So on the advice from an employee at the Xamanek student Inn in Guatemala city, I got on a bus headed to Puerto Barrios, and was the only one to step off half-way in Santa Cruz, Zacapa. I walked into the hotel and said I was looking for people from "Hearts in Motion", which the receptionist understood even though I didn't use the spanish translation "Corazones en Movimiento". They weren't yet back, so I came back later and without saying anything again to the receptionist she called Karen who came down with her daughter a few moments later. After introducing myself and explaining my project (or lack thereof), a limping man (beneficiary of Karen's work) and his wife and daughter (named Karen) walked up, Karen (the big one) introduced them, invited me to a pizza party that night and to leave with the group in the morning (the last day of their stay), and departed with the family.
The morning started with a visit to a nutrition center (what they call places where they put the starving kids to fatten em up) in the next town over, Teculután. The sign does not mention HIM, though it is said to be supported by them. The entire volunteer group passed through, the kids performed a dance. This center, with a capacity of 30 (24 or 25 there at the time) is run by nuns and the way it works is that the kids live their for three weeks a month and then go home for the last week before returning again. One little girl was particularly memorable. The day we went was the last day for the month, and family was there to pick up the kids. Unfortunately I did not take a picture of the families in the waiting room while the volunteers were watching the play and holding all the babies (I, like everybody else, was taking pics of the kids in the playroom, but then walked past the families in the waiting room without so much as an adios), even though, because I being the only one with a hat was asked to collect the donations in the doorway on their way out, was in the unusual position to observe the waiting families on my left and the volunteers interacting with the children on the right. As time goes on hopefully I will get braver with my camera, but I will say that the families there did not look any different from others I saw about the town, only some of the children. After we left the families got a health lecture before going home with the kids. Before we could leave the bus the volunteers were going to take broke down and everybody was left standing while they called to get another van so they could pile everybody into the two. From behind the fence one of the old fathers was watching this debacle and I was able to find out that he was a farmer and made 1 Quetzal per hour (7.75 quetzals make one dollar on the official market, 7 on the street), which seems very low compared to later estimates I was getting. Hopefully I´m remembering incorrectly or misunderstood and he actually told me two or three quetzals, but either way...From there one van went to the hospital and the other to the construction site of a new center in a village (whose name now escapes me) outside of Gualan. It was described as a nutrition center/day care/school. Later that night one of the volunteers told Karen of his desire to install modern sports facilities at the site of the center. I suppose it will make a tasteful juxtaposition with the constant stream of bloated bellies.
The next stop (or maybe not, by now I´ve forgotten the order) was a fire station (HIM is involved with the training of firemen and supporting the stations in other ways, as you´ll hear on the interview) where we unloaded a trailer (the big, 18-wheeler kind) full of stuff from Kansas: old tredmills and exercise equipment, used clothing, old computer equipment. During this the solidarity with guatemalans really came to the surface, the gringos mostly taking the stuff off the truck, them taking it from our hands and stacking it up in the storage room. Another stop was a hospital, rehabilitation center, and prosthetics lab. The prosthetics lab is run by the Range of Motion Project, whose co-founder I spoke with the night before at the pizza party. He was a very inspiring man (with a prosthetic leg himself) who expresses his passion to help people by making custom prosthetics with donated parts in like-new condition. He's also recently opened a private practice in Ecuador (for rich people there so they don't have to travel to the U.S. for routine improvements), from which he earns his salary to support his time in Guatemala, and for which he recently hired one of the main employees from his competition after a fall-out between him and the boss (the employee was doing most of the work but not getting a cut). I was lucky to hear in person (over some Gallo beers, if I remember correctly) his story of how the lab came together, which I assume is repeated in his interview on Worldview's global activism series.
We passed by a free daycare center (utilized by many mothers who, I was told, are melon pickers) built by HIM but absent of any acknowledgement of the fact, which did not bother Karen at all. She said it was only important that it gets done and is there, not that everybody knows HIM did it. From there we went to a school with a computer lab, outside of which was standing a child of the sun. This school was a secondary school (high school), and I asked the teacher if there were opportunities for the students to continue on to college afterwards. His response was a stark "no mucho". He said that out of a class of 20 kids maybe 1 or 2 go on to college.
We went back to an HIM house (for college student volunteers), where resides a parrot (or something like it) living outside with no cage and unclipped wings, but who was not in the mood for any kind of interaction. One of the last discussions I had with Karen was about the elections coming up in Guatemala. The political propaganda here is alot more prominent than it is in the states, fliers, signs, and murals are everywhere but the TV commercials may be fewer than they would be in the states. I guessed that she would vote for Colom, whose ads feature doves and the slogan "life, development, and peace" would probably resonate with more women than his opponent Molina's "security and employment" with a prominent fist underwritten with "Mano Dura", or "hard hand", as in "iron fist". Her response was that Colom is a communist, and she wanted Molina to win. She's met both prospective first ladies, who she would be obligated to work with, and said Colom's wife was a bitch (though she actually used the word horrible, but with her facial expression and hesitation it was clear she wanted to say bitch), but Molina's wife was nice. One of the last stops before going back to the hotel was the same family with the daughter named Karen, where she (big Karen) dropped of a wheelchair (for some other person not in the family). Then that night at the going-away party (before a weekend of rest in Antigua) I ate like the rest, received a t-shirt, and even ended up in the group photo, despite the fact that I was only there for the last day of the volunteers' time, did no volunteer registration and paid no fee. So throughout the trip there were many hints of the fact that Karen and HIM's focus is on getting things done and not on formal bureaucratic procedures, a trait very difficult to encounter these days but very preferable to the other way around.
So if you listened to Karen's interview you would have heard that she mentioned a famine in a part of Zacapa called La Union. I told Dan (from HIM) about that and that I was going to go there to look for it and he said they had just done a clinic near there but he didn't see anything unusual, just skinny kids. So I looked up the spanish word for famine, did a search for it and guatemala, and the recent result that came up was this Sep 2 announcement on the Guatemala Solidarity Network from the U.K, which was an excerpt of this Aug 24 Prensa Libre article (google cache cause prensalibre.com doesn't seem reliable). 53 communities, 5,000 people, and 10 kids moved to a recuperation (nutrition) center. I'll (try to) translate two paragraphs from the article, use google.com/translate for the rest:
"Various factors have influenced the production of the crisis. The first is that the only type of work is the production of coffee, but workers are not needed until the end of october, when the harvest begins, and daily wages last until january and february. From march until september they supplement with local production of corn and beans, but this year they were affected by winter storms. In addition the quota of subsidized fertilizer was reduced. In 2006 they received 2,600,000 kilos, and this year only 500,000 kilos." [In Guatemala winter is when it rains, from April through September]
Ok two more:
"It gives me shame to admit, but it's the reality: we have a nourishment crisis, and all of the communities need food and our means are not sufficient", says Daniel Humberto Sosa, mayor of La Union. Since July 14, the municipality of La Union has informed various state institutions and private organizations about the situation, but until yesterday only the church ministry Esperanza de Vida and the foundation Castillo Córdova have brought assistance. The situation exceeds the municipal capacity, that's why we asked for help from the foundation and the church, because the people don't have nothing to eat," he said.
Another article that came up was
an Aug 27 Prensa Libre article, this time covering a press release by the Castillo Córdova foundation and doubling the estimate of the affected population. "Between 9 and 10 thousand are affected by malnutrition in La Unión, Zacapa, which surpasses the capacity of the Castillo Córdova foundation to distribute nourishments, and they urged people to make donations." ... "We are asking for Incarparina, beans, rice, corn, medicine, and clothing, among other stuff," detailed the director. Also this one.
The last recent thing on hunger in Zacapa I could find was this Aug 28 post ("I´m from Zacapa, and I am hungry") on the forum for a radio station (also published in Siglo XXI), by a host of the station who had recently interviewed Dr. Fernando Rivera of the Castillo Córdova foundation (and just recently interviewed Carlos Peña, Latin American idol, to give you an idea of what kind of radio program this is). "The breakfast is warm water, and like that they continue the whole day, the fathers put the children to bed early so they don't have to respond when the kids ask for something to eat." He put some photos of the crisis on a different post.
The only other recent stuff I could find on hunger in Guatemala was this Aug 8 forum post by a "professor of primary education and young person's committee leader", but it was about hunger in Tzununá de Santa Cruz la Laguna, Sololá, Guatemala. "In the past 15 days two kids have died of malnutrition and one more is dying in agony in the hospital." Maybe I should've made the effort to visit this guy (only secondarily the dying children).
So anyway that was all I knew, the name of Fundación Castillo Córdova and that I wanted to go to La Union, Zacapa. The webmaster for HIM, a guatemalan girl that spoke english like a native (told me she learned from TV, and indeed on guatemalan TV there are many channels that play english sitcoms with spanish subtitles), told me to get there I would take a bus from Santa Cruz to Rio Hondo (which I did not know how to spell at the time, only say), and from there to Gualan, and from there to La Union. After an incredibly winding stretch, that almost made me sick on the way back (such that I actually decided to close my eyes, even though I'm completely fearless when it comes to roller coasters), I landed in La Union without knowing a thing. Stepping off later than most of the others, because I didnt know where I wanted to go, I walked around for a bit before running into a well dressed guy from the same van trip who had sat facing me so that during the trip we had ample opportunity to make eye contact (hard to explain, let it be said that the vans that transport people in guatemala are almost always packed way overcapacity, such that it would be illegal in the U.S., but they charge the same price). I think he was looking for donations for a funeral, and I told him I had read something about "people that don't have food" and was looking for more information. He took me to the municipal building and interacted with the receptionist for me, who directed us upstairs to some dude's office with a laptop on the desk. Somebody else was already talking with him so I sat down, and though I thought he would wait for me the guy who took me there left without giving me a chance to make a donation. So I told this guy in the office the same and he didn't ask me any questions, but told somebody that was apparently an assistant to take me to the nutrition center. So this other guy took me there, a few blocks but many hills away, on a dirtbike (without helmets). We got there and by a stroke of luck there was a guy that spoke fluent english. Jacobo (or Jacob, if you speak english), has been the nutritionist there for three months. Before that he worked at some vegetable oil plant. He spent 4 years in Chicago with his Grandma, and went to school there at one of the smaller christian schools (can't remember the name and I can't remember if he graduated from there or not, but I do know that he graduated from a college in Guatemala City with a degree in nutrition). He has a 2007 Yamaha superbike which he rides on the track when he goes back to the city. He and the doctora, Isis (one of two, the other was on her weekend off), are both from the city. They work eleven days straight and then get 4 days off, which they spend in the city. Isis is one of 80 fresh guatemalan graduates from ELAM, and a single mom. I had previously heard about ELAM from articles like this one, so it was a quite a thrill to meet a graduate. She told me that all the other students at the school were annoyed by the american's spanish and constant requests for help with it. Both Isis and Jacobo are paid nine hundred something US dollars per month.
Jacob told me there used to be a nutrition center in La Union like 5 years ago, but he doesnt know why it closed down. This center (whose sign mentions Esperanza de Vida and the Cordova Foundation) just opened earlier this year, first in a building now used for storage and the living space for Jacob and the other two doctors a few blocks away. The old place had a capacity for 10 kids, and they expanded into the new one with a capacity of 17 (currently holding 14). This center is different than the one in Teculutan in that in this one the mothers (or Grandmother) come and stay with the child 24/7 the entire duration. Jacob was telling me that rumors float through the village that they want to take the kids to fatten 'em up and sell them, so the only way they can get kids into the center is to accept the mother too. As it is a new center perhaps it will take some time before they build up trust with the surrounding communities.
From there Jacob took me with him to make a preliminary visit to one of the communities. He explained that out of 58 communities, they had already visited 8. The communities, or villages, are all relatively close, but the distance is deceiving because the time it takes to reach them is significant, from half an hour up to two hours, for the rough and dangerous terrain (though it does make for an enjoyable, if not comforting, ride. We're talking hold-on-to-your-seat-your-on-the-edge-of-a-cliff). Four of us, a muni employee on a motorcycle, the driver of the truck, Jacob, and I visited only a few houses in what I'd say was one of the closest villages. A couple weeks later Jacob will go back early in the morning and take all day making stops at every house.
By now hopefully you've found the album. I took alot of pictures so there's no need for a blow-by-blow account of what happened, but I will mention a couple of things. We only visited three houses (more like clusters of houses) but one interesting thing at the second house, where a number of families from nearby houses had congregated, was the stance of the men, which is to say not at the forefront. They even managed to escape most of the pictures, though I thought I'd made a point to include them. They were sitting back on the side looking slightly disinterested in the procedures, making distrustful interjections once or twice during the discussions between Jacob and the women. I did approach however and was well received. They explained to me that they work year round, that they make around 30 quetzales per day during the harvest and 20 the rest of the year. Jacob spent most of the time trying to convince the women that their child needed help, that the bloated belly was not normal, even saying one time that without help the child would die in six months. Another time he used me as an example, saying this gentlement came all the way from the U.S. to see your situation, to emphasize the seriousness of their predicament. The mothers were reluctant to accept what he was saying, and repeated some of the rumors they'd heard about the purpose of the child going to the center. The children were as cheerful and playful as any children I've seen. It was delightful to watch them turn the situation into play, having great fun and intense curiousity between their bouts of innocent shyness, as children will always do if given half the chance. When Jacob asked for a volunteer to be examined, gobs of laughing children would run away and hide, and after the victim was chosen, they would all rush back close seeking a good view to see what he'd do. To counter this and make some for space for the embarassed child he would shoo them away, for example telling the boys "Get away! She has a boyfriend!!"
Another interesting coincidence that I didn't mention in the HIM part has to do with the mayor of Gualan. One of the volunteers with HIM, a 17 year old high school senior girl from Minnesota with Guatemalan parents, came on the trip at the initiation of her American friend. Three years ago her uncle had visited them in the U.S. and told them he was mayor back in Guatemala, but her mom refused to believe him and so she didn't think much of it. Now here she was on this trip to Zacapa with HIM, her first time in Guatemala, and she got the chance to visit him and receive some campaign paraphernalia, and his claim was proved. He had already collaborated with HIM before his niece had ever heard of it, donating the land for the new nutrition center. And she volunteered for HIM without hearing about it from him, instead from her best friend.
Another thing we should be aware of is that the bloated bellies are more a symptom of worms than the malnutrition. The presence of the worms will then exaggerate the malnutrition, if not be the cause outright. Jacob was telling me that as long the worms are there, the child would never be able to eat enough to get the nourishment. He said by the instructions of the foundation they cannot give medicine to people outside of the center, so in order to cure the worms they'd have to bring them into the center. As it is they only bring in kids with high levels (orange and red) of malnutrition, not the low ones (yellow and green). It was usually worms that he was checking for during the examinations, squeezing the belly, in order to feel them moving around.
The other child that will be hard to forget was this little boy. He was in the street when we got there, but his house was a bit of a ways up the hill, and when we went up he followed close behind. Then on the way back down he would take short cuts off the beaten path to arrive somewhere before us and wait, watch us pass by, then catch us again further down. I really kicked myself cause I forgot to say goodbye to him. When we got back to the center we ate dinner there, the same meal as the children, as Jacobo and Isis do every time.
Have you ever tried the Guatemalan beer Gallo? Its not bad. The name means Rooster (gallina is hen). It is made by Cerveceria Centroamericana, (cerveza is beer) the CEO of which happens to be Jacobo´s Father (How do you say CEO in spanish? I must ask Jacob when I see him again because my attempts to describe that I met the son of the "boss", "top boss", and "boss most high" do not convey the essence and implications of the fact that he is the CEO). Jacob said he doesn't know how much his dad makes, and that he doesn't talk about it with anybody. The Castillo Córdova foundation is a "social project of Cerveceria Centroamericana, and manufactures the Incaparina that Jacob gave to the families on the preliminary visit. They also make a malt drink especially for breastfeeding mothers, which Jacob compared to gatorade. It tastes much worse. Are we learning anything about commodity chains yet?
That's all I can think of for now. Obviously there's way more children with bloated bellies than the center has capacity for. Isis told me that the Cordova foundation was also buying seeds for vegetables for the farmers to plant this season (Oct 25 article found here). Is that to eat them or to sell them? These people built their houses out of the dirt, they aren't indigenous but they've had green thumbs for generations. If they could grow vegetables to alieve their food crisis why weren't they already doing it? One thing I wanted to get a picture of was clearly labeled Union building up in the highlands of that village we visited, and it would be nice to get even more information on the union of those coffee workers. The other thing we discussed was the feelings one has upon seeing such poverty for the first time. Isis told me she cried when she got back home the first time. I've cried before and blamed it on pictures of starving populations and the knowledge they exist, but of course emotions are fickle things and maybe the actual reason could've been something which I was experiencing more directly at the time like teenage heartache, or something else like chronic depression. Well during this experience of visiting that village, and seeing those people, the thing I noticed was my lack of feeling. It was a kind of "well, I heard about you, seen pictures of similar things, and now here you are in real life" matter of fact acquaintance. Here, lift your shirt up so that I can get a picture. Hey, face me, so I can get your face. Smile. Yup, those are some nasty sores, let me take a picture, this will surely gross people out. And there are several beautiful waterfalls, the whole place is an enchanting mountain forest. And the children are beautiful, playful, make me laugh and smile, all are beautiful, but some have disgusting sores, thinning hair and the discharacterized facial features of malnutrition which somehow only makes them cuter. And the whole while I don't really feel much, nothing out of the usual, I'm just kind of there seeing these people who couldn't be poorer unless they were completely abandoned and disconnected from the rest of the world (and then how would we would buy their coffee?), even their houses were made from natural materials found onsite, and trying to get good pictures. I guess I didn´t know what to feel, sadness sure but I didn't get sad. I was too much in awe of the entire experience, the newness of it all. Then when I finally laid down at the end of the day it was like I was trying to think about it, trying to _feel something_, anything, rather than the opposite situation in which I usually find myself, overwhelmed by feeling and trying desperately to think of something else.
I'm heading back to La Union for another week Monday (the first one of November), so, like the employees at the Muni told me, I'm "at your orders". Hopefully I'll get the chance to satisfy any requests you people can make, for more information, or whatever. We are not alone. That's probably as equally hard for the farmers I visited to accept as it for us to remember. Though I'm sure this page will receive a quick skim followed by an inaudible tab close, one of many to be browsed by you, the reader, one of billions browsed by millions. I forgot to mention that Jacob told me that besides some people with cameras from Esperanza de Vida, I'm the only stranger to have visited the nutrition center. So I´m possibly one of the only strangers to have taken more than a passing interest in the Zacapa, Guatemala FAMINE of all those who heard about it. That's what three articles in La Prensa Libre (which btw means free press, since you were probably too lazy to look it up yourself), one in Siglo XXI, and a radio interview will get you. We all just assume that somebody else is doing something about it.
P.S.
There have been other famines in Guatemala recently too.
2004 drought induced famine - affecting twenty thousand Guatemalans in the four departments of Suchitepéquez, Retalhulea, El Progreso, and Zacapa
2001-2002
2001 photos of Jocotan people.
Jan 2002 report on famine in centroamerica -
Blanche Petrich, correspondent for Mexico City’s La Jornada (Oct. 3), observed in a series of reports from Guatemala that “what is devastating Central America technically is not a ‘famine,’ the term that the experts use for the complete absence of foods in a region....From eastern Guatemala, across Honduras and El Salvador and all the way to the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, the starving wander through well-stocked markets and beg alms along the roadside,” Petrich reported. About one-quarter of all municipalities in the region currently suffer high rates of “chronic malnutrition,” she writes, 60 percent in Guatemala alone.
The last one I have was unavailable from americas.org (if you go there you'll see why) and now seems to have disappeared even from the Google cache. So here is what I had clipped:
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:zgVm9_lrLfwJ:americas.org/item_7167+famine+zacapa&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us - Famine Kills 42 in East; According to the U.N. World Food Program (PMA), 42 people have died of malnutrition so far this year in eastern Guatemala as a result of a drought that has afflicted much of Central America; 13 of the victims were children. The eastern provinces of Chiquimula and Zacapa are the hardest hit. The PMA says it has begun distributing 127 tons of food to 7,546 people in 10 communities in Jocotán, Chiquimula, through the Soil Conservation Project, and that 49 tons of food will go 6,520 campesinos in four communities in Camotán. Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and Switzerland are also sending food, the PMA announced in a September 6 communiqué. The Guatemalan government declared a “state of public disaster” on September 3 in response to the food crisis. (El Diario–La Prensa (NY) 9/7/01, from EFE, NYC)
President Alfonso Portillo of the rightwing Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) announced on September 1 that the famine justified his increase of the value-added tax (IVA, equivalent to a sales tax) to 12 percent from 10 percent. “Hunger is not just a Jocotán problem, it’s a problem for the country,” he said. “I’m surprised at the fuss that has been made [about Jocotán and Camotán], since the whole world knows that 80 percent of Guatemalans live in poverty . . .. The fiscal reform is for this purpose, to confront the problem.” One fourth of the IVA increase is earmarked for food programs for school and preschool children. There were massive demonstrations against the new tax rate after it went into effect on August 1. (Guatemala Hoy 9/3/01)"
Last thing, so after all this I just found out, after searching La Esperanza Vida and zacapa, that the USDA, through one front or another, donated a bunch of food in back in February, 20,000,000 kilos of food, with a value of $70 million (which would be about $10 million US if they meant Quetzals). Don't forget to look at the photos, click "ver fotos", and compare what you see with the meager stacks I found in the nutrition center at La Union. Says some of it was destined for Zacapa. This comes from elzacapaneco.com, a site of which I remember because it turned up often in my searches that included the word zacapa, notably its pages of photos of zacapanecas in bikinis, here's one from La Union in particular, from last year, also has lots of pics of La Union if you want to see what the city looks like. Where did all that food go? And why not to La Union, which would suffer a famine only 5 months later. I challenge you to try and find out more as hard as you would try to find that rare album, to spend as much time as you would in one day on myspace. The page got a lot of comments, I'll translate the third:
"LOOK AT THESE GRINGOS OF SHIT WITH ALL THEY'VE ROBBED FROM GUATEMALA THEY WANT TO DECEIVE US WITH A SACK OF RICE OR BEANS, AND THE SADDEST PART IS THAT THE SHITHEADS WE HAVE IN AUTHORITY IN ZACAPA ARE PLAYED AND LOOK LIKE LAP DOGS BEHIND THEM AND MOST DEPLORABLE THAT AT TIMES TO SOME NUMBER OF POOR THEY GIVE AND BESIDES THEY ROB AND SELL IN THE MARKET ONLY TO MAKE A BUNDLE OF MONEY, LETS GO PEOPLE OF ZACAPA WAKE UP ALREADY THOSE STILL SLEEPING. IN THESE ELECTIONS VOTE WITH INTELLIGENCE VOTE FOR LA GUACA [?] BECAUSE IT WOULD BE GOOD TO TRY A YOUNG BOY IN OFFICE, WELL I WILL VOTE FOR HIM"
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