the mountain school, part II

I didn't get to know Georgina or Ariel very well - Ariel was in Xela most of the time and Georgina wasn't very talkative, although I talked with her a couple times while helping with the dishes or collecting water the adjacent community that has a few water taps. She carried the water on her head, but when I imitated this she laughed a bit and showed me how men instead carry water on a shoulder. It seemed less efficient to me, but so I did it. Fatima has no electricity or water taps, because installing a tap from the water system of Santa Maria costs about $500, a sum of money that no one here can afford. In the meanwhile the residents get water from a few minutes walk away from Nuevo San Jose, or from the escuela de la montana. The primary long-term goal of the community right now is to find $10,000 in funding to install a potable water system from a spring up the hill for everyone in the community. These costs certainly put provide a different perspective to the prices of certain things in my own life, especially things which aren't as important as having water. I didn't take any pictures of my family here; I just didn't feel comfortable getting out my little digital camera which is worth almost as much as a water tap would be.

Much of my time in the house was spent playing card games, building houses of cards, or reading to the 6-year-old daughter Dora, who loved playing and having fun. However my highlight of the week in the house was Saturday night when the whole family except for Rosalia went into Xela, and after a week of hardly speaking at all with Rosalia she spent 2 hours telling us stories about the labour struggle which resulted in the formation of Fatima, about how her deceased husband tried to keep working after he lost his eyes when a bomb exploded in front of him, and about her life now. She gets up a 3am every morning to start preparing breakfast and lunch for her son who starts work at 5 at a sawmill. She also help Georgina prepare breakfast, lunch and dinner at at 7:00, 12:15 and 5:30 for the students and the rest of the family, thankfully with an afternoon siesta in between. Dinner is a couple hours earlier here than in Xela, because there's no light to work by after dark. It sounds like a tough life, but she says it's much better than when they worked on the coffee finca before the formation of Fatima - there was a time when she had to get up at 1am to start preparing food for the family, when the men were being sent 3 hours by bus to a mango plantation, leaving at 3am every morning and returning at 9-10pm every night. Her sole income now is from feeding students of the escuela de la montana. I asked Rosalia if hosting students paid sufficiently and she said yes, at least when the students eat "mas o menos normal" (more or less normal), like us. That made me smile, given how abnormal my vegan diet seems to most people.

The community of Fatima operates a small, fair-trade, organic coffee colectiva which would be really neat to visit during the harvest season Nov - Jan. During this time many of the residents work on the nearby big coffee finca, then come home on the weekends and work their own fields. The school took us on a tour of the big coffee finca which has now diversified into growing flowers and avocadoes as well since the big crash in wholesale coffee prices in the last 10 years. It had beautiful but abandoned and rotting 100-year-old colonial home of the dueno (boss), on-site residences and a school which are mostly empty now. Saw a fellow spraying liquid from an insecticide canister on the avocado plants, wearing no protective gear but rubber boots, pants, and a T-shirt. Other students said they had seen this at other fincas as well, and that it's normal practice in Guatemala. Standard pay here for picking coffee here is around Q20/day for men and Q12/day for women (Q6=CDN$1). For a 1-lb bag of coffee that you can buy in Canada, that works out to 2 or 3 cents going to the person who picked those beans for you. It's not a living wage, even in Guatemala, but enough to help one become malnourished a little less quickly than with no job at all. The difference in price between fair-trade and "regular" coffee is caused by the lesser demand and economies of scale for fair-trade coffee, not by the difference in pay to the workers. Something to think about. I'm still thinking about if, when, or how I will eat imported tropical foods when I return to Canada, but I'll probably wait to write about this in my reflections at the end of this trip.

Ah, one other highlight of the escuela de la montana was eating almost every day the fresh, organic bananas that grow on the grounds as shade trees for the coffee plants. They were by far, the sweetest and most delicious bananas I have ever tasted.