Avivara     

Jenny and Catherine: A friendship over the years

The following essay was written by Catherine Austin, who comes to Guatemala every year to volunteer with Avivara. Here she describes, after being away in the U.S. for a year, her meeting up again with her friend Jenny, a young woman, mother, and agricultural worker in Guatemala. 

February 3rd: The Visit

Nearly a week has gone by and I’ve been working with her daughters Marisol and Leticia in Avivara’s after-school program, but Jenny, my friend from past visits to Guatemala, has not yet appeared. Cuatro cuadras, four blocks, is a long distance to walk at night when you’ve been out cutting coffee for eleven hours, and there’s still dinner to make and clothes to wash. So I take the initiative. I go up the hill and knock on her metal door; Marisol, the oldest daughter, peeks out and then invites me in. “Pase adelante, Seño.”

The house is the same; a block room with a tin roof, just big enough to hold a couple of beds and five people, a bank of shelves covered by a curtain to hold clothes. A bare bulb projects from the wall and a small TV sits in the corner with tin-foil rabbit ears. The wood fired kitchen is outside, and the water running into the pila (all-purpose laundry sink) comes from a hose down the street. Half of what Julio, Jenny’s husband, earns in two weeks – Q400, or around $50 – goes to expenses: rent, electricity, water, and the obligatory municipal garbage service. The rest is for all other costs. Uniforms and school supplies for the kids, the Q50 computation fee that the “free” public school charges, medicine if someone gets sick, and food. Many times it is not enough, and Jenny, the manager of the household accounts, has to swallow her pride and borrow to cover the last few days before payday. She observes aloud that adults can bear it, but that kids get hungry and ask for food, regardless of whether there is any or not. Wearing out her credit and goodwill among friends and family even so, she pays back her debts the next week, and has never, for the life of her, been able to save.

When Jenny invites me to sit down on one of their two beds, Leticia, birthday girl of seven, is already tucked under the covers, and Juanito, soon to be four, is the energetic one, ushering in a tumbling cavalcade of puppies and attempting to pick them up one by one over the objections of his parents. We begin our catching up with the affirmation of a rumor – Does Caty have a boyfriend? What is he like? Might it be a partnership that can survive the ups and downs that Jenny and Julio have seen? When are you getting married? – She’s been teasing me for years about grandchildren for Ana (Ann Austin, my mom). Joking and laughing, with Juanito showing up periodically in different disguises, a towel, a clown’s wig, the conversation then turns to Julio’s job of many years at the tomato greenhouse. The business has suffered during the economic downturn, gone from 30 employees to 5, and Julio is now owed Q5,000 (over 6 months) in back wages. This has been no more forthcoming than his normal salary, which often arrives late and partial.

And then there is Jenny’s mysterious sickness – pain, weakness, belly swelling, which has yielded a dozen different unhelpful diagnoses from as many too-expensive doctor visits. Julio has put in applications at any number of jobs but nothing has come through besides the lost investment in time and paperwork. Y así nos quedamos. There we are. I rail a little against the job applications that require a Q200 police report which will expire in 3 months anyway, even before there is any chance of getting the job. The whole thing makes me angry, then tired. No tengo que quejarme though, no complaints…

It is coffee harvesting season in Guatemala and right now Jenny makes Q45 (under $6) each day for picking a hundred pounds of coffee at the nearby finca Bella Vista, where they keep a record of the workers and search them on their way out for any handful of coffee cherries secreted in a wrap or apron pocket. The finca processes the coffee and sells to a distributor at Q500 per hundred pounds. On a good day when the coffee is plentiful Jenny can pick 110, 125 pounds; but in the early season or at last picking it’s more likely to be 50 or 70. The more hands the better, so Jenny invites me along to help pick.

Tiredness winning out for the evening but still teasing each other, I give hugs and walk out into the darkened street. Four blocks down the hill, buenas noches to the few who are still out among the street dogs and the patterns of light on the cobblestones.

February 10th: Cutting Coffee

The black does not want to come off my hands, but it’s distinct from the trail mud that gets ground into the creases at home in Washington. Here it’s a mixture of syrup from the crushed cherries and an indeterminate powder – probably Fuego ash, gravilea dust, plain dirt, and a sprinkling of desiccated feces and plastic garbage residue. (Fuego is the volcano that spits incessantly; gravilea is the fast-growing, fast-shedding tree that is used to shade coffee plantations. And beyond just the dogs, Jenny (shown here harvesting coffee cherries) warns to watch your step among the leaf litter in case someone has been by performing their “necessary functions.”) I am hoping that it is mostly ash, given how much ends up in my lungs.

Today is mild; only one row out in the unsheltered sun before lunch where I handkerchiefed my burnable neck and sweat rolled down my spine. Afternoon clouds arrive without a burden of rain, and many of the plants we picked were satisfyingly laden. My waist stayed pretty un-sore (it helps to have a smaller basket that you have to empty more often. Slender rope bites when it’s holding 20 or 30 pounds) and my shoulders and hands don’t feel strain like I remember from last year. Ten hours of standing is plenty, though, punctuated by the occasional bit of walking and half an hour of sitting at lunch. I brought spinach and potato salad, to Jenny’s fried egg and ketchup and Cecilia’s gristly meat in tomato salsa. I feel bad about my pale contribution to both the communal diet and the morning’s work; I have a long way to go – if ever – before the coffee abounds for me as it does for Jenny and her sister. Even so, I contributed a basket to Chila and Lionel, and three to Jenny.

Near the end of the day the image etched into my mind is of the pickers in suspended animation, waiting for the man in charge of the platform scale. Everyone’s hands are black, arms dusty and scratched, head scarves and torn T-shirts not yet shed because the last task of the day is still to come. Teen-aged boys sit, quiet, on the edge of the scale. Women lean on the wall of the weighing house. Woven plastic sacks whose flour company logos are long worn away rest against each other like fat tipsy soldiers in a line, shreds of plastic tying their tops. Joining the tableaux, a girl comes up with a sack on her head and heaves it onto the platform. In the background, men shovel water and coffee into the tiers of washing troughs, seemingly suspended above gravilea fronds and the ubiquitous concrete block walls whose spires of rebar point into the cloud-textured sky.

Between Jenny and I, we harvested 195 pounds. And when I close my eyes at the end of the day, I see a branch with dark red oblongs, umbilical-marked, breaking their sticky juice onto my fingers.