Guatemala Journal – The Silence and the Pain (Part IX)

I traveled to Guatemala on a Saturday with our national senior account executive from Salem Radio, five of my colleagues from Food For The Poor (FFP) and the 13 coolest Christian radio hosts (some also pastors) that one could ever imagine, coming from as close by as the west coast of Florida and as far away as Hawaii...

 Part IX: The Silence

On Sundays, I have my immediate family to our home for dinner. I cook for 21 people (four generations of us) including six wonderful grandchildren (by next Sunday there will be seven!). There is always the noise of children at play – laughing, crying, shouting, running, music, television, video games, and more. I love that beautiful noise – it is the noise of immortality, of legacy, of the future.

I noticed that there were many children at all the homes we visited; yet the only noise we heard was the sad sound of crying. The silence of the children was almost unbearable, for each of us knew from whence it came. It was the silence of hunger, the silence of deprivation, the silence of malnourishment, the silence of lethargy – in short, the silence of poverty!

Another generation robbed of its childhood simply because they lost the lottery of life – born in a poor country to destitute parents.

To be continued...

Guatemala Journal – The Silence and the Pain (Part VIII)

I traveled to Guatemala on a Saturday with our national senior account executive from Salem Radio, five of my colleagues from Food For The Poor (FFP) and the 13 coolest Christian radio hosts (some also pastors) that one could ever imagine, coming from as close by as the west coast of Florida and as far away as Hawaii...

 Part VIII: A Widow on the Edge

We then visited Catarina Sacrohope, a 27-year-old woman with four young children. At first sight, Catarina’s predicament has much in common with many of the other destitute families we had visited: she is a widow; she is very poor; she lives in a cramped, wretched hovel; she and her children scavenges for food at garbage dumps; she has no means of support for her family; her children are malnourished (the youngest did not stop crying until we gave him some food); their clothing is ragged and threadbare.

Angel with Catarina and her family

Yet her sadness was different for the others we had seen – it was more distracted, more desperate, more urgent; more intense. As we walked down the treacherous, slippery, rocky, narrow pathway that sloped sharply downhill towards her house, I understood why.

You see, Catarina lives with her family on the edge of a cliff, literally one foot away from a hundred-foot drop down a ravine that people use to dump their useless garbage, debris and human waste. There is slow but chronic erosion, as the shack is directly in the path of frequent mudslides caused by the heavy rainfall and the area is further afflicted by earth tremors.

Catarina is a woman who lives in constant fear – not only of long-term consequences of malnourishment, contaminated water and other scourges of poverty, but of an instant and immediate danger to the life of her children and her own. She is a woman living on the edge of a cliff that has her teetering always between life and death, robbing her of anything even remotely resembling peace of mind.

To be continued...

Guatemala Journal – The Silence and the Pain (Part IV)

I traveled to Guatemala on a Saturday with our national senior account executive from Salem Radio, five of my colleagues from Food For The Poor (FFP) and the 13 coolest Christian radio hosts (some also pastors) that one could ever imagine, coming from as close by as the west coast of Florida and as far away as Hawaii...

Part IV: Josefa Morales

Angel Aloma with Josefa Morales and her family

All the people we visited on our first two days had a certain sadness about them, but with Josefa Morales, her sadness and pain was constant and devastating. During our entire visit she never stopped crying for a moment, she seemed inconsolable.

Josefa is alone; her husband abandoned her four years ago and left her with ten children aged 4 to 16. They all live in a mud house with rotten wood and nothing inside. The mountains are cold and the clothing is sparse, so they huddle together at night to keep each other warm on the damp mud floor. Josefa’s oldest daughter, Juana, shares in her mother’s sadness, as she is the only one old enough to understand the reason for it.

Josefa is shamed and hurt that her children live in such poverty and she, as their mother, is not able to do anything to make their lives better. Her eyes always look towards the floor, no matter whom she is addressing. She seems like a person suffering from a broken soul.

Two of Josefa Morales' 10 children.

She talks about her attempts to make things better. She and Juana walk the neighborhood every day, knocking on every door asking for neighbors who are not a lot better off than she is for dirty clothes to wash for them. Even when the neighbors oblige, the most that she and Juana can earn in one day is less than $3.00 and that’s not counting the cost of washing soap and the effort to walk to a suitable source of water.

Amidst tears, she talks of her pain at having to feed her children only corn tamales, or broth “made from bullion, not real meat,” or weak coffee to try and “kill the hunger.” She cries because her children never get to taste meat; because a couple boiled potatoes are considered a full meal; because sometimes she is forced to fry leaves and grasses and give that to her children as dinner; because sometimes she has no food and no money and she has to listen to their cries of hunger.

How can we abandon this woman to her sorrow and her pain?


To be continued...

Guatemala Journal – The Silence and the Pain (Part II)

I traveled to Guatemala on a Saturday with our national senior account executive from Salem Radio, five of my colleagues from Food For The Poor (FFP) and the 13 coolest Christian radio hosts (some also pastors) that one could ever imagine, coming from as close by as the west coast of Florida and as far away as Hawaii...

PART II: Martin and Isabela

As soon as we got to Quetzaltenango (also known as Xela (pronounced Chela) we traveled to the mountains just outside the city and visited our first family in the town of Nimasac.

Martin, Isabela and their daughter

Martin and Isabela are a young couple that are not able to make ends meet. I was shocked to learn that they actually had to pay rent for the mud hut that they call home – dark, dank, moist crowded area with no furniture other than a handloom. They have four children, ages 9 months to 11 years old.

They sleep on the damp dirt floor, which worries Isabella as she realizes the danger to her children’s health, particularly since their immune systems are already compromised by severe malnutrition. That afternoon, the only food they had consumed all day was three small corn tamales shared among all six family members – less than a hundred calories each, minimal protein.

Isabela searches the garbage dump for clothing for her children, as the cold in that region can be bitter. Unfortunately, the clothing found in the dump of that area is in horrible condition and those who scavenge at the dump for a living will pick the better of the worst. One of her boys had on a pair of shoes that left most of the front of the feet exposed.

No one would dare say they are lazy.

Martin labors at the backbreaking task of weaving colorful, beautiful cloths at the loom, his back bent over at an almost 90 degree angle for hours on end. It takes him weeks to complete one 8-yard piece. To make matters worse, the retailers, knowing the desperate condition of these poor people, pay them far less than what the cloths are worth and then mark them up by 300-400% when they sell them to the tourists. He barely earns enough to pay the 50 quetzales rent (US$7.00), and at times, not enough even for that. His eyes betray the terrible shame of a man who cannot feed his slowly starving children.

The shoes belonging to Martin & Isabela's son.

Isabela takes all four children with her to the neighboring woods to collect branches and sticks to sell for firewood for only pennies a day. The older three help Isabela, while she bears the weight of the baby on her back all day as she works. On one occasion, the income from one day’s sale of wood was only enough to buy one egg. Isabela cannot help but weep when she speaks of the needs of her family, of the children’s hunger, of their sometimes incessant crying for food.

 We took them clothes and shoes for the children, we bought all four cloths that Martin had completed for a fair market price and we brought them mattresses to put on the floor. They expressed tearful words of appreciation in Quiche, which was translated to Spanish, which I translated into English – there was not a dry eye there.

To be continued...