Mothers’ Day

For most of you Mothers’ Day probably passed rather quietly, perhaps even pleasantly. Mothers’ Day was one was the first weekends we spent with our host families last May in the south, and it consisted of a fun Sunday meal at my host-grandma’s house. But this was in the ladino south, and I was curious to see how it would be celebrated here in Temux. It struck me as interesting that a culture sometimes notorious for mysogyny was celebrating a day of women, and I was curious to see how it would go down here. Truth be told, there was a get-together for all Huehue volunteers this weekend I probably would have chosen to go to rather than stay home, but our health comittee president had requested over a month ago that we be in Temux to celebrate Mothers’ Day with everyone. We like to be supportive, so we agreed to this.

A week or so before the big day Manuel told us he was going to gather money to create a “historical moment” in Temux. He invited the director of the school, the health center nurse, myself and Jaime, the three oldest chikays (grandmas) in town, and the town leaders all to a shared meal in the health center. He was so excited about this historical moment; “it’s about our sentiments, to show how we really feel about mothers, and to celebrate health and education on mothers day.” I was terribly impressed with his enthusiasm and how well he seemed to grasp the big picture of what’s important on this day, to him personally as well as to the town. He asked us if we could contribute to the meal and we told him sure. We told him our friend was coming for the weekend, and he said we had to convince her to stay and take part in the meal with us. He could hardly contain his excitement over the whole thing.

Sometimes I’m so surprised by our little village. In some ways it seems so unlike the Guatemala we heard about during training. Although I’ve mentioned before that the women seem to have been trained to be non-participatory and to not voice their opinions, I have never seen physical signs of abuse or heard horror stories of that nature in Temux. There is a definite gender divide with some obvious inequalities, but while working to encourage confidence in these women, I just kept thinking, “You know, it’s really not that bad, all things considered.” Ironically, Mothers’ Day, with its wordy plaudits to Virgin Mary and images of caucasian mothers with their white babies plastered in red hearts hanging from the ceiling as decorations, was quite the eye-opener.

Our friend Emily came in on Friday, and was welcomed by the town leaders who were in a meeting trying to set up our Emergency Action Plan. She was the subject of three impromptu applauses within 15 minutes. On Saturday we decided to show her the paisaje and go for hike, where we were intercepted by what seemed like half the town, but we had one particularly interesting interaction. One of the town leaders stopped us to ask us, on behalf of his wife, a little question that he had. It took him nearly 10 minutes to spit out this question, on behalf of his wife. It turns out they have a son in the US who was arrested for statutory rape and sentenced to 35 years in an Arizona prison, but in the last 3 months no one has been able to contact him, and he’s stopped writing letters. They’re concerned about where he is and if he’s ok. The question from this mother, “Is there anything you could do to help us find out if my son is ok?” I just happen to have a cousin who is an immigration lawyer. I told them if they gave me his name and information I could contact my cousin to see what we could do, but I could make no promises. They told me they had two other sons working illegally in the US and they’d have one call me to tell me the whole story if I wanted them to. I left my number with the family to pass along to their sons.

We continued on our walk talking about the case. Supposedly the guy was 21 and his girlfriend/mother of his child was 15. Her parents did not press charges, but they told the guy he had to be responsible for his child and take the girl to her medical appointments, but somehow the case was found out and the guy was arrested anyway. This seemed a really unfortunate, because that’s a fairly standard relationship here. So this boy gets to the US, and is acting under what he views as pretty “normal” circumstances, and he lands in an American prison for 35 years? That sentence seems incredibly harsh, so we wonder is this a typical story here where some detail we’d deem very important was just left out? Who knows… But we do know that the way things work here, boys don’t have a lot of responsibilities. I feel because of this they’re generally very immature. In my opinion/experience, a 21 year old rural Guatemalan male does not have the maturity or life experience of a 21 year old American guy, and we tend to view 21 year old guys in the US as pretty immature in their own right. On the other hand, a Guatemalan girl is handed a mountain of responsibilities as soon as she’s old enough to start participating, about the age of 6 or 7. By the time the girls here turn 12 they can run a household nearly as well as their own mothers can, which I guess is good since they often end up becoming mothers themselves in the next year or two. So if you look at this statutory rape case from the US through the Guatemalan cultural lense it seems unfair that he was ever charged for anything.

Please DO NOT mistake this as me supporting teenage pregnancy; I would rather it not happen anywhere, and we do teach the health risks of such early pregnancies in our health talks. But the fact is that in many countries around the world teenage pregnancy is the norm, not the exception. I’ve read some essays and critiques that charge American culture with inventing “adolescence”, a time of learning and experiencing life without the burdens of having a spouse or children to take care of. Thus in Guatemala and many other countries teenage pregnancy is not treated as a problem to be eradicated like we treat in the US because the innocence of adolescence we’re trying to protect doesn’t always exist in other cultures. Turns out the missing piece of information was that the girl was 12 year old, and the case was reported by the clinic she went to for prenatal care. Twelve was a lot harder for me to stomach, but still falls into the bounds of normalcy here. In this story we have one mother suffering because she doesn’t know where her son is or if he’s alright, and another much younger mother who’s left alone to raise her child as the babies father is in jail. We are trying to locate the guy with the help of my cousin, just to see if he’s alright, to give the family some peace of mind. Happy Mothers’ Day?

Enter Sunday, the BIG DAY. Bombas began to go off as early as 4 am, huge jarring explosions and marimba music was broadcast over the loud speakers in the center of the village. Happy Mothers’ Day! I am glad on, so many occasions, that I sleep in ear-plugs. By 8 in the morning we watched from our window, a bustling school yard, kids in their school uniforms on a Sunday, everyone scrubbed clean and dressed in their nicest clothes. The teachers, most of whom live in town, had come out to the village to lead the ceremonies, children presenting little skits of thanks and celebrations to their mothers. It appeared to be a very happy affair from our little window. Generally on big celebration days like this we stay away all morning to have to some personal time and gear up for a long afternoon and evening of cultural exchange. That’s how we played it on this Sunday morning, even more so because Emily was visiting us. We spent the morning debating whether she’d go home or stay for the party as had been requested, and finally we talked her in to staying one more night. I called Manuel around noon to make sure the plans were all in order for the party/ meal in the health center we’d heard would start at 3. His wife answered the phone, which is always awkward for me because she doesn’t speak Spanish very well, and I don’t speak Q’anjob’al very well, but eventually I got her to pass the phone to him. He was slurring drunk. When I asked about the meal he said, “Oh, we’re not doing that today, all the leaders are drunk.” So much for historical moments, and expressions of profound sentiments. Happy Mothers’ Day.

We decided we’d run into the Sunday market since Emily was staying an extra day and we were no longer having food provided for us in the afternoon. When we got back we had all the ingredients to make a cake for all the mothers in our host family, except sugar. I ran down to the store, and found it filled with cigarette smoke. Manuel was buying beers as his wife stood by his side, like she was shielding him from people, making sure he didn’t do or say anything too regrettable. I glanced in the back corner and saw that most of the male school teachers as well as a few local guys, squinty-eyed,leaning on one another and the stacks of soda crates for support as they downed drinks together. This store is located right across the road from the school. Kids were running in and out all day. I couldn’t help but think what wonderful examples they were setting for the kids. I returned to hide in my house and bake a cake to share with our favorite local mothers.

We’d purchased a little gift for Lina, Nas’ wife, to present along with the cake, and around dinner time we went over to the house to share with them. Thankfully, as is usually the case, Nas was completely sober and had spent the day relaxing with the family as did some of our other favorite town leaders. I told the Lina, Reina, Gela, Masha and Lena that, being the moms, they got to decide if they wanted to eat the whole cake themselves, or if they wanted to share with their kids. They laughed, very amused. That would be so unlike them here. EVERYTHING in that house is always divided into fair parts for sharing, and the mothers last of anyone would ever imagine keeping bigger pieces for themselves, but they played along laughing and said they’d eat it all themselves, to the protests of the kids who wanted in on the cake. Then we split it into 20 some pieces and dished it out to everyone as custom dictates. Earlier in the week we’d told the whole community that we’d come out to dance the marimba with them and dress in the traje, so the family began dressing the Emilys after we finished the cake, and off we went to the marimba.

Dressing up and dancing with them is such a little thing to us, but people get so excited to see us out and dressed. Their excitement has become our biggest reason for doing it. They feel like we respect and support their culture, and they always tell us that we’re so good at dancing to the marimba! Sometimes I wonder if we’ve fooled them into thinking we like the marimba as much as they do. But I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to like marimba as much as they do. Their unwavering devotion to marimba is something else. But we danced and danced 4 or 5 sets. The little girls danced with Fletch while a few local guys asked me to dance (and the rule we’ve devised is that Jaime “doesn’t allow” me to dance with anyone who is drunk), and Emily took turns with various women and guys. Drunk men stumbled in and around the circle, falling down and coming up covered in dust. Emily is a photographer and told us that once she asked if she could photograph a dance in her town. The town leaders told her she could, but only if she came early in the day, because at night people started dancing with all sorts of partners and if she took incriminating pictures that made it back to the US, then there could be problems. Have we mentioned that this dance involves standing side by side, men keep their hands clasped behind their back, and the women keep their hands straight down at their sides. What kind of incriminating photos could be taken of this dance?! If that doesn’t speak to the conservatism of this culture, I don’t know what does. That is also the reason that lots of women end up dancing with their sisters or sisters-in-laws or no one at all. In the case of all our host sisters, whose husbands are all in the US, they come to the dance simply to watch since they can’t safely dance with anyone without starting rumors. So they and lots of mothers sat along the walls watching on, as we danced set after set in circles, and maybe they had the easier lot since the women whose husbands are here spent much of the evening taking care of the inebriated spouses. Happy Mothers’ Day.

I was glad when we finally came home to settle in for the evening. I was feeling pretty down about the whole thing, but relieved that it was over. Turns out it wasn’t. Monday morning after Emily left I went to visit the kitchen and chit chat with everyone. When I walked in a man I didn’t recognize was passed out on the floor. They’d thrown a blanket on top of him. Everyone seemed to be largely ignoring his odd presence there, stepping over and around him. The grandma came in to take her seat in the corner by the fire as he began to wake up and thrash his legs about. Mind you, she’s nearly blind and walks with a cane, but even so it took two other people to guide her around his thrashing legs and help her to her seat as she squealed, “Ay!Ay!Ay!” Annoyingly, he saw me and tried to begin speaking English, and then I tried to ignore him like everyone else did. As he came to, I took leave of the house, but he was there all day. Every time I went over to get water or to wash dishes, he was ranting and raving, kicking the dogs around, scaring the kids.

Reina told me later that he was a cousin and they kept him at their house because he’d end up beating his wife he went home. “He keeps telling my dad he wants more kids”. I asked her how many kids he has. “Mmm, I think he has 8 or so. The worst part is that his oldest son had to drop out of school when he was deported from the U.S., and he only had half a year to go before he finished nursing school. So me and Rigo (her brother) and my dad are all paying for him, it’s a loan he’ll pay back, to finish school so he can at least find a job. And here his dad is completely drunk. He beats his wife if he thinks she’s not getting pregnant fast enough, and he tells her he’ll leave her if she doesn’t keep having babies, but he can’t even pay for the ones he has.” I felt slightly ill. We finished up talking and I went home.

Later in the afternoon Fletch and I were working in the greenhouse when Masha came by to check out what we were doing. Michelle was strapped to her back, she told me, because she was scared of the bolo (drunk guy) at the house and didn’t want to be without her mother. But she wanted to inform us there was a muerto, someone had just died. She doesn’t speak much Spanish, so we didn’t get the story from her. Reina stopped by about 15 minutes later to tell us the same thing, and I asked her what happened. “It’s a guy who hung himself. Did you see him stumbling around this morning? I saw him down on the road. He just got sent back from the U.S. by his dad who said he was drinking too much. He’s had problems since he got back. They said he was using cocaine in the states. Last night he was so drunk he started hitting his wife and trying to strangle her, but his uncle stepped in to defend her. Then he started hitting his uncle. They don’t live here, so when morning came his wife took their baby and went back to their home town. He was staying at his grandma’s house, and they had someone watching him all morning. He told the guy watching him that he was going to sleep so the guy left. When he was alone, he hung himself with a cord.” This guy was only 19 years old, so who knows how young and terrified his wife was. So at this point I was wondering, would this awful saga of Mothers’ Day ever end!?

The mother of the deceased had come to get the body and the town leaders convinced her not to take it out of town, rather to bury him here. Apparently if they moved the body from here to his home town there would be an investigation of his death and no one wanted to mess with that. That meant we listened to two days of funeral music coming from his grandma’s house up the hill until they finally buried him on Wednesday. And believe it or not, I was privy to even worse stories of abuse in the interim, as though this death brought up a bunch of dirty secrets everyone needed to whisper to get off their shoulders. I was disturbed and depressed.

You know, it’s not that these thing don’t happen in the U.S. They do, and it’s just as disgusting and awful that they happen there. But we have recourse for perpetrators of such violence. We have safe houses for abused women. We have laws and police officers who enforce them. That doesn’t mean that all bad-deeds are punished. But it does mean that such violence and abuse aren’t accepted as common place and/or due course for domestic disputes. Mothers’ Day and the week following shook my faith in the possibility of progress here. A community, a state, a nation, a world, CANNOT develop if they subject half their citizens, to inferior status. The men here are given so little responsibility, and yet they’re given responsibility for everything, without being held accountable to anyone. What is incentive for them to change? It’s a problem that affects everything we’re trying to do here. I find it even more troubling how this is the case in a community where religion is used to explain everything. Where in their religion do they find justification for acting this way? I find myself losing more and more respect for religion here. But at the same time, I think if there’s anything males here will respond to it is the Church. So I began to wish there was some way these churches could begin educational campaigns to teach men how to be responsible fathers/husbands/members of society in general. I don’t know what we could do to foster that, but I keep thinking about it. This problem is just so huge. It’s taken me a while to digest all this information and in turn to be able to write about it.

Thankfully, the end of this awful week coincided with our first weekend out of site in almost a month. I was ready to run away for awhile. It helped to have a weekend to talk to people who understood where I was coming from, to put some perspective and distance between myself and these events. And I didn’t run away for good. Here we are back at work again, and there is plenty of work to do.