We maintained our friendship with Natalia and Chonita over the years - always checking on how they were doing and making small talk whenever we made a site visit, but when we came back to Santiago in August of 2007 for a full year, we began to see much more of Natalia, Chonita, and Chonita’s little brother, Domingo. Each time, Natalia told me more about her situation, including the seriousness of her husband’s condition and the lack of support from her family and in-laws. She had heard about a rehab program which had been successful for some other notorious Santiago alcoholics, and she wanted to send her husband, Max to this program. I sat quietly, thinking about her roundabout request for a loan of Q1200 ($160) for the three months of rehab while I watched little Chonita and Domingo, clearly underfed, devour six bananas in one sitting. I then agreed to the request and told her that she didn’t have to pay me back; but of course, Natalia continued offering to do a variety of things on my behalf.
Three months later, Max returned to his family and I finally met him. He had noticeable symptoms of liver damage and lots of unexplained pain, but he was extremely grateful to everyone. He began attending Alcoholics Anonymous or his family’s church on a nightly basis and has since been actively working or searching for work and providing for his family. He is now almost eight months sober.
Through Natalia’s “volunteer” work, I realized that she had a special skill with a measuring tape and a good eye for textile quality. Apparently, Natalia had spent a few years working in a sweatshop in Guatemala City. So, when the IHF’s Just Apparel project was in need of a quality control manager, she was a perfect fit (and of course the project pays her a living wage and ensure a relaxed working environment!). She has been working as a leader with Just Apparel since April and her family is now making a consistent living wage. Chonita has started school, the family moved into a new house in the government funded Post Hurricane Stan reconstruction site (yes, they were victims of the 2005 mudslide as well), and Max is contributing to the family instead of taking from it.
While this is a story of one family, it is representative of the kinds of long-term relationships that stem from the long-term partnership model of the IHF. These relationships are not only valuable in and of themselves (for all parties involved); they also allow us to move beyond generalities and demographics into unique stories and respond to the specific needs of specific people. These small steps and individual stories each contribute to a larger process of empowerment and grassroots change.
The IHF has just released its Summer 2008 newsletter. Check it out.
There is nothing quite like waking up in a new place, around people you’ve only just met, expecting to start your first day of work, and realizing that your stomach is so cramped up it hurts to be awake, let alone move. It happened to me shortly after I arrived in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, and I survived, but allow me to explain what transpired before I knew that I would be ok.
I drank some water, lied down, and texted Heidi, the Just Apparel project manager that I would be working with. “I’m not feeling so great, I’m just going to lie down a bit longer,” I wrote. I didn’t want to be a chore on my first day. 30 minutes later I threw up the water, and 30 minutes after that I dry heaved because there was nothing left in my stomach to throw up. By that point I had called Heidi, but I still didn’t want to be a pain, and I figured it had to be a virus that would pass.
Sadly, though I suppose this makes for a better story, it did not pass that easily, for the rest of the morning my stomach would not stop hurting and I would periodically throw up/dry heave. At one point Heidi was checking on me and I went into the bathroom to dry heave some more. Heidi made the executive decision that it was time to go to the hospitalito. I was reassured that the Hospitalito was a good place and filled with American volunteers. I thought back to my 19-year-old roommate’s spring break trip to Latin America where she had been asked to administer shots and other drugs for the first time. “Don’t let me have a ‘doctor’ like that,” I thought.
When I got to the hospitalito, they had a lot of difficulty finding my shrunken, dehydrated veins, and may have stuck me a couple times before they could get the IV in, but otherwise I received very good care. It turns out I had giardia, a nasty parasite that was attacking my stomach and intestines. I was sent home with some Flagyll medication, which does wonders to kill the parasites, but tastes terrible. Within a couple days I was out and running again, and I finally Ihad my first day of work.
It’s striking how easy it is for a comparatively wealthy volunteer from the US to contract a parasitic infection, get treatment, and get back to business, while so many children around here have chronic intestinal problems. Giardia is just a part of life for the population of Santiago. Clean water is hard to come by, and it’s certainly not cheap. The sewage system here is rudimentary, and in the outlying areas, latrines are far from universally available. I suppose people’s bodies get used to parasites (any doctors who can confirm that in the comments?), but after what I went through, it’s hard to imagine.
I’ve learned that if you come from the right place you can get sick in a foreign country, around people you barely know, and live to smile about it… though you might want to wait till the stomach cramps go away to laugh - it hurts a lot less.
Katie
This morning Heidi and I were talking to the lawyer who’s helping us out with the legal formation of the Just Apparel Partner Artisans’ group. Specifically, we were discussing the contracts that we had asked him to draw up between the artisans’ association and Dolores, our general manager, and Natalia, our quality control specialist. Natalia works for JA part time at an hourly wage of 10 quetzales, which is more than double what she made when she worked at a textile factory in Guatemala City and about one and a half times the Guatemalan minimum wage computed hourly. We expressed that we were hoping to formalize that relationship and give Natalia the benefit of being a contractually employed worker. And that’s when we stumbled inadvertently into the labyrinthine mess that is Guatemalan labor law.
You see, if I understand our conversation correctly, there’s no such thing as a part-time job in Guatemala. The minimum wage is not computed hourly, but rather monthly, and there’s no provision for someone who works less than eight hours a day six days a week to earn a prorated salary that varies by hours worked. That monthly minimum salary is Q.1310 ($175). But, naturally, there’s also a government-mandated “bonificacion incentivo” (incentive bonus) that each worker has to receive. The last time I checked, a mandatory bonus isn’t an incentive. It’s a raise. So that brings the monthly salary to Q.1560 ($210). In addition to the mandatory monthly bonus, the law also requires a mandatory bi-annual bonus of one month’s salary. So, for every twelve months of work, the law requires fourteen months of salary. That means that over the course of a year, a worker is legally entitled to Q.21840 ($2950).
Now, from the perspective of the US, that sounds pitifully small, right? A family of six (average for Guatemala) with two workers would still only earn $3.70 per person per day, which isn’t exactly the makings of a life of material comfort. As someone working to promote grassroots development efforts in Guatemala, I would love nothing more than to see everyone here earning more than the minimum wage. There’s just one catch. With all the bonuses and the like, the Guatemalan minimum wage comes out to be 118% of the estimated 2007 GDP per capita. As a point of comparison, if the US were to mandate a minimum wage that large, the minimum annual salary would be $54,100. Using the 55-hour work week that’s common in Guatemala, that would compute to a minimum hourly wage of around $18.90, or 2.75 times the federal minimum wage once it rises this summer.
Given the level of income inequality in Guatemala (the wealthiest 10% of Guatemalans earn over 43% of the country’s income), it’s currently impossible for everyone who works to earn minimum wage. There’s simply no way. It appears that the Guatemalan state may have let its good intentions get ahead of what is realistically possible. I have to ask if perhaps it wouldn’t be better for the government here to lower the minimum wage a little, allow for an hourly minimum wage for part-time employment, and bring a larger percentage of the population into the formal labor force, thereby at least granting those people basic labor rights, even if they weren’t earning an exceptional salary.
Welcome to the International Humanitarian Foundation’s blog, “Creating Global Change.” Over the coming months, IHF volunteers around the globe will share their thoughts on such subjects as the role of volunteers in development, the significance of partnership as a development model, and the ethics of development.
We hope you find our posts interesting, compelling, and entertaining. Please feel free to contribute your comments: our goal is to foster conversation about important issues in development. Check back every Friday for new content.
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