more update than you are ready for, way less than there is to say

I went to Rabinal and I heard the story that I was expecting to hear and then a little more. The taxi driver took me to a little settlement outside of town with rows and rows of little wooden houses. We stopped on a corner and began to talk to the women in the house, a grandmother, mother and baby. They peel sunflower seeds for cash and the men work these little plots of land with corn and beans. they have a pig. hungry dogs everywhere. The people are drinking out of the river. you know that they are sick and a little hungry or feeling bad almost all the time. A man approached us. He told us about how the government surveyor had just come and measured his little plot and only given him title to half because he had only planted half. And he told us what he went through to get what little he had. He had been living down in the fertile valley but when Lukas was in power they decided to put a hydroelectric plant there. So he moved up the hill to land that wouldnt be flooded. But the government pursued him there because they told him that was private property now. Before it had always been communal. They were trying to kill him and he and his family, and some other families were hiding in the mountains there. In some parts, the government cut down all the trees on the hills so that the people couldnt hide. Now the hills are all eroding and the land doesnt produce as well. They were eating tree roots and stuff, almost dead when Lukas fell from power and Montt came in, as I understand it. And Montt was building these little houses to give people to resettle and so they fought and they got one of these little houses and they came back to living near Rabinal. But the houses dont have foundations, and so when it rained, they would have water up to your knees. What good were they? a little good. One of the weirder things about the rio negro resettlement is that there were a lot of the houses that had signs for Habitat for Humanity. I guess what happened is that they saw how the people were living, whenever they showed up probably in the 90s, and they didnt realize that the houses that they used as models are sort of evil. They modelled, I guess, more houses for the settlement after the original ones. And they came with all good will and built them. I assume that Montt didnt hire them to build the original ones. But there are definately Habitat Houses there. Very weird.

Before the man had cattle and chickens and enough land to feed his family. It was just like the taxi driver told me it would be. The man we talked to said that they were tying people up and burning down the house around them up in the mountains. This stuff happened in the government counter-insurgency campaign. But the man says that the people in town dont believe that it happened. The town people. There are all these divides between people living very close together.

On the block where I was living last week before I visited El Salvador, there is a little tortilla place with real poor people, and there is also a guy from a very rich family who sits and plays videogames and runs a hostel by the airport (where I stayed in May). He didnt know about the young man who was shot in the food place across the street because those arent his people, not his problem. He has a servent. A lot of people have servents. The rich and the poor are very close together here. There arent really suburbs. A few very rich people live very outside of town, and there are some ghetto-like parts that are even more dangerous, but in most of the city, maybe everywhere in the city, the rich and the poor are enough close together that sometimes the poor get some guns and then they get very very close to the rich people and they rob them of everything they have. This happened once about four years ago to the people where I was living last week, and they live in a pretty classy neighborhood. All this happens on one block.

And of course adoption is no less crazy. A friend of mine who is an assistent to some adoption lawyers was caring for a child while it was in the process. And some people came to her house, armed men and a woman who claimed that the baby was actually her baby and that the woman who had put it up for adoption initially (the DNA test comes later in the process, so these people never meant for the baby to go to the US, they just wanted to get the advance that comes at the start of the process) was not the real mother and was just trying to get the first advance. But it was obvious that these people were mareros (like gang people, but gangs are different here) and that they had just done the whole thing to get the first part of the money that goes to the mothers. So my friend called the police. And the police came, and she showed them all the documentation about how she was the legal caretaker of the child and how everything was in order and that these people were threatening her. The mareros paid the police some money, and the police took the documents from her and said they would file them with the report, and then they took my friend to jail instead of the others. And when she had to go to court of course the documents never appeared. And so she is paying bail and a lawyer bill and waiting for the day when she will have enough saved up from her work that she and her boyfriend can move to Spain.

On the other hand. BY FAR most of the adoptions are a real social service. And the government doesnt provide social services here. In El salvador, the presidents steal a lot of money, but they also provide some basic services in their somewhat poorer country (alas not healthy water or septic systems). But in Guatemala it seems that they really just keep almost all of the money among the rich people. The government homes for abandoned children are few few and bad I think. Here there is a certain type of racism that says, "those people are backwards, those backwards country indigenous people wouldnt know what to do with money if we gave it to them." Apparently the other option for the kids, for many of the kids, is just to leave them on the street somewhere and who knows what happens.

It is also much worse for women here. Women dont make enough money to have their own places to live, so they are dependent on men. And no one uses condoms, so there are lots of unwanted kids. And what happens a lot, based on the interviews Ive done with birth mothers through the Family Court people is that when the women get pregnant, the men disappear, or else chase the women out into the street, depending on the power dynamic. In the case of this university student whose interview I am typing up now, the guy changed his job and his house. She just couldnt contact him, couldnt find him anymore starting about two weeks after she told him she was pregnant. The end.

There was a very very poor indigenous girl; her father wouldnt really let her leave the house, certainly not go to school, and she finally ran away from home around 15, and then she worked as a domestic and sometimes they didnt pay her. I spent the day with her after her interview and she really didnt seem to know how to present herself so that people wouldnt take advantage of her. And she took up with this guy and did whatever he said, even sold some of her clothes for money that he took. And then when she got pregnant, he kicked her out. His whole family backed him up. And since she was pregnant she couldnt find work as a domestic because they dont like to hire pregnant girls. The story is that she was thinking of killing herself, but then someone told her dont do that give your child in adoption. And so she did, and the social worker is sort of managing the money for her, although not that well, but at least, now Julia doesnt have a baby, a few people have told her she is worth something, she has clothes and a rented apartment (and a TV with cable), and maybe she can find work. She (and a lot of other people) watches this talk show from Peru called Laura that is like Montel or whatever those peoples names are, everyone screaming and crying, screwed up families. She says watching it makes her feel less alone.

I brought Julia by the house where I was living because I thought she could learn something from Celia and Maria. Celia owns the house where I was living (her father was a train conductor for United Fruit and made a ton of money, bought a lot of land of what was then the edges of the city back in the first half of the century). She who has a very close relationship with her house-maid, Maria, but is also very strict and neat. I thought Julia could see what a probably much better house-owner/maid relationship would look like, maybe she could learn to cook some things from Celia who cooks a lot and then she would have more skills to sell when she went looking for work. And when she left, and when I finally had a big long talk with Celia before I moved out, she said Julia was a liar, that she didnt believe that her past employers didnt pay her. And I said that I beleived it for x and y reasons, but you see, all stories are contested here.

The adoption research is not putting me in danger because "thesis research" doesnt mean anything to anyone and because the US is already threatening/planning to stop adoption from here within a year. So I am under the radar. I am learning far more than I will ever know what to do with. I think after I graduate I want to write a book about Guatemala, maybe fiction but call it something like Dideditdedi(which words here, not sure): State and Society in Guatemala. Kind of an academic joke. This place is crazy. I am taking care of myself. I will have plenty to say in whatever I write next spring about adoption. I have also met some Americans at the Embassy who I think will email me and let me trade stories with them this winter. I didnt ask for their contact information because its sort of a sensitive time, but I gave them my email. It would have been neat if I had a card, but a scrap of notebook paper worked, too. Thanks for listening to my long stories. There are way too many to recount.

Alice