Jose Humberto Alonzo & Celestina Simion

(A-59 Jose) Status: Sponsored as of February 15, 2013!
(A-53 Celestina) Status: Sponsored

Needs: food, medicine, chemotherapy, pila, bathroom, kitchen, stove repairs
UPDATE Dec 10, 2012: Celestina has received a bed, mattress and blanket!
UPDATE May 2013: Celestina has had her door repaired!

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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.  

Six of Celestina’s children pretend to have forgotten her, leaving her living in a room lucky to fit two whole bodies inside it, though it’s just her, a bed made of boards, and a television set which sits unused on a shelf.

Even if she had electricity, she would not understand the language of its programs, as none speak her native Kaqchiquel.

Her husband died last year; the two of them had shared the tiny space. 

One more son lives up the hill past the bathroom—two holes made in the ground with wooden boxes placed over them, in their own wooden box like a stable around them—past his own bathroom which is not even this: USAID tarps, given for temporary relief housing after natural disasters, wrap around boards laid atop a hole on the ground. They are wet from use. 

He wears a hat on his head to cover the consequence of his cancer, whose treatment his family is constantly seeking to pay for.

Every two months for the past three years he has gone to the City for treatment.

Because of his illness he does not work; his wife makes beaded jewelry to make ends meet. Most of the time, she doesn’t: she borrows from neighbors, friends, whomever—so they might have enough to buy her husband’s medicine this time, or have food on the table afterwards.

When borrowing fails, they either don’t eat or don’t buy the medicine.
Though by age Jose doesn’t qualify for the Feeding Program, his mother does, who asked that he be allowed to go because of his illness and his poverty.

Bent over and shoeless, though adorned as if to suggest to the world that being poor does not mean being poorly dressed, she goes to the kitchen.

A stove is curtained in more USAID tarps.

It’s about to fall, says Jose’s wife. Just like the chimney for the stove, which fell a few months ago.

I just want a bed, says Celestina. Or something else to keep out the cold—the door’s wood’s been rotting for a long time and all the wind gets in.