Sabina Bocel

(A-51) Status: Not Sponsored
Needs: Onil stove, water filter, bed and mattress
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. 

Sabina's spouse is missing an eye; she is missing a row of teeth.
He sleeps on the wooden boards on the floor, she on a cot in the kitchen.
While they should both come to eat, only Sabina makes it.
Her husband does not want to leave the house, surrounded in tall crops and grass, as he cannot see well.
She takes half her food to her husband.
Their child drinks and does not work.

Past stories about Sabina: click here.

Maria Felipa Coroz

(A-30) Status: Sponsored

Needs: food, electricity, drainage, medicines
Past stories about Maria: click here.
UPDATE June 19, 2013: "If I suddenly die," Maria says, "where would they put these things?" She explains why she does not ask for anything. The problem now is the trail to her house, which is long and treacherous. The rain makes it worse, so she cannot leave to come to the dining center to eat. She says she tries to visit her son who lives nearby each day, since if she doesn't, it is a sign that something is wrong. Her son comes to the house to check on her then, if she's sick or has fallen. While Mayan Families had given her a stove, she rarely cooks, subsisting on the food brought from the dining center. Her kids have no money to give her, nor does she have a way to make her own. She uses a latrine shielded only by PVC pipe and some sheets.
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Maria Felipa lives alone, high on a hill, taking a hour to get to from town. 

Like many of the women here she has outlived her husband by at least a decade; her children are too poor to look after her. 

She lives without a shower, or a sink. 

She waits for the neighbor child to bring her a barrel of water per week. 

She lives without a table, or chairs. She eats in the bed that was a gift. 

She lives without a floor; four wooden, rotted walls surround the dirt. 

When she cooks, she kneels on arthritic knees and blows on the open fire.

Rosa Guit Ramos

(A-32) Status: Sponsored as of Nov 9, 2012!
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.  

Rosa saves a little lunch for later. 

Today she could come to eat her lunch, yesterday, no. 

Her feet swell and sometimes she must stay in bed. 

Where once she'd sold food at the market or door to door, piling fruit into baskets to weigh on her head, now she must wait for someone to wait on her.

Her daughter is getting on in age as well: at 60 she washes other's clothes and sells in a store.
She makes enough to feed her own family, but not her mother, who depends on the lunch she receives.

When I ask Rosa what she needs she says food, sugar, beans. 

Luciana Simion Buch

Update Dec 4, 2012: Luciana has received a generous donation of shoes, food, and a blanket! She is so grateful, thank you!

(A-43) Status: Not Sponsored
Needs: water filter

Luciana asks for a pair of shoes, vitamins.
Once she wove great reams of fabric; she spun the threads by hand.
Now her bones swell inside their skin and she does not weave.
She hardly walks.
Her son and her grandson are builders, whose work is never steady.
They cannot afford to drink pure water, so drink from the tap.
Because of this Luciana vomits and has diarrhea all day.
But she does not complain of her body's disobedience, nor her arthritis, the bad water or that she does not have blankets on her bed.
She asks for shoes, vitamins.

One story, a hundred faces

There is the kind of displacement that becomes a refugee: for example, a hurricane stripping a home of its inhabitants, or a war chasing out those will not fight. It is a word representing the forced movement of a thing from one place to another. It evokes violence, resistance, and destructive change.

With reference to a person, it is a forced exile from their home to somewhere unfamiliar. We say they have been uprooted, like the wind tears out a tree from the ground.

Then there is another kind of displacement, a change most of us only gradually notice but for others, happens as violent or unexpected as a storm: age. Instead of being a victim of the time and place of your country, a person becomes a victim of the vehicle he uses to live in the world.

Guatemalan indigenous, if they have lived long enough, experience both kinds. They have experienced the displacement of natural disaster and war, where winds or bullets had forced them to seek refuge in the mountains or elsewhere. As they age, they may also feel a body’s betrayal, as their means for work, transportation and staying out of debt begins to fail. They become displaced in becoming unfamiliar, even useless, to themselves. Where do we go? What can we do? Says a refugee, lost somewhere not his home.

Many elderly are accustomed to carting large bundles of wood, food or water on their backs and heads. Others work in fields plucking seeds or leaves with fingers that will not close around them. Most walk to where the water is, to where they can get food, to where there is fuel for their fire. What can they do when their body slows? The slightest health problem incurs a debt too large to repay, since it is their very bodies which must work to pay to repair them.

And sometimes, to rely on the family they’d raised is to rely on the support of disaster relief housing after a landslide: the relief is not built to last, as the families, like the houses, can barely support themselves.

The indigenous elderly's ailments are great and means are few. It is one story with a hundred—thousands of faces. 

We are asking you to help us feed just one. The upcoming photos and bios will feature one human being displaced by time— a body become foreign in a familiar context--as one face in a world of faces.

We aim to provide nearly 80 people with one meal, once a day with a monthly sponsorship of $35. 

Please consider helping someone who does not have, nor will have, a way to help themselves. Visit www.mayanfamilies.org/donatenow 

Feed Just One.

Our Elderly Care program feeds about 70 people per day at our locations here in Panajachel and the neighboring village of San Jorge.

For most of them, this is the only meal they receive all day. Some stretch their portion by saving half for the evening. For some, they are the only members of their family who get to eat that day. Others save half their meal for their wife, husband or families at home.

When I ask what they’d eaten that day, or what they might eat later, many answer: a single tortilla with salt. A single egg.  A tomato. Nothing.

Some of our elderly live with their entire families in a single house. Some have nine children who have four or five children of their own. Food prices continue to soar, leaving those who cannot work in worse conditions than ever: the adults in the house must choose who gets to eat, their children or their parents. They must choose who gets to sleep in a bed, and who must sleep on the floor.

This should not have to be a choice. The Feeding Program provides a single meal a day to the elderly who otherwise would forfeit their food for the children, or who by their poor health would not otherwise be able to scavenge the trash for scraps or find other means to feed themselves.

Having spent their lives in desperate conditions during the last century of war, poverty, civil unrest and its constant repercussions, the elderly are still the last to receive relief in Guatemala. And having spent their lives struggling with the hope that someday things might get better, and being proven otherwise, they are grateful for even the smallest gift: one meal per day, five days a week.

By no means is one meal enough, but at the moment it is all Mayan Families can provide, and the program is in danger of being cut. Only those who are currently sponsored will continue receiving their one meal a day. The rest we will have to refuse; we will have to tell them that even this tiny, but necessary quantity of food will be taken from them, like so much has been taken from them throughout their lives.

Currently, only 13 of our elderly receive a monthly donation to help with food, medical costs, rent or other necessities. In an effort to ensure that all 70 of our elderly receive just one meal a day, not including purchased medicine, rent costs or other expenses, we are asking you to sponsor one for just $35 a month. We will continue to help our elderly for medicine and other needs per the extraneous donations we receive. However, $35 a month will provide one meal per day, five days a week, to one person who has no way to care for herself, whose family faces the daily impasse of feeding who they must raise or feeding who fought to raise them. 

If you would like to help to keep one person fed for one month, please visit www.mayanfamilies.org/donatenow and write "one month, one person'' in the Other box. 

Update: Manuel needs follow-up after his surgery

Manuel has been doing very well since his surgery.  It truly saved his life and he never would have been able to pay for it on his own.  He and his family are extremely grateful for the opportunity that Mayan Families gave them to save Manuel!  Thank you so much for contributing!

Now, Manuel is in need of follow-up care after the surgery.  For the procedure to maintain its full affect, Manuel must travel two hours to the hospital nearly every month and have adjustments made to the apparatus that was inserted.  Every time Manuel travels, he needs $67.  Without these check-ups, Manuel's condition will become extremely painful again and put his life at risk. 

Please consider helping Manuel and go to Donate Now and scroll down.  In the Other $ box, enter the amount of your donation.  In the Details box, enter Manuel Medical.  Thank you!
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Manuel, a 64 year old mute man in our elderly care program, is in need of an urgent life-saving surgery!  He was operated on in January for prostate problems and seemed to be doing fine, but recently has had extreme pain and has been urinating blood.  The complications from his previous surgery have now put his life in danger and we are worried that if he is not operated on immediately, he will day a very painful death.

Manuel's niece came to us today to ask us for help to send her uncle to a specialist who will do the procedure for $1200.  The public hospital is not equipped to provide Manuel with the care that would save his life.  Please consider helping cover the costs of Manuel's surgery!