I: Juana Coroxon Ramos

(A-44) Status: Not Sponsored

Needs: food, medicine, mattress, water filter, table, chairs

UPDATE Dec 11, 2012: Juana needs medical care
For more stories and photos of the ancianos in the Feeding Program, please consider purchasing a book compiled of our participants. All profits go to the Elderly. You can preview the book here.  

Juana begins to cry. Her spouse, to whom she’s been married 55 years, is away trying to find work as a day-laborer, the work he’s done all his life. 

It is the work of a younger man. She had done it too. She says there were no buses, no trucks then. They walked for days to coffee farms that needed to be harvested. During a portion of the year they walked to the coast—a distance of 100-150 km, depending, as the crow flies—to work seasonally in the fields. They never went to school.

She was used to carrying heavy loads on her back or head.  Juana's toenails curl like snails embedded in her feet, which look wooden for how hard and dusty they are. Her arm does not leave from where it covers her face as she tells us how the light hurts to look at, and she does not move, since that hurts too.

Her daughter, who sits behind us on another bed, stays home to care for her mother. She talks through her like a ventriloquist, telling us of her mother’s pain: she hurts here and here, she explains as Juana combs her side.

The daughter is one of three remaining children. Three others had died as kids. Because their parents could not pay for a doctor, she says, they tried to cure sicknesses with herbs or other remedies. Sometimes it worked.

We can’t leave her alone, repeats the daughter. They have very little: the two mattressless beds, collections of photographs of family hanging on mud walls—light and air intruding where the ceiling doesn’t meet them—and a kitchen separated by tin sheets. 

The daughter is quick to dismiss the kitchen as being hers, as if the rubble of tortillas on the stove and its tenants of flies belong to no one. A bathroom exists somewhere, shared by others in the compound. There is no table, no chairs, no water filter. A large bowl of milled maize sits on the floor uncovered.

To help Juana and her daughter with these needs, please go to www.mayanfamilies.org/donatenow.