We'll start with Mountain School adventures. I only got to spend one week up there and, honestly, that was probably enough time for me. Things run at a much slower pace up at the mountain school...
Yay naptime in the hammocks :) |
The school itself is mostly made up of dorm rooms. They weren't quite full up the week I was there so I had my own room, which was rather nice. They only have space for 14 students, and everyone stays in the school, so you get to know everyone quite well. The week I was there there was a group from Colorado studying - it was a school-organized trip for 3 high school students. They had 3 chaperones as well, and a younger sibling tagging along.
Life at the mountain school runs on its own time schedule. There is Guatemalan Time, which is a slower, more laid-back pace - and then there is mountain school time, which is a half hour to an hour behind schedule. Sometimes more. The classes run on time, and generally the meals, but not a whole lot else.
Meals are eaten in the home of a local family. There are two tiny towns between the school and the small town of Santo Domingo. First is Fatima - there are literally two dirt "roads" (read: footpaths) off the main cobblestone street. After Fatima is Nuevo San Jose, which I think is another two dirt roads, but might just be one (my family lived down at the end of the first road of this village, so I never had to remember if there was a second one or not). The villages of Fatima and Nuevo San Jose are communities of ex-coffee plantation workers.
History: In the mid to late 90's and early 2000's, the world coffee market crashed thanks to 1) the arrival of a Vietnamese coffee crop flooding the market - the World Bank and IMF funded coffee projects to help revitalize the economy in Vietnam, but it ended up bottoming out the price of coffee and severely affecting the economies of a lot of central and south american countries who depended on their coffee crop exports - including Guatemala. 2) In part thanks to the increased supply, the US and some European companies started deviating from a previous agreement of paying fair-er trade prices for coffee imports and going for rock-bottom prices that helped increase their profit margins. Technically they played by free-market economy rules - but that didn't help the plantation workers in Guatemala or elsewhere. A lot of plantations went broke - including the plantations where the people of Fatima and Nueva San Jose lived and worked.
In the past, large coffee plantations often supported 100 or so people year round to tend the coffee crop. When the harvest came migrant workers would come in and increase the ranks to 200-300, sometimes more at the really large plantations. Coffee plantation living was a hard life, plantation owners usually tried to increase their profit margins by skimping on the amenities for workers. Think one-room huts for a family of 6-8, running water and drainage if they were lucky (but most weren't, and even if they had running water, it's not potable down here). Wages were right at poverty levels or below. Laws exist(ed) that require plantation owners to provide a livable wage, humane living conditions, and education for the children of employees. But quite often the laws weren't followed, and the infractions were overlooked by officials.
In the case of Fatima, the plantation owner stopped paying wages for 7 months (I think) when the operation went bankrupt. The workers ended up striking and I think taking the plantation owner through the courts. They had a pretty good outcome and recouped all of their back wages plus damages. It was with this money that the community bought the land that is now the village of Fatima. The case of Nueva San Jose is a bit more dramatic. They weren't paid for their work for over a year - similar situations had happened before for months at a stretch, and the owner always eventually paid them their back wages, which is possibly why they waited so long. With no money for food, and no land to grow their own crops, most families lost children to starvation. They tried to organize and take the plantation owner to court, but he bribed the judge (a pretty common occurrence) and it quickly became obvious that they weren't going to be able to use the judicial system for justice. So, desperate and starving, they took the plantation owner hostage to use as leverage for ransom negotiations. They did manage to bargain for some of their back wages - but I don't think they got all of them - and they didn't get any damages. The community still managed to buy some land next to the village of Fatima.
Life now isn't that much easier than it was when families lived and worked on the plantations. They don't generally have regular work or sources of income. The men usually ride into one of the nearby towns for day labor. Minimum wage in Guatemala is around Q86/day ($11-12/day) but often day laborers receive less than that as they're not regulated. The bus into town and back is around Q5 or Q10 so if they don't get work for a few days that expense will quickly eat up a previous day's earnings. This is one of the reasons the school has become such a vital part of these two communities. Families are paid a living wage for the week for hosting a student. As there are more families than students, you get a new family every week so the work is rotated throughout the communities. There is also a rotation of women in the communities who are hired to come work cleaning the school each week, and a couple of men who work as night-guards.
When I say that these families live in destitute poverty, that is not an exaggeration. One of the main reasons students sleep in the school is that the living conditions in the homes of the host families just can't accommodate students. My family's house was approximately 15x20ft made out of corrugated tin (and plastic tarps to cover the holes) and consisted of two "rooms" (there wasn't really much of a divider between them though). The kitchen and the bedroom with 3 beds for the 6 members of the family (2 parents and 4 kids). I fell in love with their stove, which I think was built as part of a development project the school helped secure grant funds for.
Here's the version of the Irish Blessing Song I sing:
Puede el camino subir con tigo
Puede el viento siempre estar detras ti
Puede el sol brillar sobre ti
Puede la lluvia caer suave en tus campo
Y hasta nos encontramos con nosotros otra vez
Puede la tierra sostenerte
En sus hondonadas y sus terrenos
May the road rise with you
May the wind be always at your back
May the sun shine upon you
May the rain fall softly on your fields
And until we meet again
May the Earth hold you
In her hollows and her lands
Taylor liked the part about the Clifford books. She wished you had taken pictures. We miss you! Love T and Ev and Jack and me.
ReplyDelete