Santos Palaz

(A-68) Status: Not Sponsored

Needs: doctor's visit & follow-up, bed, mattress, water filter replacement cartridges

To help: www.mayanfamilies.org/donatenow "A-68 [need]" e.g. sponsorship, medical, bed.

Past stories about Santos: click here.

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.  

It feels like a nail being pounded through his breast, then coursing through his torso to his swollen hips. 

For five years the tumor has been growing and Santos has been losing his sight.

His daughter guides him to a chair in the dark of the room, explaining why she can't take him to the doctor: there has never been any money. 

There is no electricity in the room, and the walls are dank. Two chairs and a small table host a little food and a water filter whose filters have been outdated for over a year. A wooden statue of Christ is embedded in the concrete wall, watching over a dirt floor.  

The house lets in the chickens, but little light as Santos’ daughter shows us where the tumor sits, where there might be a cyst or something else.

The pain used to come and go, now its just constant.

His grandchildren sit in the doorway. Their father left them, his daughter says, pointing to her son.

Her husband had worked as a day-laborer, and earned less than $6 a day.

Now she looks after them alone, and must take the job of guiding her father where he needs to go, since he can no longer see.

She works making jewelry and might earn $2 a week.

She lives in a house with her two kids, apart from the room where her father sleeps on a mat on the dirt.

She uses the community concrete sink to wash their clothes and dishes.

Her sister has three kids of her own, living in similar conditions. Even combined, the families could not provide for Santos’ medical costs.

The food he gets comes from the Elderly Care program, which his grandkid retrieves for him at lunchtime.

It looks like he’s growing a breast, his daughter says. We’re afraid that he won’t be able to walk at all soon if the pain gets any worse.

Alberta Quieju

(A-49) Status: Not Sponsored

Needs: water filter, pila, table, food

Previous stories about Alberta can be found here.
UPDATE June 21, 2013: Alberta receives blankets and sheets!

To help, click here. To sponsor Alberta for $35 a month, click here.
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.  

Alberta lives in her one room with her one son, who drinks away what he earns. 

These days, the only thing important to her is that she eats a tortilla with salt, since when there is no money there is no food.

A hundred bundles of sticks sit outside the house, around two broken concrete sinks: the former which fuel the fire for her stove and the latter which serve no one. 

Two beds take up most of the space in the house.

Two chairs sit there, denuded for lack of a table, surrounding a rooster on the floor that is the earth. 

She plans to kill it to eat it later, which is why it's tied to the chair. 

There's no sink, no shower in the house. There is no light and no running water.

They landlord will let her live within the mud walls and tin roof until she dies. As far as what her son will do then, God knows, she says. 

III: Paulino

Paulino Buch Xalcut
(A-87) Status: Not Sponsored
Needs: food, pain medication, wheelchair repairs, glass for a window
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.  

For 15 years, Paulino's knees have ceased to serve him.
He sits in a wheelchair whose wheels don't turn, next to a window without a pane, where a blanket hangs.
It gets cold there, where the house sits overlooking Lake Atitlan and the crowns of broken buildings.
At 92 he has felt a few earthquakes, has seen a few sad things.
His wife died about the time his knees began to ache.
Of his five children, the three men work in the fields like he did, though one has "fallen" to drinking.
One daughter lives with her father and the others, she says, have no concern for him.
She does not speak much Spanish, did not go to school long.
Some grandchildren live in the same rented compound. Because Paulino can walk a little bit sometimes, he'll turn the corner and pass the time with them, chatting.
He coughs in the night, and cannot feel his knees.

Felipa & Clemente

II: Felipa & Clemente

Clemente Cun Palax, Felipa Simieon Palax

(A-40, A-41) Staus: Sponsored as of Dec 15, 2012!

Needs: food, corn, mattress, water filter, house

UPDATE Nov 30, 2012: Felipa & Clemente received a large basket of food!
                Dec 7, 2012: They received a mattress and a large basket of food!
                Dec 15, 2012: They are now sponsored for one year!
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. 

Felipa was hanging on, but barely, when she fell off the back of the truck. 

Here the pickup beds are public transportation: crowds of people pile into the back and hang on till their destination.

Sometimes there are so many the last ones on are left to step on the fender, hanging on to a pole.

After Felipa fell, she hobbled home and wrapped the wrist that was broken, then laid down on a straw mat called a petate, which serves as her mattress on her bed of boards.

Her husband is a blind man, and cannot work. They have no children, though Felipa, when she was a midwife, delivered over 1000 others. 

They live in a little room in a compound of other little rooms, where some family of family live.

The extended family members give them water, and maybe a little money if they have it.

They let them borrow the stove to cook and the pila, a large concrete sink, to wash.

They also let them borrow electricity: one lightbulb hangs from a wire above them.

There are no supports to keep the roof from becoming a floor. Felipa said that when the earthquake hit two weeks ago she was afraid the walls would fall on her.

Both she and Clemente are afraid for the next storm, for the breeze that will destroy everything.

When Clemente went blind, Felipa had once worked to support the both of them. But there are two things, she says: right now there are no pregnant women here, and even if there were they wouldn’t come to me.

Girls nowadays go to the hospital to see a doctor about their babies.

Felipa does not go to a doctor about her wrist or her fall, as there is no money. She’d been given enough from a neighbor to see a huesero, a healer who massages bones back into place.

It is a little better than before, she says. However, now that neither she nor her husband can work, she worries: she cannot buy maize, corn, the staple of a million Guatemalan dishes. She begins to cry. How will we get our food? How will we buy our corn?

The food they do get comes from the neighbor kids who bring it from the Feeding Program. Since the accident it has been the only guarantee that they will eat.

Estamos un poco mal, Clemente says, we’re not doing so well. 


A link to some photographs of Felipa & Clemente and their housing situation can be found here.
A brief story about the bedridden elderly in Guatemala can be found here. 

If you would like to help Felipa and Clemente with any of their many needs, please go to www.mayanfamilies.org/donatenow and write A-40, 41 plus the amount and what you are donating for. A list of prices can be found on this page. If you would like to sponsor Felipa and Clemente to continue eating with us each day, please consider sponsoring them at $35 each per month. We are in desperate need of sponsorship for the many Elderly who do not have enough to eat each day. 

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. 

A prison of the body and the bed

To be old in this place is to have lost your last means of independence: the body which is able to work.

There are many whose bodies have aged past a limit barely withstood by the young and able in a country whose conditions do not allow any but the fittest to survive.

They often cannot even walk the short distance to the comedor, the dining room where we host lunch. Neighbor kids bring them the food. The majority, made silent by the walls by which they're kept, moan similar complaints when we visit: of their aching bones, of their aching body, of the eyes that do not see and the feet which do not walk. 

It seems they lie forgotten on their beds, which often host petates, straw mats, in place of mattresses. Their children try their best, but often they must choose between providing for their parents or their kids, since they themselves are poor.

The next three stories will feature some of the bedridden, who are much in need of basic provisions: food, mattresses, shoes, a water filter, a window-- and most urgently, sponsorship to eat each day. Read the stories; if you would like to make a donation of any of the items, please go to www.mayanfamilies.org/donatenow, and write the A- # and the item you would like to donate in the Other box. Prices for item donations can be found on this page.

If you would like to sponsor an elderly person to eat each day in our Feeding program, which provides a basic and nutritious lunch to those unable to do much, even cook, for themselves-- you can write the A- # of someone you know you would like to sponsor (biographies on the right side of the page). We will happily introduce you to more of our unsponsored program participants in the upcoming weeks. 

Thank you for your support! Further questions can be directed to familyaid@mayanfamilies.org.