05402
August 5, 2005   

No time for grieving 

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE — When church leaders, disaster-aid workers and rights activists brainstorm for ways for Guatemalan widows to earn money to support their families, few options come to mind.

     This is no small problem in a country where thousands of husbands were killed in a bitter civil war three decades ago.

     A widow lives in a remote town — where jobs are scarce — might have to go elsewhere to work. She may wind up hiring on as a field hand on a big plantation, where she will be paid less than men who do the same job. In Guatemala, it’s legal to pay women less.

     If she has a house or a small plot of land, she can stay put and sell whatever she can to earn her family’s daily bread.

     She might whip up a pot of beans and sell them by the roadside. Or send her youngest kids out to hawk homemade tamales in the streets. She can sell homespun crafts. She can walk to the nearest city, buy such things as toilet paper, pots and umbrellas, and return home to sell them for a tiny profit. If she has a bit of money, she might buy a pig and sell piglets.

     Widows often live day-to-day, hand-to-mouth, with no guaranteed income for tomorrow. Any aid they may get, from the church, the government or non-governmental organizations, will be intermittent at best.

     “A pan of beans, some crafts. She’ll get some money … but it is not permanent. It is nothing she can rely on. It just allows her to survive,” says Maria Everarda Tista, general coordinator of the National Guatemalan Council of Widows (CONAVIGUA), the nation’s only organized voice for widows.

     “There are more than 50,000 widows, because they lost their husbands due to the violence and due to other causes,” says Tista, who has talked with many of them about the struggle to put food on the table and keep a roof over their children’s heads.

     According to CONAVIGUA, more than 44 percent of Guatemalan widows live below the poverty line — in an economy where $4 is the average monthly minimum wage. Female field hands may earn as little as $2 a month.

     There is no welfare, no government safety net.

     “There is no insurance here, no government help that I can see,” says Ellen Dozier, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission worker who has spent the past decade working with church women in Guatemala. “Family and friends do help out … But the industrious ones are out trying to sell anything and everything. For most of the women that I know, widows or not, their only way of getting income is by selling something.”

     According to Dozier, a garden plot of beans and corns allows women to keep their families fed and still have staples that can be turned into tamales or other salable products.

     “They can’t go to a factory and get a job,” she says.       

     Mourning rituals in Guatemala include food gifts and even collections of money for grieving families — a few quetzales and some flowers. It is not long before a grief-struck widow begins plotting how to replace her dead husband’s income, however small.

     “The church always has something to give, either locally or through the presbytery,” says the Rev. Carlos Lara, executive secretary of the Presbyterian Church of Guatemala, which is headquartered in Guatemala City. “But there is no national program to help.”

     According to Lara, only 50 of the denomination’s 250 pastors pay into the retirement plan, so most pastors’ widows have no pension income.

     Most pastors earn less than $16 a month. So putting money aside for a retirement plan isn’t a priority. The notion is so counter-cultural that it is always a hard sell. “They either don’t have the money or don’t see the benefit,” Lara says. “If the church pays  $16 a month, that’s why pastors do something else.”

     Many ministers are also farmers, because preaching seldom pays the bills.

     In crises, collections are taken up. But the money doesn’t last long.

     Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) Coordinator Susan Ryan is still gathering data and deciding how to help the families decimated by the June 15 mudslides in Senahu, a remote Mayan town in the Guatemalan highlands — among them the family of Pastor Jose Pop, who was killed along with his youngest daughter, Anna Teresa, 8.

     In all, 22 people were killed.

     Pop’s widow, Elvira, 36, has five surviving children. (See related story.)

     PDA has sent an emergency grant of $10,000 to Senahu, where about 100 families were displaced by the mudslides. Ryan says she will send more when a rehabilitation strategy is in place. She is trying to determine how else PDA can help the families, including five new widows and their children.

     “We’re looking, perhaps, at school fees for the widows’ kids,” says Ryan, adding that public education isn’t free in Guatemala. “Otherwise, the family may get so far behind that they can’t get ahead. We need to keep them from dropping through the cracks.”

     Church professionals say some widows have avoided poverty by banding together and securing grants or loans to help them establish small businesses. Lara says one widows’ collective with European backing operates two restaurants along the highway to Shayla, a mountain city a few hours from the capital. The women began by selling cookies and pies, then invested in the restaurants.

     Dozier says that most widows don’t have the luxury of grieving.

     “For me, there isn’t just the need for financial help, but emotional,” she says. “Some of these women have been married most of their adult lives. I find that a lot of people are not able to express their grief. They just have to be stoic.”

     And industrious.