Bridging the divide...or not

Julio and Gloria are siblings who live with their family in a house in El Estor. Their house is immediately behind one of the houses that we helped lay concrete floor in on Monday.
Julio, 15, is an avid soccer player. He is no longer in school. He helps his older brother make candles mainly for their El Estor neighbors whose houses lack electricity.
Gloria, 17, is a single parent who spends her days helping her mother cook for seven people who live in their family’s compound and hand-washing clothes for all seven people in the family, three times a week.
Julio, Gloria, and Gloria’s three-year-old son live with the parents and younger siblings in one of the two houses on the property. Their older brother (the candle maker) and his family live in another house.
The yard is all dirt, except for a garden of banana trees and sugar cane. We were not invited inside either of the houses, but the houses no doubt have dirt floors just like the nearby house we worked on (until we helped complete the concrete floor Monday afternoon).
It is hot in El Estor, and the houses’ tin roofs make it even hotter inside, though trees shade some of the family’s property. The family’s pigs and chickens wander the yard freely.
Julio, Gloria, and their family are active in the Arca de Noe Presbyterian Church in El Estor, the church which has been our home base in El Estor.
Julio and Gloria were very hospitable and gracious. They showed us around their garden, shared family pictures with us, told us about their dog dying last year, and played Frisbee and marbles with us.
But there were uncomfortable moments, too. I asked Gloria where her esposa (husband) was, and she looked embarrassed and said she had none. (She’s the only mother I’ve met in El Estor who is not married.) I apologized to her for some reason and dropped it, but still wondered about the father.
Playing Frisbee with a large group of boys (including Douglas and Vincent from our group), I called out to Julio to ask him a question, but I had a block on his name and called him “Jose,” after I had just been talking with him for more than an hour. I fear this humiliated him, privately (since we had just spoken for a long time), and publicly, with his friends ribbing him about me getting his name wrong.
Prior to visiting Guatemala we had read in the guidebooks that some Guatemalans are fearful about U.S. people — especially women — visiting because Guatemalans fear that these U.S. people want to kidnap and adopt Guatemalan children. The night before Presbyterian mission worker and host David Wiseman had warned of a rumor around Guatemala about U.S. people taking Guatemalan babies to harvest their organs.
Imagine the surprise that Stephanie felt when adults in Julio and Gloria’s family, upon learning that Stephanie and I had just one child (16-year-old Vincent), offered us Gloria’s three-year-old boy as a child for us to adopt.
At some level, Stephanie was scared and horrified, and so she pretended not to understand. At another level, Stephanie and I had to confess to each other that we have considered adoption and had half joked about looking for a Guatemalan baby on this trip. (Later, in Antigua, we met a number of U.S. couples at various stages in the process of adopting Guatemalan babies.)
Stephanie even conceded to me that she really wants a girl, not a boy, and that something seemed wrong with Gloria’s child. And so we also felt sheepish about “cherry picking” potential adoptees.
On the other hand, the fact that we met only one single parent all day Sunday and Monday —in this gender- and age-stratified culture —may suggest that remaining single is not really a very good option for El Estor women and that a 17-year-old single woman with a three-year-old son may face bleak marriage prospects.
Towards the end of the day, Gloria deduced that one of the youths in our trip (17-year-old Douglas) was her age. She asked if he had a girlfriend. Douglas responded in English that girlfriends cost too much. Stephanie and I decided to translate this liberally, since we felt that a literal translation might be misunderstood. It takes a lot of money to have a girlfriend, we tried to explain in Spanish.
As we left, I also tried to explain that Vincent was my stepson, and that another man was his biological father. Gloria understood and supplied a word for “stepfather” in Spanish that I’ve subsequently had a block on, but also said I was Vincent’s segundo padre. It occurred to me later that perhaps Gloria would also like to have a segundo padre for her son. But perhaps in the K’ekchi culture that is unlikely to happen.
So we felt mixed emotions during the day. Our hosts have been so hospitable and so open to communicate and work with us, and yet a cultural and economic divide still separates us.

Perry Chang (written Monday, July 2)