Almost every day in Guatemala City I see plastic coke bottles fly out bus windows, crisp-packets flutter from cars, and everything from gum foil to polystyrene cups dropped mindlessly from the hands of adults and children alike. Something in me wants to yell, every time, “HEY YOU! Pick that up! Isn’t this YOUR country? Don’t you CARE?” But of course I keep my bossy foreign mouth shut.
It takes me back to the days before garbage-consciousness, when we all thought the world was big enough to take whatever we threw at it. I spent most of my childhood without giving a single thought to the question of rubbish. That was before most industrialized countries officially discovered recycling (though frugal country people like my parents – products of the 1930s depression – always hoped to re-use things, so they always had a shed full of junk). But nowadays I suspect every child living in the developed world is as thoroughly inculcated with a motto like, “Reduce, Re-use, Recycle,” as we were with the necessity of cleaning our plates because of the starving children in Africa. Our kids don’t get to make weekend trips to the “rubbish tip” and help offload a heap of indiscriminately mixed garbage. They might sometimes visit a waste management centre and deposit sorted containers of paper, glass, plastics and aluminium. Or maybe they are lucky enough to have a recycling collection service in their street.
But it’s not like that in Guatemala. As far as I can tell, the majority of people drop rubbish indiscriminately in public places, and no one seems to sort their household rubbish for recycling. There is no publicly run system of recycling - or garbage collection for that matter, although we pay only Q60 - USD 6.60 - per month for a daily pick-up service. I’ve only discovered one place where recyclable rubbish can be taken and I know of only one other family who uses it – not that I make this a regular conversation topic!
I would have to conclude that in general Guatemalans have a low level of environmental consciousness, including the where, what and when of garbage disposal. This is not altogether surprising, as approximately 75% of the population lives below the poverty line, so naturally their minds are concentrated on survival. And, while the very rich portion of the population is so rich that Guatemala reportedly has the highest per capita helicopter ownership in the world, the country’s wealth does not translate well into tax dollars. So governments are always struggling to provide even basic health and education services, without worrying about waste management centres and broader ecological education.
But the great irony is that sheer, desperate, poverty, means that the streets are kept clean and almost every single piece of rubbish that can be, is recycled or returned for a deposit. The city’s bad rubbish habits provide both employment for the many street sweepers, and a means of livelihood for the people who live off scrounging junk, albeit not the sort of livelihood most would hope for. As I find out more about the latter I’m thinking of reversing my recycling process, because I suspect that all I’m doing is removing the most lucrative part of the trade-in-garbage from the men who collect ours, and giving it to someone else who is already better off. So perhaps I should keep sorting it, but then put the sorted rubbish out for our collectors to take, including all the “good” bits.
On every city road, every day, there is a person sweeping along the edge, while buses, trucks and other old vehicles spew black diesel fumes over them. Sometimes I look along the vast tract of road ahead of the sweeper and wonder how they can keep their heart in it enough to make their arms move. They carry orange “witches hats” which they sit on the road beside them while they work, to alert drivers to their presence, and usually they wear lime green vests with the city crest, saying “infrastructure…. cumple” – the city mayor’s message to his voters that he is achieving his public infrastructure goals. Often there is insufficient space for cars to pass by them in the same lane, so at the very least they tend to cause minor traffic disruptions. This happens especially in peak morning traffic, which also seems to be the favourite time for sweeping (I often wonder why?). But, in an attitude of pure fatalism, many of them also sweep with their faces towards the edge of the road, ignoring the cars flying past within inches of their backs. A number of times I’ve only just seen the sweeper in time to avoid running him or her down, especially on a winding road. It looks to me like a high-risk occupation, but as government paid jobs I suspect the positions are quite sought after amongst the many unskilled labourers competing for any kind of work.
There is a much worse job to be had than street sweeping, and that’s the job of the garbage men. Correctly called rubbish collectors, or recolectors de basura, they are also sometimes called basureros, which is the same as the word for the city rubbish dump. Of course rubbish collection has never been a high status occupation anywhere, but in many countries the nastier aspects have been removed through the use of automated collection trucks. But here the work is very hands-on and the men who do it (they are all men) are invariably thin, slightly ragged and very dirty. They manually take bags of garbage or piles of garden cuttings from the street in front of people’s houses and carry them to the truck. Any loose rubbish is loaded onto frayed old sheets of woven nylon, which were probably sacks once. It seems symptomatic of their poverty that they can’t even replace their nylon sacks when they wear out, but keep using an ever-shrinking piece of frayed fabric. A few of the workmen are old and I often see them struggling across the road with loads so huge they can barely walk. The trucks look like retired removal vans, their dents and crumples painted over thickly in yellow with a green side stripe, and the rubbish is loaded into the back by hand. The trucks drive with one of the rear doors open, so it is possible to see what they do in there. Usually, two or three men collect on the street, while one stays in the truck and sorts every piece of rubbish that enters. They have big sacks attached to the inside walls, into which they fling bottles and cans and plastics. The rest of the rubbish seems to go into a general heap towards the front of the van, although large cardboard cartons and other big items might be tied to the roof or inside wall. The load slowly gets higher until it’s time to head to the rubbish dump. Then the workmen sit up on the pile of stinking loose garbage and snooze, or very occasionally smoke (while I pray there aren’t any flammables on board), while they head out of town.
So what happens next? I don’t know firsthand, especially questions like who gets first go at the profitable things like aluminium cans. But I do know that most of it ends up at a vast rubbish tip near Guatemala City, and that an entire community lives on, and off, the rubbish that goes there. Drifters and families, from the tiniest children to the very old, work the vast basurero - although it may be a misnomer to call them a community, as it is reputedly a rough and cutthroat business. I have never been there, but my son has been driven through a section of the rubbish dump on a school trip, as part of an ongoing community service project. They visited a school established nearby to provide education for the children and youth of the basurero. The school, called Safe Passage, or Camino Seguro, receives support from a range of donors, and it provides, food, clothing and other school supplies, as well as fun activities and academic teaching to children who would otherwise get no education at all. It aims to make a path out of a rubbish life for the children there, who suffer abuse and neglect and work long hours in a hideous and hazardous place. It is also a daily refuge from all that.
Last year my son’s fourth grade class prepared science kits for the children at Safe Passage. The teacher got them to use only materials that could be found in normal household rubbish, I thought probably to show creative use of what was available to the children at Safe Passage, rather than supplying them with short-term rich-kid products that could not be replaced once used. The class went there to meet the other children and demonstrate their science experiments to them. When our kids asked the others whether there was anything they could do to help more generally, one boy said (in Spanish) something like: “It is better if you don’t put rotten bananas in the same bag as useful things, and also good if you can wrap broken glass and sharp things so we don’t cut our hands so much.”
Mariposa Pesada
Note: You can check out the Camino Seguro website (incl English) at http://www.safepassage.org
Friday, May 19, 2006
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
From cucarachas to colibrís
As I child I used to go around singing that jolly song about “La cucaracha…morning, night and even noon…” without once suspecting I was serenading a cockroach. What’s more, it wasn’t just any cockroach. My son’s Spanish teacher says it’s an allegorical song about a very adaptable Mexican President in days gone by who, even when he’d been stripped of everything, still fought on, along the lines of Monty Python’s Black Knight.
I suspect cockroaches and mosquitoes – or cucarachas and zancudos – exist all over the world, in many places humans have never managed to settle. But just because they are clever little adaptors it doesn’t mean I have to like them. We have them here in Guatemala too, but we also have other things, both naughtier and nicer.
We saw our first firefly in the garden on the night of 1 May. And, since it was international Labor Day, and a public holiday here, I assume this insect was either a strikebreaker or a mayfly in disguise. I get excited about fireflies, the way they blink their tiny lights on for a second, then off again, then on again, seeming to jump from one point to the next at the speed of light. I can’t help being amazed that these tiny things can produce their own power, without burning coal, or building hydroelectric schemes, or nuclear power plants. The local Spanish word for them is luciernágas, which strikes me as a very long word for a very short light.
Another insect, which is dangerous to people and dogs alike, is the poisonous black caterpillar (guzano) that lives on the leaves of the guava tree. Last year my son accidentally touched one on the ground while tying his shoes and the black hairs penetrated like splinters and caused him acute pain. Apparently a full dose of their poison can require hospitalization. This year we found someone who sprayed the tree with organic, non-toxic pesticide (we had to take this on faith of course, but the referral was from a reliable source). So we were hoping we wouldn’t have to deal with another crawling black mass of them this year, but unfortunately they reappeared yesterday, albeit in smaller numbers. They seem to have hatched from the tree bark. Eeeuuugh!
We may live inside an eight-foot brick wall with razor wire around the top, but a lot goes on in here in addition to insect life. Our garden is large and quite wildlife-friendly, at least for creatures that can out-run or out-fly the dogs. We have mature pine trees and fruit trees, including oranges, a rose apple, an avocado, guavas and banana palms. Even so, it’s surprising how much wildlife manages to appear in our backyard, given that we live in a large city with almost no public parks or other large green zones. However, there are quite a few street trees in our area as well as some walled estates around the city that appear to harbor small forests, and from the air you can see that the plateau on which the city is built is slashed with steep green gullies, called barrancas. The bottoms of these are smelly drains that become rivers in the wet season, but are too steep and inhospitable to use for recreation, even in the dry season. In poorer parts of the city, jerry-built shanties cluster on the edges of the barrancas and spread down into them, forming slum neighborhoods, or barrios. Even so, these gullies probably act as unplanned green corridors in this city of around four million people.
Now that we are in our second year here, we have an idea of what wildlife to expect, and when. For example, now that the first rains have come the woodpeckers are passing through. Here they are carpenter birds – carpinteros – which I think sounds much more purposeful than merely pecking wood. I’ve only heard them so far; that characteristic tap-tap-tap which echoes in the tree trunk, but other members of the household have spotted three this week. Last May I was thrilled to watch two carpinteros working on each side of a tall tree stump just outside the kitchen window. Their vivid reds and blues, speckled backs and sharp-angled heads made them look like animated cartoons. But they weren’t felling the tree like Woody Woodpecker, only eating bugs from under the bark. They stayed for half an hour and then flew away. I think we were just their lunch stop.
Any day now we should be invaded by the ants of May – hormigas de Mayo. Last year they flew in overnight, and then almost covered the ground with discarded wings and their large, inch-long bodies ambling around. They didn’t bite and were very tranquilo, but also seemingly without purpose. Our gardener and cleaning lady both told me (the latter with undisguised disgust), that some indigenous people like to fry the ants’ bodies and eat them in bread as a crunchy sandwich. Needless to say no one offered to slay one and fry it up for me, so I still haven’t tasted that particular delicacy. But the strange thing about the ants is that, after wandering around minding their own business for two or three days, they suddenly disappeared. I still don’t know whether they all went and buried themselves somehow. They had no wings and surely couldn’t walk very far, but if they died en masse why was there was no sign at all of their bodies? Did another army of smaller ants move their carcasses?
We have furry creatures too. A small gray squirrel used to frolic in the fruit trees, just out of dog-reach, and would sit there carefully holding a guava in its tiny hands, munching happily while the big dog went hysterical below. Unfortunately our squirrel wasn’t so clever with cars, and came to a sad end on the street near our house. One night we also had a short visit from a bat that I managed to rescue from the hysterical dog. I got to see the bat swoop over the high fence into the safety of the neighbors’ yard. It was only the size of a well-fed house mouse and had a lovely ginger coat, like a red fox.
But a more formidable furry friend has emerged in force recently. It is the large native rodent called a tacuasin (ta-kwa-sin). Apparently they live in burrows (I had wondered about that strange hole under the avocado tree) but they can also climb trees and love to eat any kind of fruit, including bitter oranges. I’ve now seen some at close quarters, both dead (compliments of our hunting spaniel) and alive (cornered in a tree by said spaniel). They have large and beautiful eyes, cute ears that point up and move around, and soft gray fur. But they also have distinctly rat-like teeth and tails. I’m torn between revulsion and fascination with the creatures. Our gardener tells me we have an entire nest of them in our yard. The dog has killed some of the smaller ones, about the size of sewer rats, but the parents are too big even for him. The first time I saw one of the adults at night, with its fat bottom squashed into the fork of a tree, casually looking down at me as if I was something the dog dragged in, I thought it was a cat. But then I noticed the long rat-tail. I decided not to argue with it and persuaded the dog to take a break indoors. Tacuasin can apparently bite quite viciously if cornered, so I’m glad the dog is up-to-date on his rabies vaccinations. I’m not, but I also don’t plan to have my rabies resistance put to the test by tackling one of them.
But of all the exotic little creatures, the ones I love most are the hummingbirds - colibrís. I had never seen a hummingbird before coming here, except on those BBC nature shows, in which the slightly breathless British-upper-crust voice of David Attenborough confided that the wings of the humming bird can beat up to 70 times per second…. But the breathlessness was warranted. Ours are tiny, green-tinted birds that you can mistake for butterflies at a distance, and their wings really are an unfocused blur. I can lie on the back lawn and see them busy in the treetops or, just occasionally when the dogs are sleeping, feeding from a lily in the garden bed. But the other day, while we were sitting in our living room admiring the cascade of pink, purple and white fuchsias in our enclosed courtyard, a tiny hummingbird darted down to the hanging pots and began systematically to visit each flower. It darted, hovered while it drank the nectar, darted again, hovered again, sipping from a dozen flowers while we watched in silence. Then it paused in mid-air, just for a moment, and flipped itself back into the blue sky.
That made my week.
Mariposa Pesada
I suspect cockroaches and mosquitoes – or cucarachas and zancudos – exist all over the world, in many places humans have never managed to settle. But just because they are clever little adaptors it doesn’t mean I have to like them. We have them here in Guatemala too, but we also have other things, both naughtier and nicer.
We saw our first firefly in the garden on the night of 1 May. And, since it was international Labor Day, and a public holiday here, I assume this insect was either a strikebreaker or a mayfly in disguise. I get excited about fireflies, the way they blink their tiny lights on for a second, then off again, then on again, seeming to jump from one point to the next at the speed of light. I can’t help being amazed that these tiny things can produce their own power, without burning coal, or building hydroelectric schemes, or nuclear power plants. The local Spanish word for them is luciernágas, which strikes me as a very long word for a very short light.
Another insect, which is dangerous to people and dogs alike, is the poisonous black caterpillar (guzano) that lives on the leaves of the guava tree. Last year my son accidentally touched one on the ground while tying his shoes and the black hairs penetrated like splinters and caused him acute pain. Apparently a full dose of their poison can require hospitalization. This year we found someone who sprayed the tree with organic, non-toxic pesticide (we had to take this on faith of course, but the referral was from a reliable source). So we were hoping we wouldn’t have to deal with another crawling black mass of them this year, but unfortunately they reappeared yesterday, albeit in smaller numbers. They seem to have hatched from the tree bark. Eeeuuugh!
We may live inside an eight-foot brick wall with razor wire around the top, but a lot goes on in here in addition to insect life. Our garden is large and quite wildlife-friendly, at least for creatures that can out-run or out-fly the dogs. We have mature pine trees and fruit trees, including oranges, a rose apple, an avocado, guavas and banana palms. Even so, it’s surprising how much wildlife manages to appear in our backyard, given that we live in a large city with almost no public parks or other large green zones. However, there are quite a few street trees in our area as well as some walled estates around the city that appear to harbor small forests, and from the air you can see that the plateau on which the city is built is slashed with steep green gullies, called barrancas. The bottoms of these are smelly drains that become rivers in the wet season, but are too steep and inhospitable to use for recreation, even in the dry season. In poorer parts of the city, jerry-built shanties cluster on the edges of the barrancas and spread down into them, forming slum neighborhoods, or barrios. Even so, these gullies probably act as unplanned green corridors in this city of around four million people.
Now that we are in our second year here, we have an idea of what wildlife to expect, and when. For example, now that the first rains have come the woodpeckers are passing through. Here they are carpenter birds – carpinteros – which I think sounds much more purposeful than merely pecking wood. I’ve only heard them so far; that characteristic tap-tap-tap which echoes in the tree trunk, but other members of the household have spotted three this week. Last May I was thrilled to watch two carpinteros working on each side of a tall tree stump just outside the kitchen window. Their vivid reds and blues, speckled backs and sharp-angled heads made them look like animated cartoons. But they weren’t felling the tree like Woody Woodpecker, only eating bugs from under the bark. They stayed for half an hour and then flew away. I think we were just their lunch stop.
Any day now we should be invaded by the ants of May – hormigas de Mayo. Last year they flew in overnight, and then almost covered the ground with discarded wings and their large, inch-long bodies ambling around. They didn’t bite and were very tranquilo, but also seemingly without purpose. Our gardener and cleaning lady both told me (the latter with undisguised disgust), that some indigenous people like to fry the ants’ bodies and eat them in bread as a crunchy sandwich. Needless to say no one offered to slay one and fry it up for me, so I still haven’t tasted that particular delicacy. But the strange thing about the ants is that, after wandering around minding their own business for two or three days, they suddenly disappeared. I still don’t know whether they all went and buried themselves somehow. They had no wings and surely couldn’t walk very far, but if they died en masse why was there was no sign at all of their bodies? Did another army of smaller ants move their carcasses?
We have furry creatures too. A small gray squirrel used to frolic in the fruit trees, just out of dog-reach, and would sit there carefully holding a guava in its tiny hands, munching happily while the big dog went hysterical below. Unfortunately our squirrel wasn’t so clever with cars, and came to a sad end on the street near our house. One night we also had a short visit from a bat that I managed to rescue from the hysterical dog. I got to see the bat swoop over the high fence into the safety of the neighbors’ yard. It was only the size of a well-fed house mouse and had a lovely ginger coat, like a red fox.
But a more formidable furry friend has emerged in force recently. It is the large native rodent called a tacuasin (ta-kwa-sin). Apparently they live in burrows (I had wondered about that strange hole under the avocado tree) but they can also climb trees and love to eat any kind of fruit, including bitter oranges. I’ve now seen some at close quarters, both dead (compliments of our hunting spaniel) and alive (cornered in a tree by said spaniel). They have large and beautiful eyes, cute ears that point up and move around, and soft gray fur. But they also have distinctly rat-like teeth and tails. I’m torn between revulsion and fascination with the creatures. Our gardener tells me we have an entire nest of them in our yard. The dog has killed some of the smaller ones, about the size of sewer rats, but the parents are too big even for him. The first time I saw one of the adults at night, with its fat bottom squashed into the fork of a tree, casually looking down at me as if I was something the dog dragged in, I thought it was a cat. But then I noticed the long rat-tail. I decided not to argue with it and persuaded the dog to take a break indoors. Tacuasin can apparently bite quite viciously if cornered, so I’m glad the dog is up-to-date on his rabies vaccinations. I’m not, but I also don’t plan to have my rabies resistance put to the test by tackling one of them.
But of all the exotic little creatures, the ones I love most are the hummingbirds - colibrís. I had never seen a hummingbird before coming here, except on those BBC nature shows, in which the slightly breathless British-upper-crust voice of David Attenborough confided that the wings of the humming bird can beat up to 70 times per second…. But the breathlessness was warranted. Ours are tiny, green-tinted birds that you can mistake for butterflies at a distance, and their wings really are an unfocused blur. I can lie on the back lawn and see them busy in the treetops or, just occasionally when the dogs are sleeping, feeding from a lily in the garden bed. But the other day, while we were sitting in our living room admiring the cascade of pink, purple and white fuchsias in our enclosed courtyard, a tiny hummingbird darted down to the hanging pots and began systematically to visit each flower. It darted, hovered while it drank the nectar, darted again, hovered again, sipping from a dozen flowers while we watched in silence. Then it paused in mid-air, just for a moment, and flipped itself back into the blue sky.
That made my week.
Mariposa Pesada
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
The One-Legged Lady
The one-legged lady has gone. I haven’t seen her at her usual set of traffic lights for almost two weeks. I still keep her money ready as I approach the intersection, but again today I can’t see her familiar silhouette on the footpath as I approach and she’s not resting under the trees on the median strip, as she sometimes does. I’m wondering if she’s ill, or if she’s gone back to her family in a village somewhere with the start of the wet season, and it strikes me that although she’s now so familiar I know nothing about her, not even her name. And that makes me feel a bit sad.
I think of her as Maria, because whenever I give her money – from my car window while stopped at the lights – she blesses me and calls on the Virgin Mother to intercede on my behalf, looking towards heaven and crossing herself. This is no mean feat to perform in a matter of seconds, while balancing on your crutches, still leaving time to move on to the next car before the lights change.
She is probably one of Guatemala City’s most successful beggars. Her weathered brown face is beatific – saintly as well as beautiful. She’s old enough to get an aged pension, if such a thing existed here (the legislation has passed, but has yet to be implemented) and she looks like the world’s kindest grandmother. Each day she’s out there at peak hour, her long hair twisted into a chignon, wearing a neat but faded dress and frilled apron. She swings along cheerfully on her crutches, smiling fully and openly at the car drivers, blessing anyone who gives but never betraying the slightest sign of ill-will to anyone who doesn’t. Clearly it’s her job and she does it so well, and with such dedication and nobility, that I have actually come to look forward to seeing her each day. I put some effort into trying to time it so I have to stop at the red light, and sometimes if I am too far back in the queue for her to reach me, I put my hazard lights on and creep up slowly to give her her pay, before going through the green light. No one behind me has ever tooted their horn or shown impatience at this. She knows my car now and keeps an eye out for me too. Sometimes when it doesn’t work out we just smile and wave… and I give her a bit more money the next time. I’m not a grand benefactor, just someone who contributes to her weekly income on a regular basis.
The one-legged lady has given me cause for reflection about the whole question of begging and giving. I know as well as anyone that giving a few coins to a person who appears to be in need won’t fix the system, and won’t even make that person’s life significantly better. But it might buy their corn tortillas for the day and save them some hunger pains, and it seems harsh to ignore a request like that when I have the means to help. I’m not the only person who does so – the askers would hardly bother if the response rate were negligible. I see many others putting their hands out their car windows, both Guatemalans and foreigners, holding a few coins or a small note. But what I often wonder is – what criteria do I apply to decide which person “deserves’ my money? Do they have to look me in the eye? Must they seem grateful? Do they need to appear kind, or is it OK for the bitterness of their lives to show in their faces? What if they are really hard to look at, like the poor skinny man with horizontal buckteeth, eyes magnified enormously through thick glasses, who moves with a jerky walk? And how do I know someone really is poor and not just faking it?
Guatemala city is not overrun with beggars by any means. They are mainly regulars who have staked out their own intersections at a dozen or so points around the wealthier parts of the city. Most of them go to quite a lot of trouble to scrub up and dress neatly, which seems literally to “pay off” in a culture where personal presentation has a high value. This is the complete opposite of the begging culture I witnessed in Varanasi, India, twenty years ago, where the beggars seemed to try to look as dirty and sick as possible, displaying running sores and withered limbs and, I was told, sometimes faking disabilities until the potential givers had passed. The beggars in India also seemed to congregate in certain thoroughfares where wealthier Indians or tourists had to walk by, so that it was hard to give to one without fear of being mobbed by a hundred grasping hands and high-pitched pleas. I ended up walking past the rows of beggars in India with my eyes averted because the situation was impossible. Here in Guatemala hardly anyone with wealth walks anywhere, due in part to a valid fear of street robbery, and in part to the fact that this is the backyard of the USA and the car reigns supreme. But even if they did walk, few people of means would dare to pass a mob of beggars on the street, for fear of violence. And even if they weren’t in a mob I don’t think the Indian beggars would do very well in Guatemala. They would probably be viewed as having let themselves go.
The majority of beggars here are people who are just too old or too disabled to find work in a country which doesn’t have a welfare safety net, and I think most people who live here understand that they have few options. Even if other members of their family work, the wages are low and it would be hard for them to manage. But if they don’t have family support there is nowhere to turn for long-term assistance.
There are half a dozen major intersections on my daily route where a particular person has staked out a begging beat. Most of the beggars share their intersections with newspaper men, families selling plastic bags of fruit, people draped in bundles of car phone chargers or the latest shipment of junk toys from China, and the ubiquitous vendors of mobile phone cards. But generally there’s no more than one beggar (and one of each type of vendor) per intersection. Each has their sphere of influence.
On avenida las americas there’s a youngish man in a wheelchair, who takes some risks squeezing along beside the cars stopped at the lights to collect, then swinging around to the end of the median strip, as the lights turn green. On my daily return trip there is an old and thin woman in indigenous dress who carries a tiny brown plastic pot for her money, and doesn’t look you in the eye, but seems sad and faraway. An elderly man in a very threadbare short wrap skirt and baggy trousers, the traditional dress of the people near Lake Atitlan, often appears a bit further along, and he looks both weary and humiliated. If I take a slightly different route along sixth avenida I meet the smiling young man with no hands who carries his leather carpenter’s pouch looped over his wrist stumps and wanders amiably between the lanes. He is confident and cheerful and he seems to do pretty well. There used to be another, very old, lady who held one of the busiest intersections in this part of town, near the big roundabout with the monument know as obelisco. She was so tiny and bent that she barely came up to the bottom of the car window and her whole face wrinkled in towards her toothless smiling mouth, but she was strangely loveable and seemed to do well from her regular customers. My friend who had lived in Guatemala long before we came told me the old lady had been there for years – and that in their family they joked about how long it would be before she retired to her beach house on the coast. I like to think she might have done something like that. All I know is she’s not there any more.
I’ve occasionally seen one man in Guatemala City who displays his withered leg by rolling his trousers above the knee, making it evident that he would have trouble finding manual work, but I find him very confronting and I think others do too, as he doesn’t seem to collect much money. And then there’s the pale woman with her little dark-skinned boy, who sometimes tries to sell individual sweets in beaten old wrappers, and sometimes just walks along the row of cars with her hand out in a hopeless gesture. In a society where white skin is privileged, she’s a puzzle. Every day she looks defeated. Perhaps she has fallen in-between the social groups, a woman who looks ladino (the word used here for people of mixed European descent) but has a child who is moreno (dark skinned). I often puzzle as to why I don’t feel the same sympathy for her as for some of the others. Is it just that she seems well and able-bodied enough to get work? Or am I racist? Do I see only indigenous people as the ‘deserving poor’ and have I therefore typecast them all? After all, hardly any of them beg, although most of them are poor. They work hard for miserable pay, grow a little food if they have a village plot, and scrape along. But there are also many poor, landless, ladinos.
I really have only one clear rule, and that is that I don’t give anything to children who beg. There are not many child beggars, and no regulars that I’ve seen in Guatemala City, although the numbers increase during the long annual vacation, but as a means of livelihood for children I prefer to discourage it. It’s so open to exploitation by behind-the-scenes adults, and child beggars are learning too young that they can get money out of rich strangers by being cute. I can only see that leading to a life on the streets and/or in the sex industry. And there is a public school system here, so if the kids are out begging that means they’re not at school, which just perpetuates the cycle of illiteracy, poverty and dependence. Many public schools also provide food to the children, I think mainly through foreign aid projects, as the education system is very poorly resourced and teachers are paid less than most live-in maids.
For the most part, however, my response is pretty irrational and ‘bleeding-heart liberal’. I haven’t been able to work out a better way of dealing with my own feelings at being confronted, daily, by people who have no apparent means of support, other than asking others for money.
One day I encountered a young indigenous woman, standing on the kerb with a baby on her back and a toddler by her side, who looked so sad, and desperate and humiliated by asking, that I quickly gave her enough money to feed them all for a couple of days, just to alleviate her misery. She didn’t look like a city person. I wondered if she’d come here looking for work and what she and her children had suffered, apart from hunger. But her face still haunts me. I wish I’d given her a lot more, even though I know that wouldn’t solve her problems – being a poor, indigenous woman, alone with her children, puts her at the bottom of the heap.
Mariposa Pesada
I think of her as Maria, because whenever I give her money – from my car window while stopped at the lights – she blesses me and calls on the Virgin Mother to intercede on my behalf, looking towards heaven and crossing herself. This is no mean feat to perform in a matter of seconds, while balancing on your crutches, still leaving time to move on to the next car before the lights change.
She is probably one of Guatemala City’s most successful beggars. Her weathered brown face is beatific – saintly as well as beautiful. She’s old enough to get an aged pension, if such a thing existed here (the legislation has passed, but has yet to be implemented) and she looks like the world’s kindest grandmother. Each day she’s out there at peak hour, her long hair twisted into a chignon, wearing a neat but faded dress and frilled apron. She swings along cheerfully on her crutches, smiling fully and openly at the car drivers, blessing anyone who gives but never betraying the slightest sign of ill-will to anyone who doesn’t. Clearly it’s her job and she does it so well, and with such dedication and nobility, that I have actually come to look forward to seeing her each day. I put some effort into trying to time it so I have to stop at the red light, and sometimes if I am too far back in the queue for her to reach me, I put my hazard lights on and creep up slowly to give her her pay, before going through the green light. No one behind me has ever tooted their horn or shown impatience at this. She knows my car now and keeps an eye out for me too. Sometimes when it doesn’t work out we just smile and wave… and I give her a bit more money the next time. I’m not a grand benefactor, just someone who contributes to her weekly income on a regular basis.
The one-legged lady has given me cause for reflection about the whole question of begging and giving. I know as well as anyone that giving a few coins to a person who appears to be in need won’t fix the system, and won’t even make that person’s life significantly better. But it might buy their corn tortillas for the day and save them some hunger pains, and it seems harsh to ignore a request like that when I have the means to help. I’m not the only person who does so – the askers would hardly bother if the response rate were negligible. I see many others putting their hands out their car windows, both Guatemalans and foreigners, holding a few coins or a small note. But what I often wonder is – what criteria do I apply to decide which person “deserves’ my money? Do they have to look me in the eye? Must they seem grateful? Do they need to appear kind, or is it OK for the bitterness of their lives to show in their faces? What if they are really hard to look at, like the poor skinny man with horizontal buckteeth, eyes magnified enormously through thick glasses, who moves with a jerky walk? And how do I know someone really is poor and not just faking it?
Guatemala city is not overrun with beggars by any means. They are mainly regulars who have staked out their own intersections at a dozen or so points around the wealthier parts of the city. Most of them go to quite a lot of trouble to scrub up and dress neatly, which seems literally to “pay off” in a culture where personal presentation has a high value. This is the complete opposite of the begging culture I witnessed in Varanasi, India, twenty years ago, where the beggars seemed to try to look as dirty and sick as possible, displaying running sores and withered limbs and, I was told, sometimes faking disabilities until the potential givers had passed. The beggars in India also seemed to congregate in certain thoroughfares where wealthier Indians or tourists had to walk by, so that it was hard to give to one without fear of being mobbed by a hundred grasping hands and high-pitched pleas. I ended up walking past the rows of beggars in India with my eyes averted because the situation was impossible. Here in Guatemala hardly anyone with wealth walks anywhere, due in part to a valid fear of street robbery, and in part to the fact that this is the backyard of the USA and the car reigns supreme. But even if they did walk, few people of means would dare to pass a mob of beggars on the street, for fear of violence. And even if they weren’t in a mob I don’t think the Indian beggars would do very well in Guatemala. They would probably be viewed as having let themselves go.
The majority of beggars here are people who are just too old or too disabled to find work in a country which doesn’t have a welfare safety net, and I think most people who live here understand that they have few options. Even if other members of their family work, the wages are low and it would be hard for them to manage. But if they don’t have family support there is nowhere to turn for long-term assistance.
There are half a dozen major intersections on my daily route where a particular person has staked out a begging beat. Most of the beggars share their intersections with newspaper men, families selling plastic bags of fruit, people draped in bundles of car phone chargers or the latest shipment of junk toys from China, and the ubiquitous vendors of mobile phone cards. But generally there’s no more than one beggar (and one of each type of vendor) per intersection. Each has their sphere of influence.
On avenida las americas there’s a youngish man in a wheelchair, who takes some risks squeezing along beside the cars stopped at the lights to collect, then swinging around to the end of the median strip, as the lights turn green. On my daily return trip there is an old and thin woman in indigenous dress who carries a tiny brown plastic pot for her money, and doesn’t look you in the eye, but seems sad and faraway. An elderly man in a very threadbare short wrap skirt and baggy trousers, the traditional dress of the people near Lake Atitlan, often appears a bit further along, and he looks both weary and humiliated. If I take a slightly different route along sixth avenida I meet the smiling young man with no hands who carries his leather carpenter’s pouch looped over his wrist stumps and wanders amiably between the lanes. He is confident and cheerful and he seems to do pretty well. There used to be another, very old, lady who held one of the busiest intersections in this part of town, near the big roundabout with the monument know as obelisco. She was so tiny and bent that she barely came up to the bottom of the car window and her whole face wrinkled in towards her toothless smiling mouth, but she was strangely loveable and seemed to do well from her regular customers. My friend who had lived in Guatemala long before we came told me the old lady had been there for years – and that in their family they joked about how long it would be before she retired to her beach house on the coast. I like to think she might have done something like that. All I know is she’s not there any more.
I’ve occasionally seen one man in Guatemala City who displays his withered leg by rolling his trousers above the knee, making it evident that he would have trouble finding manual work, but I find him very confronting and I think others do too, as he doesn’t seem to collect much money. And then there’s the pale woman with her little dark-skinned boy, who sometimes tries to sell individual sweets in beaten old wrappers, and sometimes just walks along the row of cars with her hand out in a hopeless gesture. In a society where white skin is privileged, she’s a puzzle. Every day she looks defeated. Perhaps she has fallen in-between the social groups, a woman who looks ladino (the word used here for people of mixed European descent) but has a child who is moreno (dark skinned). I often puzzle as to why I don’t feel the same sympathy for her as for some of the others. Is it just that she seems well and able-bodied enough to get work? Or am I racist? Do I see only indigenous people as the ‘deserving poor’ and have I therefore typecast them all? After all, hardly any of them beg, although most of them are poor. They work hard for miserable pay, grow a little food if they have a village plot, and scrape along. But there are also many poor, landless, ladinos.
I really have only one clear rule, and that is that I don’t give anything to children who beg. There are not many child beggars, and no regulars that I’ve seen in Guatemala City, although the numbers increase during the long annual vacation, but as a means of livelihood for children I prefer to discourage it. It’s so open to exploitation by behind-the-scenes adults, and child beggars are learning too young that they can get money out of rich strangers by being cute. I can only see that leading to a life on the streets and/or in the sex industry. And there is a public school system here, so if the kids are out begging that means they’re not at school, which just perpetuates the cycle of illiteracy, poverty and dependence. Many public schools also provide food to the children, I think mainly through foreign aid projects, as the education system is very poorly resourced and teachers are paid less than most live-in maids.
For the most part, however, my response is pretty irrational and ‘bleeding-heart liberal’. I haven’t been able to work out a better way of dealing with my own feelings at being confronted, daily, by people who have no apparent means of support, other than asking others for money.
One day I encountered a young indigenous woman, standing on the kerb with a baby on her back and a toddler by her side, who looked so sad, and desperate and humiliated by asking, that I quickly gave her enough money to feed them all for a couple of days, just to alleviate her misery. She didn’t look like a city person. I wondered if she’d come here looking for work and what she and her children had suffered, apart from hunger. But her face still haunts me. I wish I’d given her a lot more, even though I know that wouldn’t solve her problems – being a poor, indigenous woman, alone with her children, puts her at the bottom of the heap.
Mariposa Pesada
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