple specifically (other than conflict minerals but that’s also not Apple-specific, and a different story!)...  and I am writing this very blog with a shiny laptop of my own. We have in abundance. 

  

Anyhow, if you followed my blog earlier, I was so, so angry when I left the community that day. Humanity is ugly. (Or, it can be).

I might’ve had a richer vocabulary in English. Say, mean. Malevolent. Malicious.

I had a fewer choice of words in Spanish. But to the same effect. “Why are the land-owners so INHUMANE?!!”

Because it’s not outside our humanity. That poverty and human suffering is a social phenomenon – as much caused by people as physical geography or natural resources – is no new news – not an anomaly. But it’s none more evident, I’ve seen, than here in Guatemala... and in this community.

And it is so, SO UNNECESSARY.

Side note, somewhat, but worth mentioning. As if kicking the families off the land wouldn’t be enough, the land-owners also forbade the community to ever step foot on the farmland anymore. They couldn’t even cross the farmland to get to their new home in the mountains. They had to go around. When they tried to bring whatever small possessions they had to their new home with vehicles (I would assume the rental of a motorbike, or maybe it was actually our partner organization who had offered to help), the land-owners also forbade the passing of any motor vehicle.

So they took their homes and school apart. Brick by brick. Each piece of tin roofing. Each piece of wood or bamboo or anything that had any value for re-constructing their homes. 

... and WALKED each brick, tin sheet, and wood, 3km, AROUND the farm, ON their backs, UP the mountain  - each man, woman, and child did their share. 

One of the community leaders and his family and sweetest little kids in their re-built home

Along our drives over the few days, I saw more than few women on the road carting GINORMOUS loads (of firewood, corn, water, or whatever) on their back, bound in a bundle sack of fabric, held up by a leather strap across their forehead. The bundles extended 3 feet off their backs and surely weighed their own body weight if not more, with NO exaggeration. The expression on these women’s faces will never leave me.

Don’t ever say that development is throwing money away to lazy people who should work their own way out of poverty. There is no American Dream.

My most angry moment? As we drove ("illegally”) back out of the community. And I saw the big, grassy field we passed on the way in, earlier unnoticed of any significance by me.

On the way out,

Me: Is that the farm??

Jorge (director of our local partner organization): A piece of it. The land spans [a huge enormous area that we continued to drive through for the next 5 or 10 minutes]

And it is just sitting there, fallow. Unused. No one is using it!!! The land-owners don’t even live on the land. They live in the town where our office is, in a big fat house that spans half a city block. I wanted to hop out of the truck and kick the wall when we drove by and Jorge pointed it out for me. And they don’t need the land – they have more vast agricultural acres in the south of the country by the coast.

There was land in abundance, excess, and waste.

And the community is l.i.t.e.r.a.l.l.y  S.T.A.R.V.I.N.G.  Suffering meanwhile to work at rock-hard soil. Working to corn grow out of a mountain. And just a stone’s throw away, some vast endless acres and acres of flat, fertile farmland sits unused. Because someone has claim on it and the socially bestowed power to subvert Others to misery.

Why such malice???

Why???!

I would hazard a guess that these land-owners derive little true pleasure from the situation. My question is, what are you going to do with all that land after this lifetime?

After my flabbergasted outbursts in the truck that day about the INJUSTICE of the situation of San Francisco,

Jorge (gently): That’s only one example, Rainbow.

Me: I know.

Oh, I know. And that’s what makes me love and hate Guatemala so much. And I emailed HOPE that night... “I will personally raise new funds for Guatemala. I don’t know how. But I will.”

I don’t know how but I will. I cannot walk away. The suffering in that community - and countless others just like it - is so, so UNNECESSARY. Apathy and inaction... aren't all so very far from deliberate malice. 

Poverty is unnecessary in this day and age. 

I will not walk away.