Children of Guatemala

THE CHILDREN OF GUATEMALA
As I sat in the park in Antigua Guatemala, my first week as a Spanish student there, a boy of perhaps six came up to me with a shy expression and a wooden box to put my shoe on so he could shine it. He said something I didn’t understand and gestured at my shoes…I shook my head and indicated that they weren’t made to be shined. He looked at them dubiously for a moment and then wandered away, eyeing the shoes of each person sitting on the stone benches (old men, family groups, couples, and the occasional single person like me) as he passed.
A young boy about his age caught his eye. This boy was dressed in suit-pants and a white buttoned shirt; his hair combed back. He was with his family, and his father was blowing bubbles for him from a small bottle in his hand. The boy was shouting with delight and rushing back and forth to chase each new bubble. The shoe-shine boy paused for 4-5 minutes--watching the boy’s pleasure, perhaps; noting the interaction between father and child. Then he hitched the strap of his box up higher on his shoulder, as if suddenly remembering his responsibilities, and moved on down the path.
This was one of the first things that struck me about Guatemala: the old people working—firewood or bags of rocks strapped to their backs; pushing huge vending carts up the cobblestone streets, and children working--selling newspapers, fountain pens with your name on them, and picture cards, or shining shoes. Some of these children are working with or for their mothers, vending textiles, or begging with a bowl on one side of the street while mom sits on the other. But many are by themselves at 5, 6, 7 years old in a reasonably big city.
Children working became even more evident when I moved to a rural pueblo at the side of Lake Atitlan. But here it was more often with the family and not necessarily for money (though at the dock in Santiago you will be set upon by dozens of children vending bracelets, key rings, and other crafts items...and occasionally begging.) In both San Pedro, where I’ve lived for three years, and San Pablo, where I volunteer in the school, the children work for family – carrying corn to be ground, food purchases from the store, holding balls of yarn while mama winds them, or holding the homemade tool which twists the maguey twine made in San Pablo while mom plaits the plant fibre into the rope from her position five yards up the street. In San Pablo I saw two boys, perhaps 8 and 10, pulling a huge bull on a rope to tether him in another grassy spot. In slightly more sophisticated San Pedro, I often see a 13 year old carrying a man-size bundle of firewood strapped to his back via the mecapal across his forehead, and know well a 14 year old who helps his father get a pig on a table to slit its throat. The families I know think nothing of asking their children of all ages to drop what they’re doing and run to the store for them, and I never hear a “thank you” for their efforts. It is simply accepted that children help their parents as part of being in a family…just as their parents once did.
Another immediately-notable thing about Guatemalan children is the respect and affection they evidence for their parents and their elders in general. Fifteen-year-old young men walk with their arms around the shoulders of their much smaller mothers. And when I first arrived in San Pedro, I noticed a line of 3-4 adolescent boys lined up to kiss the hand of an old man, an elder, sitting on the side of the street. There is also enormous familial affection, evidenced everywhere: young brothers and sisters walk holding hands; a teen-age boy cares for his much younger brother, holding him on his shoulders, or by the hand. All of this is almost too common to mention, but not so common in the U.S. Perhaps this caring is part of the net that makes working with family not only tolerable but enjoyable.
Guatemalan children, especially the poor ones I know, share a bed with brothers and sisters and sometimes parents. Hand-me-downs from older sibs is the norm. Few have toys, certainly not more than one or two, and these are also shared. If you give a poor child some food, they will invariably tuck a part of it in some crevice in their clothing for their brother or sister.

In most other respects, of course, they are like children everywhere: curious, inventive, full of energy, fun, and teasing.
I asked a young man of 20--who told me he worked side-by-side with his father in the fields, hoeing corn and whatever else needed doing, from the time he was six or so—how that felt. Was it like drudgery? Did he resent it? Was it in any way fun? (showing my bias by my questions, of course.) He said no, he never resented it; he was proud to work beside his dad. “And there were no diversions or distractions in those days (a mere 14 years ago or less),” he said. “No TV, no video games. We were happy to have something to do and proud to help. It’s a little different, now.”
In this slightly more modern town, affected by much tourism over the past 30 years, things are changing…for children, perhaps more quickly than for anyone else. Plastic toys have arrived in cheap droves….sold in the flung-up booths along the street during the week of Feria. They break quickly, so the cry goes out for more. Many children have at least rudimentary TV channels available in their homes or that of a friend; Hannah Montana items (a lunchbox, backpack, or actual toy!) suggest that you are “in the know,” one of the chosen ones (we can all remember this from our own childhoods.) Envy thrives. Some young girls are now wearing sports clothing, instead of the traditional wrapped skirt, belt and woven blouse.
These are not bad things in themselves, but as young people begin to want things from the wider world (in particular the U.S.) more than they want what their parents have to teach them, as cellphones and IPODs and gameboys become the desirable items and their grandparents know nothing about them, a measure of respect is lost. The sculpted hair of the boys and makeup the young girls want separate them even more from their befuddled grandparents…still immersed in centuries of tradition…and a generation gap ensues. And of course for those families who can afford to send their children to university in the Capital, the children grow away from home. I think that the family net is strong enough here to hold again the stretching of the bonds; I hope that’s true…and that the children of this generation gain more than they lose from all these changes.

Miranda Pope works with preschool children in San Pablo in her project (www.letsbeready.org) and with 5 to 13-year-old children of single mothers in her project in San Pedro la Laguna (www.paintmyfuture.org.)

Culture conscious

Yesterday a local friend told me that they were having his baby's baptism at 9 at the church, and at 10 I was invited for almuerzo at their house. So there I was at 9 at the church, long skirt and traditional-fabric shirt on, only to find that mass was currently in session, so I stood at the back of the church with the group of jovenes in their creatively-spiked hair. All the usual standing and sitting and kneeling, tho not as much of the usual call-and-response recitations I like so much, but a marimba band and some mediocre singing. At 9:50 I gave up thinking that they were going to do the baptism at this short time before the almuerzo, so I walked thru the windy dirt and stone alleys to his house....or his parents' house. (He - at age 27 - still lives at home with mom and dad, his wife and two children, and his two adult sisters.)
So I entered the house via their molina on the street...direct entry into a dark gloomy room with a big machine for grinding corn which makes a huge racket--belts slapping, generator roaring. Then walked thru a flimsy curtain into a back passageway which opens to the left into a roofless courtyard (with a view of the top of Volcan San Pedro, which I wish I had a better view of!) Then across the roofed side of the courtyard into the kitchen....a nearly-empty room with pans hanging on the walls, a big armoire at the end full of pots and pans, a simple table on the left, and a huge flat-topped wood-fired stove on the right with the big chimney going up thru a hole in the roof. On the stove were two HUGE pots, one full of cabbage. So first I helped chop some cabbage, which they mix with a little hierba buena/mint and a little limon and eat fresh. Then my friend's older brother came in from somewhere and we talked about how his work at the bar was last night - and then I sat and watched his mother chopping the heck out of a pile of chickens, on a lower cement table attached to the stove. At some point I asked the brother if he grew up in this house and he said they'd lived there since he was 11....(so 22 years, but he moved out at 20)...before that they all lived with his grandparents up near El Centro. So he grew up with this constant racket from the molino! No wonder he does so well as a DJ (with the noise of the loudspeakers.)
Then a bustle, the whispers that the parents and baby were coming from the church, where they had had the baptism AFTER mass, of course, and a big woman came in carrying the baby and man came with her (the padrinos) and then Arecely and Henry (who took off his outer shirt and showed me he was wearing my birthday present Virgin Mary tshirt underneath,) and they all hustled into the main room. They asked if I'd like to sit with them but I chose to sit outside with the rest of the family since I knew the talk inside would be relatively serious and all in Tz'utujil. So I took the baby out of the fancy padded stroller she was in and held and rocked her for awhile and the family borrowed my camera and took some fotos, and then she was asleep so I was served first, a little ceremoniously as guest: the usual, rice with bits of carrots and red peppers, chicken, cabbage, and the broth it was all cooked in (very sabroso) on the side.
While waiting I had spent time watching the molino being worked by the younger sister while the older (who will soon be married) washed everything in sight in the hall and courtyard including taking a bucket of water and throwing it into the bathroom - off the courtyard - and then mopping everything down with a towel/broom (so that's why bathrooms here are always soppng wet.) And the molino sister showed me how to make a tortilla from the wet masa, and I watched two or three women come in with their cooked corn with a little "cal" added (white calcium powder?) and grind it into a mush, scoop it together into their bucket and walk home with it in the small plastic bucket on their heads.
So that's all there was to it, except for listening to a long oration by the padrino in Tzu on how the child should be raised, and then they got ready to leave but I insisted on taking photos of the mother/father/madrina/padrino and baby together, and then just the padrinos with the baby (I don't know what protocol is, but I figured....) Evidentally they are in charge of the child's spiritual life, but it didn't sound like it was too huge an actual responsibility. It seemed very important that he was a man who hadn't drunk in many years.

So that was that cultural event, but on the way home I caught the sub-director of the school next to an extranjera friend's house who also owns a restarurant/lavandaria/bakery and listened for a rapt hour to her stories of all her students are doing about recycling, and producing products from recycled matierals, learning about marketing, advertising, etc. in the process....but mainly coming up with their own great ideas. So I was stoked about that and walked home all happy.