Tuesday, July 31, 2007

“Si avanzo, síganme. Si me detengo, empújame.” “If I advance, follow me. If I fall behind, push me.” -Commandante Tacho

Screw the masks and the pop cultural preoccupation with Subcommandante Marcos as a leader that he is really not.  I´m over the iconography, and the mainstream loss of interest in Zapatista symbolism.  Zapatismo is far more than any newspaper article I´ve ever skimmed or book I´ve ever read.  It is an anti-capitalist movement that is doing exactly what it is saying it´s doing: building a community and a way of life that is autonomous from the state that hasn´t kept its many promises for many many years.  My last week was spent attending the second encuentro (encounter) between the pueblos of the Zapatistas and the pueblos of the world.  About 3,000 people from indigenous communities a few miles away to groups of people from 46 different countries converged on Chiapas, Mexico in one of several autonomous zones inhabited by the famous Zapatistas. 
The Zapatistas are a group of indigenous Maya from Southern Mexico who in 1994 decided to say enough is enough and decided to take control of and occupy their lands and declare themselves autonomous from the Mexican government.  The night that the occupation began, it was extremely cold in Chiapas so many of the Zapatistas were wearing face masks which were assumed, by the press, to be part of their uniform, and that point on they kept the masks as a symbolic representation of how the indigenous people have been hidden from view, and basically ignored by their colonizers for years.  Conversely, wearing the black masks to cover their faces is a way for them to be seen, and has given the movement a mysticism, and an international appeal that can only be described as an odd mix of intimidation and infatuation.  They hide by being seen and are seen by hiding.  At the same time, one of the organizers of the movement, a Mexican university professor who goes by the name Subcommandante Marcos became the mouthpeice of the movement being perhaps the only one in it who has mastered the Spanish language.  Most of the people in the territory speak only a little Spanish and their native Tsotsil, Tzeltal, Chol or Tojolabal.  Marcos poetic and self-deprecating sense of humor and incredible talent for communicating beautifully the demands of the Zapatistas, along with long-time encrypted identity and husky voice hidden behind a black mask and an ever-smoking pipe have turned him into both a revolutionary and pop-culture and for some, an international sex symbol. 
Since 1994, after the government failed to keep the promises it made in the peace negotiations, the Zapatistas have began constructing autonomous forms of government, health, education, and collective community works.  They formed what are called the Juntas de Buen Gobierno, or the good governmenta board, a rotating board of community members that makes decisions in the community using complete consensus.  They place the most emphasis on educating the children to be part of the community rather than preparing them to leave it and be better than it.  They farm and produce food and collectively so that they can provide for themselves in a rejection of the “free” market economy that provides them with NO markets for their goods, nor a price that is high enough to make them worth growing.  The Encuentro was essentially an opportunity for people to hear their words, learn how their communities function and for people to network and discuss ways to bring autonomy and self-organization to their own communities and to support the struggles of people in other places.  The Zapatistas do not have an ideology, or a bible, or a doctrine which makes them different than all other historical left-wing revolutionary movements.  They dream of a “world where many worlds can fit,” and from this has emerged the Other Campaign, an international movement perpetuated by collectives of people who want to to try and build lives and communities where consumption of corporate goods and services are not the only way to be happy or the only way to survive.  People doing things for themselves.  No racist national government.  No health care systems designed to make money instead of making people better.  No corporate control of absolutely everything we do, see, and hear. 
Now that the foundation has been built I can get down to describing the logistics.  Katie and I left San Cristóbal on Sunday to Oventic, the first of the different forums for the Encuentro only to miss the Caravan of 3,000 people already headed to the next spot.  Oventic is where we will be going to language school next week, and the first time that Katie and I had ever stepped foot into an autonomous municipality.  We were both awestruck when we arrived at the front gate being guarded by an older, masked Zapatista woman (by the way, 60% of leadership positions are occupied by women…hell yea) who told us that the caravan had left.  We decided to check with the vigilancia of the community to make sure they were ready for our arrival in a couple weeks.  We showed them our letters of accreditation to attend the school, and after discovering that virtually no one in the community had any idea what we were talking about, we were given an audience with the Good Government Board.  Three women, Three Men.  6 masks queitly staring at us as I try nervously to explain why after all the gringos have already left, we still remain in their community.  They conferred quietly in Tsotsil amongst themselves while we looked around the colorfully painted walls at photos of Subcommandante, beautiful faces of children, and weird pendants of schools and universities ununiformly scattered around.  After a while they said they would see us in a couple weeks, and Katie and I patiently filed out of the wooded room, trying to suspend shock and disbelief for the other side of the gate.  That is not what I expected my first encounter with the people who are collectively actualizing my political and organizational dreams day in and day out to be like. 
We left for Morelia, the sight of the next meeting, the next morning after finding three of my friends from Boston, Mike GW, Kelly and James, in San Cristóbal that evening who were also attending the Encuentro, and had just arrived from Oaxaca where they were covering the Guelaguetza marches in Oaxaca for Indymedia.  (After about a four hour trip, we arrived at Morelia: an expansive sea of tents, tarp encampments, and tiny smoking wooden shacks swarming with people of all shapes, colors and sizes moving back and forth between their dusty homes away from home to the plenaries where panels of stoic, masked Zapatistas spoke about the functioning of the autonomous health, education, and government structures in their communites.  We decided to show up at this thing during the rainy season with no tent so we rolled out our sleeping bag in a long open shack with a laminate, tin roof on a floor of some of the sharpest gravel I´ve ever encountered.  Other´s strung hammocks from the beems, only to be awoken at 6am by the Zapatista alarm clock: extremely lound Mexican ranchero music being pumped over the loud speakers to rouse the beer-deprived revolutionaries from their 5 hours of tossing, turning and dodging rain intrusion.  We are talking that music that when scanning through radio stations you hear and either skip immediately or jokingly dance to for a couple seconds as if you love it and are going to keep it there just to annoy whoever else is in the car.  The exact same songs and music were played every night during the “Baila Popular” or the 20 minutes to 7 hours of dancing that would occur each night after the plenaries…the grassy, social meeting ground between the Zapatistas and the non-indigenous.  I´ve grown to love and hate that bouncy tuba beat so thoroughly and so equally that I now remain only neutral and nostalgic.
The days were spent attending the plenaries, slamming plate-fulls of beans, rice and tortillas, and meeting incredible, wonderful, brilliant, friendly, unusual, extroardinary people that were always surrounding us on all sides.  The bathrooms were wooden planks surrounded by trashbags with holes cut in the ground, and frequented by gringos who obviously had never squatted before.  I learned how much more this movement was than just Marcos, but I also learned that despite the fact that he isn´t running the show, the Zapatistas still love him, and his presence or his anticipated presence would electrify the entire camp, and send people running to the stage to hear him.  Truck fulls of EZLN soldiers arrived the afternoon of the day he came to speak in Morelia.  That afternoon Katie and I had been wondering when he would make his appearance.  We were sitting on the stage in between plenaries, when we were approaced by three adorable Zapatista boys who came to chat.  They told us that they were going to do a sketch on stage with Marcos that night which we of course didn´t believe.  After nightfall, there they were, with the Sup, on stage, where he told the camp a children´s story.  My first time seeing the Sup was kindof anti-climactic.  I was far away and their were tons of Zapatista babies all around crying really loud so I couldn´t really hear. 
We were transferred last Thursday to the third meeting place of the Encuentro in La Realidad, a camp deep in the Lacandón Jungle for more popular dances, more plenaries on Zapatista community organization and more wonderful people.  Katie and I met a journalist for Narco News who let us sit in and participate in his interviews with different leaders of peasant movements in India and Thailand.  I also got to visit their clinic and learn a little bit about traditional and alternative medicinces the Zapatistas use.  Perhaps the most memorable moment of the meeting was the second night that a Zapatista asked me to dance.  His name was Juan Carlos and he was a teacher.  I had been asked to dance by a tiny Zapatista the night before, but that time we just danced irratically to the ranchero music without a word.  This time Juan Carlos and I chatted about our lives, and who we were.  Why did this just seem so normal?  I kept thinking to myself, the Zapatistas aren´t people that you make small talk with or dance with!  They are the m*therf*ing Zapatistas!  He asked me how old I was.  22 I said. He asked me to guess how old he was.  I said, I can only see your eyes.  He pulled up his mask so I could see his face.  That simple eh.  The Zapatistas would frequently walk around with their masks off or down but for some reason  I was so startled by the unmasking that happened right before me.  I asked him why sometimes he has it down and sometimes he pulls it up.  He said because he gets sweaty.  Oh.  I asked him what he thought about all these people coming to see and learn about his community.  He said, we also want to learn from you.  You struggle and organize in the U.S. too.  I wanted to say…hah, yea right. No we don´t.  But that wasn´t true.
The last night of the Encuentro, the Sup came out again in the third meeting space.  Katie and I and our new best most-wonderful friend Carwil and I were buying some juice on our way back from a quick dip in the river when we heard everyone saying that the Sup was in the Caracol (the camp) and they were closing down the store.  We got back just as he and the other Commandantes had come on stage.  He was there, pipe fuming, in the twilight, looking a little bit more portly than he did in the 90s.  He talked about where the Zapatistas look when the world is asking them where they look when they decide to do the things they do.  They look to the mountains to the east where they have buried their dead…where the moon comes up to complete its long slow kiss across the skin that is the night sky.  Sigh.  I thought he had left the Caracol when all the sudden I was gently pushed to the side by my friend James to make way for him and the other commanders who were walking right by us through the crowd. 
I had realized where I was and what I was doing and why I was here, and how the amazing thing about the masks and Marcos are the moments when you see what is behind them…the faces and the people.
I´m back in San Cristóbal.  I have that ever so familiar bowel ailment that I always seem to get once or twice when I come to Latin America.  I´m decompressing, and processing and cooking, and dancing.  I´m amazed.
This is my word,
Compañera Andrea
Posted by Andie at 23:39:36 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Saturday, July 21, 2007

“John Cena is fighting the the Great Khali tonight. He is huge! About your size.” -11 year-old boy comparing me to the largest wrestler in the WWE and reigning Heavyweight Champion

Here is the Great Khali, i.e. my fraternal twin, if anyone is interested: http://www.wwe.com/superstars/smackdown/thegreatkhali/photos1/ 
Height: 7 foot 3
Weight: 420 pounds
Thank God Chiapas looks so much like the Guatemalan highlands, because otherwise 14 hours of transit split between a bus, two taxis, a microbus and a rickshaw plus two immigration checkpoints, 3 security car screenings and 4 on-board document checks by federal police to collect bribes from people trying to cross illegally into mexico, might have been a little harder to stomach.  The solo border cross wasn´t as scary as the shocked look on the faces of all my friends and family when I said I would be doing it, though when the federal police emptied out an entire tightly-packed microbus only to go through MY bag and nothing else ( we are talking shoulder deep into the backpack, full cavity search, including removal of the plastic bag containing my under garments in front of all the passengers on the bus who already didnt want to sit next to me because I am tall, foreign, white and weird, sort of scenario) definitely tried my patience.  I spent about 40 minutes looking for a hotel that wasn´t on the list of those that aren´t supported by the federal police or right wing inteligencia this afternoon which only included one good slip, leaving me with an only a little bit bloody shin from the bottom of the knee to about halfway down the leg.  I miss Guatemala more than I ever thought I would, and if Katie wasn´t only a day away, I would sprint back into the arms of my almost overly hospitable aunt who was sure to warn me before I left about those people…those people that have…that army…with that man marcos…ay no he is no good..¨. “The Zapatistas?” I ask. “Oh I don´t know, I suppose so,” she says.  Ha…if only she knew.
My time in Tecpán was straight-up incredible.  So what if I had fleas in my bed, and a thirteen year-old girl sharing a room with me whose favorite nighttime, post-sleep activity is to experiment with different ringtones, and fall asleep with the light on.  I learned so much.  My new skills include finding the position of a baby in the womb, checking blood pressure, INJECTING PEOPLE, checking dilation of the cervix, finding a fetal heartbeat both manually, with a doppler device, and using a toilet paper tube, and convincing mayan ladies to let someone with virtually no skills or cualifications (me) poke and prod the crap out of them while still charging them 15 quetzales for the favor.  I really have learned how to do a lot, and I think it might be just enough to make me realize that this is a profession that I could really do, and hopefully even love doing.  Odilia is an incredible teacher.  She operates on the watch it once, maybe twice and then do it philosophy, so by the end I was doing the prenatal exams more/less by myself.  I unfortunately only got to go with her to one birth.  Slow month.  Though as luck would have it, two ladies went into labor the same day that I was being whisked off to Guatemala City to collect my new passport.  So I did get to be with them for parts of their labor despite ducking out before the grand finale.  Seeing the first birth was amazing, but a little anti-climactic because birth and pregnancy there, from what I could tell, is just not the major motion picture/tear fest that it is in the U.S.  I had to choke back some tears after adorably-purple baby Daniel was born because I would most certainly have been the only one showing any kind of obvious emotion (other than Rosita, the mom, who was screaming and stuff…which I believe indicates pain.)
Leaving Odilia and the kids was probably the hardest part.  You would think it would be impossible for one woman to raise 15 well-rounded kids all at once, but these kids are literally ALL good.  Every single one of them was so kind, and helpful, and loving and funny.  They share everything, and love to teach me things, and are just so freaking cute.  Except Luis Eduardo, aka Guicho, who has a bit of an anger problem and as one of his favorite activities while in fits of rage was threatening to throw my roll of toilett paper or some other delicate item over the balcony.  Still, leaving them was rough.  Although, Odilia´s mother in law, Doña Lya took it a little harder than even I, given that after handing me a meat-filled tamale, she said that this would probably be the last time we would ever see each other and started to cry.  I didn´t realize why she thought that until Odilia told me that she didn´t think she would live long enough to see me the next time I come to visit.   Here I was thinking she was being just a little bit dramatic.  Ughhhh.  God did I feel bad.  Man, I get chills just thinking about it.  I will especially miss my two angels, Meme (Manuel Orlando) and Coco (Sonia Carmelita), the 11 and 12 year-olds.  They were some of the most intelligent, kind people I have ever met.  The favorite pasttime of all the kids is to go look for wild mushrooms and rasberries in the woods, and down by the river.  Some of my best moments were walking around with them, and 8 to 9 other kids, usually with at least one or more little hands holding each of mine, with Meme and Coco, teaching me about all the different plants and mushrooms and yelling at me to whack branches of rasberries and cherries with a stick that they couldn´t reach.  I´m kindof convinced that my height is the only reason they actually like me, but I enjoy myself so I deal with it.  We would steal pears and peaches from the neighbors farms, all the kids either whispering or screaming, as if volume would prevent the neighbors from noticing three kids climbing around in their trees with six others face-planting into their best produce.
God there is so much to say.  The food was wonderful.  Beans, eggs, TONS of hand made (poorly-made if I was doing it) tortillas, greens, veggies etc.  They loved that I would eat pretty much anything they gave me, although I was seriously pissed the ONE time I tried to cook for them, all I did was cook some spinach Odilia gave me in a skillet with oil and garlic, and they wouldnt not TOUCH it.  I figured, they love green herbs, they cook the beans with garlic and they scortch the crap out of all sorts of things with oil so how could this be a miss???  Might as well have been the anti-christ.  One girl actually spit it out.  I mean I really didn´t love some of the food sometimes, and even would pick a stray piece of chicken out of my food sometimes (read: compromising personal convictions so not to offend) and they were by no means willing to excericize such politeness.  Sometimes I think I have conditioned myself to be so comfortable, and so culturally relative that it comes at the expense of expressing myself honestly about 90% of the time.  No exaggeration.  That was probably the only moment I was really straight up pissed but didn´t say anything.
Ok we gotta wrap this up.  My birthday passed like most other days.  Market.  Prenatal exams.  Trip with the kids to find flowers in the milpa.  The highlight was definitely when the older girls covered the ceiling over my bed with balloons that said¨”Happy Birthday Endie!”  Birthday occasionally misspelled, and Andie, always misspelled in the same adorable fashion.  Morenito, the three year-old, continued to wish me happy birthday every single day for the rest of my stay, which compensated for almost every single one of them forgetting the morning of, despite having asked me when my birthday was every single day since I had arrived.  It took them about 5 days to remember my name so I´m really not surprised.  I remembered 17 names and by 17 I mean 51 because they all have second names and nicknames in 48 hours and they couldn´t get mine to save their lives.  Once they did get it, the younger ones still cant pronounce their R´s so my name always came out And-lea.  And then despite the lack of R, in Andie, they perverted it to Andlay or otherwise just went Lea, depending on levels of linguistic development.  Precious.  In any case, I miss all of them dearly, and hope to god you all will let me tell you more stories when I see each one of you next.
I have no idea what this next month will be like but I think I am going to allow myself to be glad to be hear.  Thank you all for the birthday wishes. 
With love, (more for the people who actually had the patience to read all of this)
And-Lea
Posted by Andie at 17:08:00 | Permalink | Comments (5)

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Just Fifty Cents a Day: The Side of Child Sponsorship that Sally Struthers Doesn’t Want You to See

Here is a story I wrote a few days ago.  I don´t really have much time for an update but it is beautiful here and I like it a lot.  It´s a long one so don´t feel obligated to read the whole thing.  It gives kindof a glimpse of what I´m up to but I´ll write more later. 

Amor,

Andreita 

Odilia´s voice changed when she spoke to Doña Carmen on the phone.  She transformed from the confident, tough midwife who specialized in either scaring the crap out of you or soothing the baby out of you, to victimized mother of twelve who forgot all words but two, muchas and gracias, and of course Doña Carmen’s name.  Carmen serves who knows what function at the Christian Foundation for Children and Aging.  She had some how come across Odilia´s house as the perfect source of 6-10 year-old orphaned children attending school and capable of making candles and other handicrafts to send to well-meaning Americans with check books and bleeding hearts. Doña Odilia has 12 children, 10 still living with her in her home in a village outside of Tecpán, Guatemala and in January of this year acquired 5 additional mouths to feed after the death of her sister, who oddly, or better, eerily enough, may have died in the bed in which I am now lying.  The father is long gone and Odilia remains the only one with the means to take them in.  The house of her sister and the children is still standing, and by house I mean crumbling cinderblock frame stripped of its laminate roof, about 500 meters from here.  The kids are 15, 13, 6, 4, and 2 and if you take the 6 year-old back to the site of the house, he’ll show you exactly where the kitchen was, his bed and even one of his old shoes that was left behind. 

 

Doña Odilia didn’t know why Doña Carmen wanted her to bring only a couple of orphans and one of her own school-aged children into town into the office of the NGO; just that it was some project that wanted to help poor children trying to go to school.  The combined income of her husband’s chicken bus and microbus service that he provides shuttling people around town and the sale of the vegetables he grows plus her midwife’s salary is enough for them to get by, but she is in no position to turn down a little help. 

 

She had just finished breastfeeding her yet unnamed newborn of 15 days when she hung up the phone.  I had never heard her speak to anyone that way before.  I had never seen her at someone else’s mercy before.  Raising 17 kids on less than what I made at my part-time hostess job per year can’t be easy, but I was angered by the sound of helplessness in the voice of a woman who I’ve seen resuscitate a purple newborn with one hand and coax a reluctant placenta out with another.  She told me we would bring Luisito, the six and the four year-old, and Juana, her seven year-old on Carmen’s recommendations to the office of the foundation at noon the next day to do who knows what.  I inferred from the conversation that she was asked if they had nice clothes to wear, at which point she reminded Carmen that because her sister had left her with nothing to support the kids, she just bought the cheaply made clothes from the market: the t-shirts and underpants that only cost three quetzals (about forty cents U.S).  Solo tres quetzales.  Tres quetzales. Tres quetzales.  As if Doña Carmen was not yet convinced of the perilousness of the situation, Odilia seemed to latch on to clothing prices as the perfect way to paint that picture. 

 

I knew from the second I heard about it that this unnamed project (the name of which was still never formally disclosed to Odilia even after the meeting) was another Save the Children sans Sally Struthers in which a small dollar amount a day would support a bureaucratic institution the size of a small Caribbean country that thrives entirely on monthly contributions and appropriately unfortunate sounding situations.  I wanted to reserve judgment however because at the end of the day, Odilia would still be getting help in who knows what form to take care of these kids with whom I am completely in love.  About twenty minutes before the set appointment time, I peered over the banner of the patio where my room is to see Juana, Odilia´s seven year-old, with her head half way submerged in the water tank and a comb double the length of her head’s diameter slowly making its way through her mess of wet, black hair.  Valentina, the four year-old was dressed to the nines in her traditional Maya skirt and blouse with her hair being aggressively combed into a ponytail.  The end result being the world’s most devastatingly cute little girl who at this point I’d only scarcely ever seen without two straight streams of green snot oozing from each nostril and smudges of dirt accenting her cheeks, forehead, and alternately everywhere else she had exposed skin.

 

The six year-old orphan, Luis, who is nicknamed Patas, was out to pasture with the goats when it was time to hit the town so Odilia grabbed Miguelito, her 3 year-old to go in his place.  The three chosen ones piled into the microbus with excitement; going into town doesn’t happen often for the littler kids.  Unfortunately, Daniel, the 2 year-old, got swept up in the excitement and piled into microbus as well.  The last thing you could hear when pulling out onto the road was the sound of him crying hysterically after his older sister, Sarah, peeled his tiny body from the van.  I wonder if the people who chose to sponsor a kid in a foreign country ever think about the fourteen other kids in the child’s household who don’t get a new sweater and greeting card every Christmas.  The microbus took off towards Tecpán in what I think of as a pothole with some road in it.  They each fought an appropriate amount for their spots next to me or in may lap.  The seatbelt-free seating arrangement slowly but naturally eroded into the most dangerous combination of positions for children to be in in the event of an accident.  I hardly recognized the three eager little faces without their usual layer of all organic makeup. 

 

Around the second bend in the road we came across Patas and two of Odilia´s boys making their way back to the house with the goats.  Santos , Odilia´s husband, rolled down the window and, according to my pathetic command of the Spanish language, tried to coax Patas into the car by telling him that we were going to see his father.  Patas just stood there, fighting the accelerating goats, with his usual unsuspecting smile, a little reluctant and as cute as hell.  Odilia seemed uninterested in pursuing this tactic given that even at six, Patas could figure out that that dude was not coming back, and just barked at Patas to get in the van.  He hoped in, confused, but placid as ever.  She told him to change his dirt streaked t-shirt and clean himself up, thought at the time I didn’t really process that request, so I instinctively grabbed what I thought was a dirty, wet towel on the bench of the bus to smooth his multiple cow licks into conformity.  I pulled his boots off to try and tuck them into his filthy sweat pants but he pulled off his pants too, one step ahead of me, to put on the clean pair of jeans and belt that were sloppily folded next to him.  I hadn’t noticed but, Odilia had put a clean set of clothes and a wet rag in the van for just such an occasion.  With that realization, I abandoned even the mild hesitance I’d previously exercised and began violently wiping dirt and snot off of his face with the rag and went to town on those cow licks.  Why I felt so compelled to make this kid look squeaky clean for the NGO and their digital camera I don’t really understand.  Why did we want them to look clean and well-taken care of?  Isn’t that the opposite of what is expected of a bus full of charity cases?

 

We were late and Santos and Odilia were frantic.  We couldn’t locate the office so Odilia shouted to a lady making roadside snow cones to ask for directions while simultaneously calling the office for guidance.  Once we found the place, I was told to stay behind, immediately angered that my presence as a white girl could in some way injure their chances of charity.  Apparently never showering and having dirt all over my clothes did little to make me less conspicuous.  It’s hard for a 5´8” fair-skinned white girl to keep a low profile in a land of Maya Indians who barely graze 5´1”.  Odilia reconsidered and told me I could come along.  I couldn’t see how having a gringa here to learn about her practice of rural midwifery possibly hurt her case.  The office was an empty house with old wooden school desks lining the entry way and absolutely no identifying markings on the outside of any kind.  A tiny woman in non-traditional dress, who was not Doña Carmen, raced around the office greeting us only with a, “Do you have an appointment?” before rushing in to assist two other perhaps also unusually well-dressed young boys that could be characterized only by their awkwardness.  Odilia commanded all four kids to sit in the desks and wait to be received.  I took my place in one of the little wooden desks and smiled at each of the little angels down the row.  The walls were lined with crumpled notebook paper signs that were either requests for children to keep their materials clean or lists of food and clothes that children of different age groups were supposed to receive, all written in orange or purple washable marker.  On the floor in the room straight ahead were piles of cellophane-wrapped sweaters that had been removed from cardboard boxes and picked through.  I got up to look at a Xeroxed copy of the NGO´s newsletter taped off to one side of a wall:  a Christian children’s foundation.  Just as I had suspected.

 

The frantic woman passed us down the hall and called us into her office.  More boxes.  More sweaters.  More almost bare walls.  First order of business was to distribute plastic-wrapped sweaters.  They only had one in Juana’s size so that was the end of that task.  Odilia snapped at to get the kids to sit down on this stool or that bench, trying desperately to order them in some way, despite having no particular guidelines to do so.  The tiny lady pulled out some blank forms and began asking questions about how the orphans came to be the helpless creatures in need of assistance that they are.  Odilia shifted immediate back into three quetzales mode, explaining the death of her sister and her lack of support in their upbringing.  At the same time that I was angered by Odilia´s self-victimization, I felt myself mentally encouraging her to ham up her situation a bit.  Why not milk this for all it’s worth?  The woman asked us about Valentina and as soon as we told the lady her age, the woman pushed that form to the side. Nope.  No good.  Too Young.  “Excuse me,” I said silently. “Have you seen Valentina?  Do you have any idea how charming and precious she is?  What do you mean she is too young?”  She jumped right ahead to plan B, and started asking about the other orphan, Patas, and began to explain that the organization was interested in orphans as a priority and only those of school age.  At six years old, and in his first year of school, Patas was a winner. 

 

I enjoyed that she felt the need to explain herself to me knowing full well that her higher ups are English-speaking white woman just like myself.  I asked her whether it would be better to bring in his tow older sisters, Juanona and Sarah, thirteen and fifteen, who weren’t going to school because Odilia couldn’t afford it.  Nope. Too old.  Not marketable.  Only 6 to 10 years old and ALREADY going to school.  I found this restriction as confusing as I did obvious.  She said she was scared to sign up one of Odilia´s kids because they obviously weren’t orphaned. So of the four kiddos we glossed up for the show, only one got to perform.  Thank heavens for that moist rag.  She asked Patas´ birthday which neither he or Odilia knew, so we made a quick call to Sarah to find out.  She asked what he liked to do and then immediately wrote play soccer before Odilia said anything.  Ok, I know we are in Latin America here but I’ve never seen the kid even touch a ball.  However Odilia said yes and then listed some other activities that he actually does like to do, but the lady didn’t write any of them.  “He doesn’t play ball!” I wanted to scream.  He likes to pick wild mushrooms and raspberries watch WWF.  Wouldn’t Jane Doe from Des Moines, Iowa or whoever rather know that? 

 

She asked about the house, what the floors were made of, whether his bed was wood or metal, whether we cooked with wood or gas, i.e., exactly how poor is he.  Odilia said the rooms had cement floors which is true in his bedroom but not in the rest of the house.  Odilia clearly felt the make-it-sound-as-bad-as-they-want-it-to mandate.  The woman then hastily explained that Patas would have to come and make greeting cards and candles for whoever his benefactor is every so often. I absolutely hate the idea of him making a Christmas card for someone he doesn’t know for reasons he won’t understand to thank these people graciously for their good will that he may not really realize he’s getting.  She said they would have to come by the house too to look at it.  We found out later that night that the NGO had already contacted a neighbour to verify her story only about 15 minutes before we arrived.     

 

After the sob story was duly recorded, she rushed us out to the back yard patio, lamenting all the while that there wasn’t good sunlight for the photo.  She put Patas in front of some shrubbery and pulled out her little, silver digital.  While she was complaining about clouds to Odilia, I got a surge of pride when I turned away from the photo shoot to see that Miguelito had dropped trow, and was unapologetically peeing on the back fence.  Odilia seemed to try not to draw attention to him.  Patas stood there with his mild grin, like always, the fly of his pants popping out and his little boy belling extending boldly over the belt that had in recent weeks become too small for him.  “Pobrecito,” she kept saying.  Poor little guy.  “And, oh, how cute he is.  Poor, poor thing.”  At this point the cool contempt I had been projecting until this point turned to a quiet rage.  Why do you have to keep saying that?  He is not poor!  He is perfect.  What good does it do to keep telling him that?  I told him to smile when she took the picture because I didn’t want him to look sad like I thought they might want him too.  But then I thought his sponsors might just pick him because he is so cute and smiley in spite of all his hardship and I felt guilty.  She kept saying how cute he was in spite of it all, as if being orphaned automatically meant you had to be homely looking.  Odilia inquired about bringing in Valentina and Daniel when they were school aged and the lady showed us the pictures.  I smiled politely; more convinced than ever that I was at the root of some evil NGO conspiracy to commodify the children of the world.  Odilia disengaged by thanking this woman profusely in alternation with giving stern orders to the kids to get in the bus. 

 

When Patas got in the car, I hugged him like he had just returned from fifteen months in Iraq .  I hugged him like he needed protection or consolation from something traumatic though I think it was far more traumatic for me than for him.  So despite being unaffected, I continued consoling myself by kissing his forehead until I was about 3 kisses away from wearing off the first layers of skin.  Back we went with four immaculately clean children to a house full of even more children who are just not the right kid of adorably poor. I explained to Odilia and Santos how these organizations work while trying to restrain disillusionment.  I was by no means successful at self-restraint, though I can’t imagine how or why it would change their course of action.  Is Patas gonna be on a television commercial?  Is somebody going to flip through a booklet of photos of slightly confused, uncomfortable children and fly right past him?  Are these people ever going to have any idea how adorable he looked on that car ride home?

 

While Odilia´s family will benefit in some way from this transaction, I can’t stand what people feel like they have to do to get people to open their pocket books.  I felt today like I saw something I shouldn’t see, the part of the process that people from my world aren’t supposed to know about: that this has almost nothing to do with that little boy or girl in the picture, or else maybe Miguelito and his golden arch in the background would have made it into the shot.

 

 

Posted by Andie at 18:04:30 | Permalink | Comments (4)