Email: Callie Vandewiele

Friends,

Her name is Rosalia. She’s in her mid fifties but her hair is still dark, black, and curly. She wears glasses, a blue apron, and comfortable brown shoes with panty hose.

Standing in the kitchen of the Francisco Coll school she ladles a corn atol drink into cup after cup for the morning snack. She serves each class, one after the other, from first grade to sixth, providing what is sometimes the student’s biggest or only meal for the day. The aqua-colored school walls provide a sort of haven. The neatly ordered desks and murals on the wall surrounding the small courtyard form a sort of island of order in the midst of chaos. Children sit in classrooms, glancing out open doors to catch a glimpse of strangers. Some wear uniforms. Some don’t. Blue jackets, ripped tee shirts, old jeans, and pressed skirts. Art projects and science textbooks, it is a school like any other school. 

A glance to the roofline breaks that spell. Above the cleanly painted red tin roof you can see the slums. Concrete block houses built in, on, and around each other in a sort of complex jigsaw puzzle, defying gravity. Ripped plastic tarps, tin roofing long since rusted through, broken windows behind rebar, a stained red curtain shuffling in the damp breeze. Across the narrow street is a soccer field surrounded by a fence. The wire is incomplete, leaving gaps and holes along its length. The children play there during recess, but they know what to do if they hear gun shots. They know where to run, and what not to see. That is the reality that these children live in, the reality that has defined Rosalia’s life, a poverty that pervades every aspect of their daily existence from the houses they go home to, to the work they do in Guatemala’s City dump, in and around which they live. 

Welcome to Francisco Coll, one of a handful of schools that serve the children living in Guatemala City’s worst slums. I was there last Monday with a group of students from the University of Tennessee who were on a mission trip to Guatemala organized through CEDEPCA. My role was to help translate, answer questions, and generally be available. My perk (for doing this) was to accompany the group during their week here from the mountains above Xela to the shores of Lake Atitlan and through the twists and turns of Guatemala City’s slums into the vault-like communities of the wealthiest neighborhoods. So last Monday I stood on the sidewalk in the neighborhood the Francisco Coll school serves, holding a drawing handed to me by a set of tiny hands and struggling to translate Rosalia’s story as she spoke, understanding what I was hearing, but hardly believing that it could be true. That people could live like that.

Rosalia’s smile seems untouched by her life. She is the mother of seven children. She wanted three, her husband wanted more. She had no choice. She raised her children in a congested community, a tiny house built into the dump where she and her husband worked for over 20 years, searching through the piles of trash for recyclables, anything that could be reused, even food. She talks about earning less than a dollar a day. About building houses out of sheet roofing, plastic tarps and anything that could be found on city land. About being evicted without recourse. About children being forced from schools because they came from her neighborhood. She tells stories of students she knows who started school only to drop out when their families faced extortion from the local narco-traficantes, a “tax” imposed by local gang members on those who have nicer houses, good jobs, or any kind of opportunity. Rosalia talks about her own past, about working long hours every day, about her children working. She tells us about day-to-day struggle, about burning trash to boil water, about wearing the same pair of shoes for years, about finding poisoned meat left to kill stray dogs and (not knowing it was poison), serving it to her family, and eating it. About her children missing the hospital because they missed the food there. Her eyes never dim.

Rosalia’s oldest daughter is a teacher in Francisco Coll. She is 19 and graduated high school last year with a diploma in education. She is more educated than her mother can ever dream to be. She is also the only teacher in the school who dares to live in the slum that it serves. Assaults are common, electricity is hit or miss, and many people buy water from tanker trucks, carrying what they need in five-gallon buckets or jugs from the street down through the narrow alleys to their houses. Rosalia points hers out to us, a concrete block room with a small second story made from wood. There is a window and she has a whiskeal plant climbing up the side of the building, clinging for life in the hot sun which I can already feel is searing my skin even though it’s not yet 11:00 a.m.

I keep glancing at Emerson, a CEDEPCA staff member who works with these groups regularly. I want to confirm what I am hearing before I translate it. I understand the words, their meaning makes sense if I only look around me, but I don’t really want to understand this reality. Emerson is patient with me. When I falter he fills in words. I feel like I’m brand new here, like I just got off the plane from Tennessee. I feel like I am seeing a part of the world for the first time and struggling to respond to it, to justify my place in an increasingly complex and unjust universe.

Forty five minutes later, Hernan, our driver, hands his license over to a guard at the gate of La Canada—one of Guatemala City’s most exclusive neighborhoods. Information is copied down, we are waved through. Emerson and Hernan exchange a joke en Espanol. There are 14 students and one campus minister in the group. They have been in Guatemala for a grand total of 36 hours, jet lag is barely wearing off, and the trip is in full swing. I can hear the murmur of conversation behind me, awe expressed at the site of each new mansion, each gate topped with barbed wire, at the glimpses of each small army of security guards we see. I crane my head to look out the front window. We are passing the house of Guatemala City’s mayor. The stonework is amazing. We were at the beginning of a journey. 

Latin America is complex, to say the least. It is a land of extremes in geography, culture, politics, history, and wealth. Here it is easy to see the difference between the very rich and the very poor. The ramshackle home tacked together with plastic sheeting and metal roofing bits found in the dump, built wall to wall with other similar homes in a congested slum, in comparison to the four-story mansion fronted by an iron gate, ten-foot walls, and security guards, all within a walled and guarded complex. The have-nots and the haves are easily identified. We sit with the haves.

I think about this later, when I’m back at the hotel with the group, updating my Facebook profile using the free Internet service provided by the hotel. I just took a hot shower and am looking forward to dinner in half an hour. My biggest complaint about my day is that sunburns are not attractive, particularly on people with freckles, and I am a sunburned person with freckles.

It’s hard sometimes to realize how much I really have. My student loans outweigh all the money I have ever made combined into one lump sum in my entire life, and I spent two years at a community college and then received a decent amount of help in the form of grants and scholarships to help cover those last two years. I do not have a personal body guard and have never owned a car. I was 10 or 11 the last time my family went on a vacation together longer than a weekend or further from home than the Oregon coast. I used food stamps to help get me through school and sometimes wonder how long it’ll be before I have a job that pays enough so that I won’t need them.

But then again, I have never been hungry enough to search for food in the trash. I do have a college education. I am living abroad for a year by choice, not necessity. If I get sick I can go to the doctor, right away. I have an iPod (which I love) and a computer. My parents own their respective houses, and I will always have somewhere to turn if I need it. My personal experience of poverty is solely an experience of beginning—a middle class American life before an established job. It won’t last. This is not my only reality. For the children at the Francisco Coll school there is no other reality, and their poverty is far harsher than anything I will ever have to live through. 

I’m beginning to believe that as long as I insist on the lifestyle I have been raised to expect, poverty will continue to be endemic. Granted, one person’s expectations and actions hardly ever matter, but I am part of a generation. There are tens of millions of us—middle and upper class U.S. citizens and Europeans, and if we all continue to expect a lifestyle of consumption, then that lifestyle will continue to inflict a huge toll on the world and her people. 

It’s one of those things you hear all the time—that if everyone were to have a lifestyle like middle class America, we would need to have five or six planet earths to sustain our collective consumption. We repeat it in school, dutifully recycle and take public transportation when it’s convenient.  Usually we are taught to view this in environmental terms, but the human cost is equally debilitating. We don’t just need mass amounts of resources to manufacture our SUVs and Holister tee-shirts, but we need people to work in factories and farms. Someone’s water catches the waste from industrial plants and someone’s land lies fallow after too many years of exposure to chemical insecticides. The cost of consumption can’t just be measured in dollars, and the less we pay up front, the more hidden costs there are—the longer the hours in the factory, the harder the crackdown on union organizing, the shoddier the environmental protections regarding resource extraction.

It’s a cycle that cannot sustain itself. It’s a cycle we are propagating. Television screens across the world broadcast the “American Dream” via shows such as “Desperate House Wives” “CSI” and “House.” These shows are interspersed with advertising, tall blonde models, and promises of better lives if you simply buy the offered product. The idea of simply having enough does not come up. We are told that the system will collapse if the economy ceases to grow. It’s like a disease, and we are spreading it to the people we exploit in order to continue our own infection. 

The problem is it’s a system that can never sustain itself, at least not unless we simply accept endemic poverty as a necessary evil and condemn those unlucky enough to be born in the global south to a future without hope.

We cannot hang onto what we have always had and how we have always done things and hope to create a better world. The resources at our disposal are not unlimited. At some point the damage we are inflicting will begin to show. More sobering still is the reality that we cannot continue our lifestyle and simply expect that others will not want the same. We can’t assume that we deserve more than others. We cannot tell the rest of the world to rein in their consumption so that we can carry on. At some point we are going to have to find a lifestyle that does not include all the plastic knick-knacks found at Dollar Tree, or whole new wardrobes with each new school year. We’ll have to get used to eating food produced locally and to using public transportation. We have to find a different way to live, but we don’t have to for ourselves. The truth is it’s easier and in the best interest for us as individuals to simply carry on as always. We are, after all, the privileged few. We have to find a different way to live so that people like Rosalia and the children at Fransisco Coll can stop eating scraps out of the garbage, so that they can have a good education, have the health care they need, so that they can be treated like the human beings they are. We can’t all live like kings, so maybe it’s time that we (the privileged few) started living like people, so that others can too.

Callie