by Bruce Wydick
José-Ernesto grinned. “Sí, Angela, existen colebras en Guatemala,” he said. There are snakes in Guatemala. “And my English is little better than you thinks.” He finished off the second sentence in English proudly as he flung the snake’s headless body off the trail with his walking stick.
Rich laughed. “Lefty, it’s too bad there wasn’t an Olympic high bar right there when that snake was slithering between your ankles. After that jump, you’d have been on the center of that medal podium with the Dutch national anthem playing!”
He said this chuckling to himself as he and Angela passed by the area on the trail where Alex and Sofia had encountered the snake. Glancing down just to the right of the trail, he spotted a writhing mass of Godman’s pit vipers next to a rotten log, many of them not more than a foot long, but with a few larger ones that looked like they meant business. Angela saw them too, but Rich was closer and it seemed to have more effect on him. “Aaaahhh!” he yelled. “There’s a whole freakin’ nest of them!—Run!” They sprinted, Rich with the metal canteen and drinking cups flailing and clanking from their straps on his backpack, nearly passing the rest of the group as they scrambled down the trail.
All of them stood breathless after the sprint. Sofia sat down on a tree stump, looking pale. She fumbled in her backpack for an inhaler she kept for her asthma. The combination of the snakes and the running had been too much and clearly caused a flare-up. Angela walked over, sat down, and put her arm around her.
“Thank you, Angela,” she said.
Alex was also gasping for air. Even so, he was nearly doubled over laughing, a tear running down his cheek. Finally, he said, “Rich, you . . . would have won the gold medal too . . . but instead of high jump, for the 100 meter sprint! You really got that extra tire cycling very, very fast.”
“Well, let’s just say incentives matter, and leave it at that,” he replied. “You okay, Sof?”
Sofia nodded without much expression.
After several breaks for water, but none for food, they reached the house just after noon. The house was a dilapidated adobe with two small rooms, surrounded by milpa fields, where beans were sown among the maize. A couple of clucking chickens chased each other in the yard. The predominant smells were of a pile of weeds smoldering to the side of the house, the mild stench of chicken droppings, and, on the positive side, the aroma of fresh tortillas being cooked on an open grill. About two or three hectares of coffee lay behind the beans and maize, planted on the side of a mountain, the coffee stopping only when it became far too inclined to cultivate.
“Don Guillermo!” José-Ernesto paused and listened for an answer. “Don Guillermo!” He called for him and strode up to the front door. In place of Don Guillermo, it was Don Guillermo’s wife who greeted them. “Ah, Doña Beatriz, bueños dias!” She seemed taken aback by the approaching group. Angela got the feeling it was unusual for Doña Beatriz to receive spontaneous foreign guests at her home. She looked around and the loneliness of rural isolation weighed on Angela; it brought forth feelings of sympathy in her for Doña Beatriz and others who lived in dilapidated hovels located miles from even the tiniest village.
“Doña Beatriz, these are students from the United States who have come to study the coffee growing of our cooperative members. Would they be able to talk with you and Don Guillermo?” asked José-Ernesto.
Doña Beatriz apparently did not speak much Spanish, so José-Ernesto switched into Quiché. Even so, they heard her say, “No está.” He wasn’t there.
“He’s not here?” asked Rich. “Well, when will señor return?” He was obviously a little frustrated after walking ten miles through brush and snakes to find that the intended source of their interview wasn’t around. Doña Beatriz rattled off something in Quiché to José-Ernesto.
“She says she doesn’t know when he’ll be back,” José-Ernesto said to the group in Spanish.
“Well, how come?” asked Rich.
“Because her husband is in Houston,” José-Ernesto responded.
“In Houston?” asked Angela incredulously.
“Yes. Since four months ago.”
“Why Houston?” asked Rich. “Have an errand to run at the strip mall?” José-Ernesto roughly translated the question back to Doña Beatriz, and she responded at some length.
“She says he just couldn’t make coffee growing work anymore, and their family was starting to starve.” Angela felt deflated, not only for the long hike that now seemed to be for nothing, but also for the thought of a coffee grower, a fair trade coffee grower no less, literally being starved off his land. She looked again at his coffee plants across the field of milpa. Most of them were scraggly, unpruned, and untended.
Beatriz began to talk to the group now in broken Spanish. “He just couldn’t keep it up this year, the coffee. Too much work. Not enough plata.” She used the Spanish slang for money, rubbing her thumb against her index finger. “In old times, prices they were good. Now we suffer too much. Nobody remains here to help harvest the crop. The workers, they are also in Houston. Live in the same place, many together. They say it is better there, and my husband, he says one day we will live there too, and our children will grow up to speak English. Don Guillermo sends me money by Western Union. I pick it up in the town every month.”
Sofia was curious about this. “How many of the men who have coffee around here are in Houston now?”
“All—all in Houston,” she responded.
“All of them? What do they do?” probed Sofia.
“They do everything, everything that the Norte Americanos don’t want to do because they are too rich. They build their houses, they paint their houses, they dig their gardens. The women I know there have jobs caring for little children. Guillermo works washing cups and dishes in a café.”
“So Don Guillermo has moved down the value chain in the coffee business,” Rich noted in English to the others.
“I’m sorry I cannot help you answer questions about my husband’s coffee. I turn our acreage over to a neighbor. He pays me a little plata so he can take whatever the plants produce. He works little, however, on our plot. Would you like some tortillas for lunch? I’m sorry, my youngest son is sick, and I have not had proper time for meals. Any of you are a doctor?” she asked in a faint hope.
Rich answered, “Well, a couple of us are studying to be doctors of a kind, but unfortunately not the kind that would be ideal to you right now. But I have some background. Mind if I take a look at him?”
Angela looked around at the children playing around them. None of them looked particularly healthy. One boy near them, who looked like he had a bad cold, was chasing his little sister around them with a stick.
“Boy looks like he’s hosting a banana slug race under his nose,” commented Rich to Angela, who responded with a wince. She joined Alex and Sofia as they walked toward the house to watch the improvised examination.
The sicker boy looked to be about four years old. He had dark circles under his dull, lifeless eyes. His skin was pale and he had blisters on the inside of his lower lip, and crusted blood was under his nose and in his underpants.
Angela watched Rich as he examined the boy; she had never seen an economist interact with a suffering child. And what seemed to move Rich were statistics. Statistics, she had heard him tell Alex, “are the plural of anecdotes,” and when properly handled, come very close to the real truth. Anecdotes and individual stories can mislead—“too often just outliers—that’s why they’re interesting.” But perhaps there was something different in Rich’s face as he looked down at the boy, this one boy, this anecdote.
Rich extracted from his backpack the formidable medical kit that he had used in his former life as a young paramedic, and took out a thermometer, a small blood pressure monitor, and a miniature stethoscope. He gently reached down and took the boy’s temperature and some other vital signs. He called over to Sofia, but Angela and Alex followed.
“Sof, come here a sec.” Sofia walked over closer to him. He tal
ked in a low voice to her in English. “This boy’s got a belly full of worms.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Positive. Got all the signs. Wretched beasts are slithering around his intestines and eatin’ up all his vitamins.”
“Do you have anything in your kit that could help him?” Sofia asked.
“Well, just happen to have some albendazole with me. That ought to take care of the little freeloaders. He’s a trifle young, but I’m going to give him a whole tablet, and that ought to do it. Better in my opinion than underdoing it.”
Rich explained the problem in Spanish to Beatriz. “Señora, I think I know what is making your boy sick. It’s lombrices.”
“Lombrices?” She was shocked. “No!”
“Sí, señora, but I have a pill that will make him better. Do you want me to give it to him? It’s good medicine. He might get a little tummy ache, but there is little risk.”
“Of course. What will happen, Doctor?” Beatriz inquired.
“Well, it’s going to be hard for me to describe this in a delicate manner, but in a day or two, he’s going to anally expel a whole bunch of worms that’s going to look like a big plate of spaghetti . . .”
“Rich!” Sofia slapped him on the arm.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” said Angela under her breath.
Thankfully for most of the group in the house, Beatriz didn’t know about spaghetti, so Sofia explained to her slowly in Spanish what were to be the likely effects of the medicine without the culinary details. José-Ernesto retranslated into Quiché so that everything was clear.
“Now, you’ve got to make sure this youngster is wearing shoes every time he goes outside, or the worms will come back,” admonished Rich. “Worms usually get inside little kids through the bottom of their feet from fecal matter in the soil, and this isn’t going to do a bit of good in the long term if this boy is shoeless. Now you take some of that Western Union money and run right down to the little shoe store in San Pedro and get this boy some shoes, me comprende?”
She nodded. “Gracias, Doctor.”
“Well, I ain’t a doctor, but unfortunately I’m the best you’ve got right now,” he said.
“Sí, Doctor, gracias.”
Rich looked down at the boy and leaned down and whispered something in his ear. The boy looked back at Rich and nodded; the beginnings of a smile appeared on his face.
Angela asked Rich as they walked away from the bed, “What did you tell him?”
“That his mama promised she would buy him a new pair of shoes, but to keep bugging her relentlessly until she did. Boy seemed to like that idea.”
Doña Beatriz brought them over to the part of the house that served as a kitchen and fried up a dozen tortillas, on each of which she placed a generous ladle of beans. The students were famished by this point and appreciated the lunch, yet aware that they might have intestinal battles of their own to wage once it was over.
During lunch Sofia asked Beatriz more about her husband’s decision to migrate to the United States. Beatriz responded, “The money he sends, it is good. He earns eleven dollars in one hour cleaning up tables in the café. That is what he earns in maybe two days here working the coffee.”
“It must be difficult for you to have your husband away in the United States,” said Angela.
“Well, I’ll be honest. Financially, we are much better with him away sending us the money. But I miss him greatly. This is not a place for a woman to be living alone with her children. Guillermo is a good man, and is very frugal. He does not spend the money he earns on gambling. He lives with three other men from our area in a small apartment in Houston and sends me much of his wages so I can buy things we need. But . . . I understand the temptations of men. This is what is my worry sometimes.”
“That he might be unfaithful to you?” asked Angela sympathetically.
“Sí. That is the thing that worries me the most. Some temptations are too much to bear even for a very good man, if he is very far away for a long time.”
José-Ernesto interjected, “Many rural families thrive financially on the remittances from illegal immigration to the States, but there are many other insidious results from it. For example, networks of narcotraffickers to and from the United States from Central America have evolved through the immigrations that began in the 1980s with the civil wars. It has led to organized crime seizing influence over much of our government and police. The poverty of our countries sets the stage for entry into this lucrative criminal activity. It’s the irony of the immensity and power of the United States and its proximity to us. It is a great source of both opportunity and problems.”
Doña Beatriz continued, “Yes, we need the money, but my four children are growing up without a father. It is sad and causes many problems. The children without fathers here often get into trouble when they become older.”
After lingering awhile after lunch, the students bade good-bye to Doña Beatriz and headed back down the trail to town. “Thank you, Doctor Rich, for helping my little boy. Gracias a Dios por su visita.” She thanked him warmly as they left and handed him a sack of extra tortillas.
“Migration is depleting this countryside of men,” Sofia said as they marched back down the trail.
“Caused mainly by poverty?” asked Angela.
“Yes, by the huge difference in wages, but this is just the surface of it.”
Angela wasn’t content to understand only the surface of it. “What lies underneath the surface?” she asked.
They conversed as they ambled down the trail. “A professor of mine explained it to us once this way: Capital and labor roam the economic landscape in search of one other. Labor always wants to move to places where capital is abundant, and capital is always seeking out places where labor is abundant. The two are constantly chasing each other around the globe. New capital makes workers more productive, and higher worker productivity leads to higher wages. Higher wages lure in workers from other places, and there you have migration.”
“And the opposite side of migration is multinationals coming down to poor countries to chase down cheap labor and exploit it,” added Alex. Angela just shook her head.
They had finished walking up a steep hill. They were all sweating heavily. Sofia’s asthma was acting up again and she stopped to unzip her backpack and pull out her inhaler. She closed her lips around it, spritzed it a couple of times into her mouth, and inhaled a deep breath. She exhaled slowly while taking in the resplendent vista of the gorge from the trail, and resumed the discussion.
“Actually, the vast majority of it doesn’t go to poor countries. Although many people in poor countries probably wish it did,” she said as she tossed the inhaler back into the pocket of her backpack and rezipped it. “Capital doesn’t necessarily want to go where wages are lowest. Otherwise all of the foreign investment would be in places like Haiti and Bangladesh. Most of it goes to rich countries where productivity is highest.”
“Except for the dirty jobs,” said Alex.
“Perhaps,” she replied.
There was silence for a while as they continued on the trail back to San Pedro Necta, mostly walking downhill now, which was a blessing for the return. Angela’s feet were starting to ache. Clouds had formed and it was cooling down as it usually did in the early afternoon, but that also meant it would rain soon. The path led them along the side of an enormous mountain with a gorge dropping two thousand feet below. The view was spectacular and they could see several of the volcanoes of western Guatemala in the distance. Rich was talking with José-Ernesto about something as they walked together in the front while the other three walked behind.
As they reached about the halfway point, the clouds began to open up. Angela looked at her watch. Two o’clock, right on schedule. The students put on their parkas and pulled over their hoods. It was a warm rain, and the sound of a billion small droplets crashing to the ground echoed across the mountains, interspersed with the cry of soaring birds in the canyon
retreating to their nests. As they looked across the landscape from their mountain vista, layers of mist and clouds produced a contrast of subsequently lighter and lighter mountains and volcanoes as the view faded into the distance toward the Pacific coast, moving from green to dark green, then to gray and finally to off-white. The air smelled sweet and clean, scented with particles of dust from the forest floor kicked up by the first droplets of rain.
For the last five miles they hiked through mud, and the conversation stilled. This was partly because the students were tired, now having hiked nearly twenty miles for the day, and partly because the noise of the rain muffled the words of a person speaking in front. Yet in the quiet slogging, a peaceable contentment reigned over the group.
A few days after their mountain hike, Angela and Rich visited another one of the coffee growers on their list, Maximo Pérez, who they learned also happened to be one of the local growers who owned a pulping machine. Many of the cooperatives, intermediaries, and other buyers preferred to purchase coffee from growers in parchment form, with the cherry removed but the beans still encased in the delicate parchment skins.
Angela and Rich greeted him as his wife summoned him from the house.
Maximo was a bulging middle-aged man, of both Spanish and Mayan descent, whose diligent wife was clearly not neglecting her job of providing him with a regular supply of delicious meals. Unlike many of the other growers who lived in adobe houses, his was made of concrete block. Maximo possessed one of the larger coffee operations in San Pedro Necta. There was a Toyota pickup in the front yard and a small satellite dish on one corner of his tile roof. By now Angela understood: these were telltale signs of membership in the Guatemalan rural middle class.
His plantation and machines were located not far from Fernando’s, and so it was Maximo’s pulping machine that Fernando used with his own harvest. Angela saw that he had forearms like ham hocks. As she moved forward to shake hands, she was overpowered by Maximo’s brawny grip and the scent of his aggressive aftershave and hair gel.
