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We stopped at one of the elders homes and they invited us in.. We visited about their new home, the mudslide and the elder centre. Candelaria the woman started crying as she told us about the mudslide. They had a son in law, daughter and granddaughter killed in it. She said she thinks about them all the time and how hard her daughter’s life was. They said they like their new home. Candelaria walks to the elder centre 3 times a week and has a meal. It takes her over an hour each way. She also brings food back to her husband. They said they stretch their food and have it for breakfast the next day. She said her husband tells her sometimes that it is too far and she is too old to walk. She said she does it because it is not just the food but she is with her friends and they can talk and laugh and she forgets about her life and how hard it has been. Chonita says that Candelaria sits with a group of her friends and they come about 10 and leave about 1. They have a good time just being together. I realize more and more that the elder centre isn’t just about food but it gives the elders friendship, and hope.  After visiting with this couple we went a bit further and stopped at one of our scholarship student’s homes. Diego Santiago and his family were in the mudslide and lost everything. They lived in the temporary housing for 3 years and I had visited them with a group in June when I was here. We had crowded into their tiny one room home. This was so much better. Since it was Saturday Diego was gone selling wood on the street. Diego is our student who wants to become a doctor. We always want to help this family but we aren’t sure how to do that without just handing them money. I think we finally found a small solution. Our elder centre was broken into a few weeks ago. (More about that later) I thought it would be good if we could have a guard there at night. They wouldn’t have to do anything but just sleep there by the door so thieves would know they were there. Chonita asked Jose, Diego’s father to come and be the guard. Jose is older as Diego is the youngest of about 9 children. He has worked his whole life hauling wood from the mountains and is now getting quite crippled up. When Chonita asked Jose to be the guard he said yes, he would do that. It would mean he would walk an hour to the centre at night and then an hour back home in the morning. He said his son was receiving a scholarship and he would help where needed. He didn’t realize we were going to pay him. Every night for a week he walked the distance and came and then walked home early in the morning to again go to the mountains and gather wood. When I got here Vikki, Diana and I helped Chonita figure out how much we would pay him. We wanted to pay him enough so that he could get a Tuk Tuk to ride when he wanted to. Diana, Chonita, Vikki and I figured out what his pay would be… Vikki and I of course thought we should pay him more, but I know that Chonita and Diana know best. Chonita told him that evening when he came that we would be paying him… He was very thankful and said he did not expect it. He also said that he would be happy to do anything else we needed because we were paying him. He is one of the most humble people that I have ever met… This small amount will help the family but not enough to sustain them totally. We will have to be creative in thinking what else we can do as he won’t be able to gather wood much longer. On our way back to the center we stopped quickly at the Hospalito to take a photo of Cristobel who is the young man that we will be sponsoring at the University. When we arrived back at the centre Rose and her sister Val were there along with Terry and Rocky. It was good to see all of them… Chonita then took Terry, Felipa, Vikki, Diana and I to look at some land and houses. Chonita is determined that someday we should build an elder centre that has a large room for the elders and rooms where they can stay if they are ill. This is a far off dream but I think we need to at least start looking and see if it is ever feasible. It is good to have Terry with us because he deals with real estate and knows much more about this than Vikki and I. We looked at several houses and several pieces of land. The land here is very expensive and the houses and land we looked at were way above our budget. It is good to look though and maybe someday it will happen. But for now we really like the centre where we are. I should tell you a little about the elder centre. We (including the owner) just did some major construction. There were two rooms in front that were open to the outside with just bars. Windows were put in both of these rooms and the floors were filled in. They had dirt before for small gardens where nothing would grow. One side was made into an office with a sliding door and the other room was made into a nice little sun room for the elders to eat. This is the room where we ate all our meals and was so nice and bright. We redid several things on the second floor. We put in a shower, made a small kitchen and have tried to redo 2 bedrooms so we can rent them out. We are always looking for sustainability and this is one way that the centre can make some money. Everything really looks nice and they had one construction man and the rest was done by Chonita, Bernavela, Felipa, Rosa and Rocky. They have quite some stories about hauling dirt, making cement, and hauling iron in the back of a truck from Guatemala City. Chonita had a wonderful story about one of the elders. She said one day this elder came to the centre and was just sobbing. Chonita was really concerned and she said ,”What is the problem, are you sick, do we need to take you to the Hospalito?” She said the elder could hardly stop crying and said, “ No, I am not ill.” Chonita then thought something had happened or she was really distressed about something in the past. Again, the elder said no that was not the problem. Finally the elder stopped long enough to say….. “I am crying because I am happy”. Chonita asked her why and she said, “ I can’t believe Americans helped make such a wonderful place for us… I think now I will move from where I usually sit and I am going to sit in the new room”. I thought this really shows how important this place is to our elders. Thank you to all of you who sponsor them. This is Vikki taking over for Diane for awhile. In the afternoon, Diane and I spent time with Chonita and Diana planning for the elder center for next year. In Guatemala as in the United States, food costs are going up so we needed to increase the food budget. When we were at the hospitalito, we decided that we needed a contact at the elder center who would work with the hospitalito on records and preventative care as well taking care of elder illnesses. We now have two women who work at the elder center with Chonita—Felipa and Bernavela. Both women have been doing the cooking, tortilla making, serving, and cleaning for the elders. In addition, Felipa has been doing the bookwork for the center. Our volunteers—Rose and Rocky—have been helping with the cooking and taking elders to the hospitalito but both will be gone next year. So for next year, Felipa will do less work in the kitchen and take on the responsibility of being the contact with the hospitalito and we will hire someone who can make tortillas. Chonita, Bernavela, and Felipa make the elder center a wonderful place for the “ancianos” and we are very thankful for each one of them. Diane had planned to meet Amanda and another friend at the Posada between 5 and 7 so we decided to go there and have dessert before our evening meal. Amanda was gone by the time we got there—it’s hard to wait with a young child—but we all were able to get a great dessert. Diane did get some time to visit with her friend Susie while the rest of us went back to the center. We had dinner and then were treated to a sing-along with Rocky playing the guitar and Terry playing the banjo. Sunday, October 12 After eating breakfast, Chonita, Diana, Diane and I got a boat to San Juan. The lake was again smooth and the ride to San Juan was beautiful. Everything is green since we are at the end of the rainy season. At --San Juan we looked at products of the women who were growing their own cotton before the mudslides. Their cotton grew in some natural colors—shades of brown and green—as well as white and they use natural dyes to get other colors. We purchased shawls, scarves, ponchos and tablecloths. The boat driver waited for us and took us on to Pana. Chonita came with us on this trip so we could find some rugs for the rooms in the center that we want to rent. We found some nice rugs at the first place we stopped and then had lunch before taking Chonita to the boat and getting on the road back to Guatemala City. We arrived back at the center in the early evening. Monday, October 13 We were up early today as we had a meeting with the dean of the medical school at the Universidad Mariano Galvez. Angie, the woman who runs Casa Guatemala, met us there for the meeting. We are working with Angie to hire a doctor who would have a clinic at the orphanage and would also travel to the nearby 14 villages to provide basic health care. We are also looking at the possibility of having fourth year medical students at the University of South Dakota come to work in the clinic as one of their practicums. We were visiting the medical school here to see if they would be willing to meet with staff from the USD medical school to do some cooperative work. The dean was very interested in exploring possible collaborations between the two medical schools. We had a late breakfast with Angie and then came back to the center. Virginia was at the center when we got back. Virginia, Diane and I met with four women from the group Corazon de Mujer (Heart of Woman). CEDEPCA is a Presbyterian group which has been working in Guatemala for a long time. They have been providing monthly training to Corazon de Mujer on healthy families. Several years ago, Diane met the women of this group and we have sold some of their products in the store but there had not been contact for awhile. Christina, a woman working for CEDEPCA, also met with us. She is just finishing an evaluation process to determine what is the best thing they can do to help this group. The group has sold products to CEDEPCA for several years and these products are taken to the US and sold in churches. With the poor economy, the women are not getting many orders for their products. We showed the group some new products Virginia had worked on with another group and Virginia showed them some ideas for new products that she was working on for them. Virginia is doing a workshop for artisans in November and she invited the women to attend. We hope CEDEPCA will choose to help this group update their products and get their “infrastructure” solid (create a current catalog of products, etc). After lunch five women from Flor de Campo came to the center. They are one of the neatest groups we work with. They came to the third floor of the centre. Sat down on the floor and proceeded to take out some food they had made. It was two vegetables called guisquil and camote. They were very good. They tasted like squash and potato. They had cooked these and brought them all the way on the bus. After we ate and visited we started. Virginia is working with these women on new designs for woven fabric. They are working with UPAVIM, another women’s group, to provide the fabric UPAVIM uses in its bags, kitchen products and children’s products. Virginia worked with them on some of the issues they had with the new designs and gave them three more designs for new fabrics. In the middle of this year, Virginia changed her focus to working with groups to help them come up with new designs for fabrics and new products. The whole process of designing is very interesting. Virginia had swatches from the colors she wanted on a long piece of cardboard and the women matched it in their weavings. We will include a photo of this so you can see what it looks like. Isabel, one of our scholarship students from the Mayan Hands group lives here at the centre and is a weaver. She is going to college in accounting but she is Virginia’s assistant in design. Virginia designs a piece of cloth and Isabel weaves it… It would be great if Isabel could eventually be our field worker and go to the communities and work with the women… I think within a year or two she will be able to do that. We will let you know when these new products are in the store and at our sales in places other than the store. There are some beautiful items coming!   Last year the Flor de Campo women said they wanted to help the members of the group keep their children in school. Instead of scholarships, they asked for school supplies and the inscription fee at the beginning of the school year. They brought us information about the cost of this for each grade in primary and middle school and a list of the children who are in primary or middle school. Next year we will be giving this group about $1300 for supplies and inscription. (This is Diane writing now… early in the morning and no one is up.. so I am adding to Vikki’s note and getting this out.) This whole process with the women sounds so simple but took about 3 hours. They presented all the names of the weavers who had children in elementary and middle school. There are 30 women in the group but only 19 of them have children that are this age. We asked about how fair this was to the 11 women who were not getting the benefit.. They talked for awhile amongst themselves and than said that the 11 women who did not have children this age could work more and earn more money but the 19 women had children and couldn’t work as much and needed the extra help with school supplies.. They didn’t even think about “fairness”…. Their fairness was helping the other women in the group… An interesting concept for us North Americans. It simply amazes me sometimes how much I learn from the women and groups that we work with…. It sometimes is a complete shift in thinking. When we were working out how to buy the school supplies it was my thought that Diana would buy them in bulk and then take them to the village. I of course thought we would save money… Vikki interjected that she thought that Diana had enough to do and that counting the time that Diana would have to do this we would probably not save any money. This brought us all back to the women…. We thought.. why are we deciding for them how to do this? This is part of the learning process for them and they are capable of deciding how they want to distribute the supplies or money. We then told them they were in charge of how they wanted to do this, they then had quite a discussion amongst themselves. . After the discussion they said they would hold a meeting with all 30 of the women and come to a consensus of how this would be done. They did not think it was right for 5 of them to make the decision… Hmmmm consensus building.. How many times have I heard that language in the US lately? We then discussed with the women how long we would continue with this support. It was decided that we would commit to 2 years… The second year the students would have to bring their grades from the first year and if they had passed their classes they would again get the support. The women said this would prompt the mothers to push their children a little harder and would also make the children want to do better. There will be 54 children receiving help. The cost will be from $15.00 each to $36.00 each. Vikki and I think we will put this out on our alternative gift list. This would be a great birthday or Christmas gift instead of the usual items we buy… Please think about this as you are buying gifts. The Flor de Campo women ate dinner with us and then stayed overnight. They will be getting up early in the morning to attend other meetings before traveling home. All is well here… we are healthy and working hard. Diane and Vikki |