Hunger

In 2006 I went to Guatemala for three weeks of Spanish language training. I didn't learn much Spanish, but I did get quite an education. I got a front row seat to globalization. It wasn't pretty.

I spent three weeks in Antigua, a popular destination for tourists and Spanish learners. The language school was staffed by locals who may or may not have known anything about pedagogy, but it provided them income and most of their students, me excepted, were fairly comfortable in Spanish anyway. The city was old, the first capital of Guatemala, and therefore full of historic churches, a lovely square, and cobblestone streets. Amidst the historic grandeur of the past, however, my fellow students and I were constantly accosted by people selling beads, hand-woven clothes, and knick-knacks. They were overwhelmingly women and children and they were everywhere: on the street, in hotel lobbies, in cafes and in restaurants plying their wares until they sold something or were chased off. 

My host family provided two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. Meals were simple and good, but I noticed at the market that prices were expensive. My fellow students and I sometimes went to restaurants at night on weekends; Not fancy places, rather average. Surprisingly, prices were not any different from prices in the US. There were almost no Guatemalans to be seen in these establishments other than the staff and the ever-present women and dirty, barefoot children selling things. Our host mother said that life was hard for the average person. The wealthy were doing well, she said, but that was only a tiny fraction of the population. According to her, most people were struggling. 

The children I saw were gaunt. Hollow cheeks and rather short in stature, attesting to a life without enough to eat. One evening two children approached the table where some fellow Spanish teachers and I  were having dinner to sell us beads and hand-woven bracelets. Although we didn't buy anything, my Spanish speaking friends began talking to them. "Where are you from?", "Where are your parents?" (No parents. Grandmother took care of them.) "Where do you live? (Under a bridge.) We let them sit down and ordered dinner for them. The Guatemalan waiter didn't look too happy about two little waifs of maybe ten and eight sitting at the table with us, (we were surrounded by other tourists), but since they were there at our invitation, he didn't say anything to them. Toward the end of the meal, the grandmother came along and put the remains of the meal in a plastic bag. She looked very tired and very old, although I don't know for sure how old she was. They said thank you and disappeared into the night. I still remember their faces. 

Other than learning Spanish, the main purpose of our trip was providing school supplies to a school in a small Mayan village. We had all brought pencils, pens, paper and articles of clothing such as T-shirts, sandals, and jackets for the children. Their school was a small two story concrete building that had been constructed with aid from a German NGO. It seems that the Guatemalan government does not see  building schools and providing texts and teachers to poor Mayans as its responsibility. The teachers lined their students up for the supplies that they had organized into bundles.  The students were grateful. The teachers were grateful. I felt inadequate and quite humbled. But I could leave. They stayed. It was dizzying to look into the maw of poverty and exploitation

Guatemala changed me. I saw people hungry in a land of plenty. Most of the land was under the cultivation of multinationals. Rows and rows of bananas, broccoli, mangos, etc. People in the country walking miles to springs for clean water. Pickup truck "taxis" full of people in the back, roadsides littered with plastic bags ands water bottles. Roads you had to be careful on because of bandits. Tiny plots tilled on mountains because the best land had been confiscated for bananas. And then coffee. And then asparagus and broccoli. Gaunt children and a drunken man staring at our bus at a rest stop. Like Native Americans everywhere, the Mayans of Guatemala are exiles in their own land. These were the images of in-your-face globalization that have been branded into my memory. It's not happy. It's not up-lifting and it's not democratic. Guatemala's gift to me was to let me witness it first hand.