News from Guatemala

A personal letter of reflection by Faye Wakeling, November 2002

This is a wonderful time of year in Guatemala, with the end of the rainy season, the beginning of the corn harvest and celebrations with those who are graduating from the courses in pastoral studies, health and theology, that Pierre and I have been leading in many regions of the country. It has been a very exciting process for me to accompany the women as they continue in their studies, become more aware of their own leadership capacity and begin to share their learning in their own villages. Tomorrow I go to a small village where the Kaqchikel women will share their own reflections on the themes we have studied together this year - Human Rights, Economy and Poverty in Guatemala, Human Relations, and Systems of Power. This has been the first time that many of the 25 women have participated in a course and it has been a very rich experience of sharing their life experiences, analysing the systems and causes of the poverty and oppression they endure, and finding their own voice and ability to speak out. Many of the women learn by oral tradition and it will be a momentous occasion for those who do not read and write to receive credits for their participation from the Universidad Biblico Latinoamericana in Costa Rica, whose Pastoral Institute is very flexible in responding to the special needs in leadership training with rural indigenous communities. I have learned so much from these women who have lived through such violent times and been engaged for many, many years in community struggles for water, land and education for their children.

I have seen the beginnings of a long-term plan to prepare Mayan women to eventually carry on the organising of theological and biblical studies I am doing with the communities of the Fraternidad. Two women from different Mayan cultures - Micaela who is Mam and Carmelina who is K'iché - have been engaged in a training project with me over the past 6 months. In addition to them sharing the accompaniment of my work in different regions, we have bi-weekly sessions with training in Popular Education methods, analysis of the sessions they are attending and preparation together of material they can use in their communities. Micaela is young (22 years, with a 3 year old child), very energetic and so open to learning and looking at new ways of reflecting, teaching, interpreting Bible, etc. Carmelina has stability and maturity ( early forties, with large family, grandchildren, etc), with solid experience in the church and a great thirst to learn. Since Carmelina began a course with me two years ago, she has been taking every course or workshop available. They are a great combination, with different gifts, different cultures and languages, and it is really wonderful to work in a team together. The communities are delighted to have them share leadership with me and, depending on the culture we are with, they are often able to teach or translate in their own language.

Guatemala continues to be confronted with increasing violence, Government corruption, deepening poverty with severe malnutrition, a coffee crisis that has left over 700,000 workers unemployed and increasing violations of Human Rights. The United Nations Mission in Guatemala has at least been able to document this deteriorating state and attacks on human rights workers and organisations, but their staff has now been drastically reduced and the mission will be withdrawn at the end of the coming year. Kofi Annan, the General Secretary of the United Nations, visited Guatemala a couple of weeks ago and expressed deep concern about the violation of Human Rights, the lack of a justice system and the escalating violence in the country. One can only hope that there are countries that will advocate his recommendation that MINUGUA, the United Nations presence, will not be pulled out in the coming year. In this time of increasing instability, poverty and violence, the children are the most effected and the most vulnerable.

As I left my home early in the morning last week, I was met by two little boys who called out to me "Lustre? Lustre?". These two little 7 or 8 year-old tykes wanted to shine my shoes and they were just beginning a very long, hard day of work – a day not fit for little children. They do a great job, charge very little and most of them have to hand over the larger portion of their earnings to those who supply them with the shoebox of materials, the tools of their trade. Children's income is a necessity for the survival of the majority of Guatemalan families that live in dire poverty. The majority of the street children that we see in our small city of Xela (the Mayan name for Quetzaltenango) have families to go home to and their labour is not an option. A local organisation that works with these children, offering opportunities for education and skills training for adolescents, recognises the importance of working with these families to try to find alternatives that allow the children to attend school and at the same time to continue their vital contribution to the family's survival. A third of primary school children dropped out of school last year because they had to work and this of course, does not take into account the majority of children, who are working and have never gone to school.

The most painful discussions I participate in with women, are about their own childhood in poverty that has left indelible marks and their determination that life will be different for their children. However, when we were studying Human Rights in one community, the group that was working on the needs and rights of children (6 to 15 years), identified on their list, the Right of children to Work. This produced a very tough and agonising discussion with the whole group. The women spoke of the fact that families couldn't survive if the children didn't work and those children had the Right to the basic necessities of life. We were faced with an impossible dilemma as the women wrestled with their deep commitment to find ways to assure that their children had an education and on the other hand, the need to survive. These Rights are so beautifully expressed in the Constitution of Guatemala, in the Peace Accords and in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by Guatemala. But how do we speak of Rights where there are no resources to fulfil them or no will by the state to meet basic needs for survival?

I often use pictures that I have collected of Guatemalan families, women, children and daily life in the Mayan communities, as a focus for sharing experiences in our studies. When we reflect on childhood experiences, the pictures include children working in the home, on the streets and in plantations. A picture of a group of small children picking coffee - which is very hard and demanding work - is very disturbing for me to look at. Yet, in every community that I have shared this picture, the women have seen this as a good memory, of times when the whole family worked together and even more important, of the times when there was paid work and enough to eat. In the past two years, hundreds of thousands of workers in Guatemala have lost their jobs as coffee plantations have closed down because of the drastic drop in coffee price. So there are no longer children picking coffee – and this is not a victory against child labour!

Children are inevitably those who suffer most from social and economic crises. In the eastern region of the country, which relied almost entirely on work in the coffee plantations that have now closed, children are dying of starvation and nothing is being done to bring enough aid or find a long-term solution. The situation that faces the family of a good friend who is a leader in her community in the Alta Verapaz region, is a poignant example of both the determination to find a better future for her four children and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles she faces. Maria has lived all her life in a small house on a plantation where her husband worked, but 6 months ago the work stopped and the plantation owner decided to sell off his land and the worker’s houses, at outrageous prices. The family was forced to leave, moved to another community, which has no schools, into a small house that was inundated with the floods of 3 months ago, and the family has lost everything. In spite of this, Maria continues to travel 14 hours to participate in meetings of our organisation and each time is accompanied by one of her daughters. The horizons of her daughters are expanding as they travel, listen, observe and see their mother taking on a very new and different role outside the home.

This change is like a wave that is moving slowly through the country, bringing with it both opportunity and new challenges. More and more Mayan children have a school experience, even though incomplete and this now includes little girls, whose mothers of the previous generation were not allowed to go to school. But there are serious costs. The majority of schools require the students to wear a uniform and this means that the traditional dress that is such an integral part of the Mayan woman's identity, must be put aside to move "forward". Many parents, who remember so painfully being ridiculed and abused as a child because they spoke only their Mayan language, use only Spanish in their homes, to protect their children from such shame and discrimination. They are opening doors for their children to a very different future, but the children are now facing the tension of living in different worlds. The challenge is theirs to find the way to continue to value their own identity as Mayan people, in educational systems and social forces that are moving in another direction.

I hear so often the words of parents and grandparents, who in the face of the present climate of violence, corruption, and increasing poverty in Guatemala, speak of hope. Their hope is for the long haul, with a patience and faith that is astounding, that change will come in the next generation or for their grandchildren. Half of the population is under the age of 15 years and the children are the ones that must find their way through the conflict, dysfunction and destruction that has followed 36 years of war. That is the hope – that is the faith.

" A little child shall lead them ....." Will that child, those children, have the basic necessities to survive, to grow, to be bearers of hope for the future?

As I share these concerns with you, we are entering the time of Advent

- the time of preparing and advocating for Peace in a world that does not know peace and - the time of seeking for Hope in a world that has become more fearful, aggressive and despairing. In all its struggles the people of Guatemala continue to have hope, to not be discouraged and to look to the future, the time when their children or grand-children, will know Peace. May it be so.

Abrazos, Faye