Lessons in generosity

While the majority of my days are spent in the Nu’Kem store/office, I greatly enjoy my little outings to the communities to spend time with the weavers. The store is in Tactic, but the women live in the poor(er) outlaying aldeas and the neighboring municipality. My visits usually consist of walking from house to house with the community representative, talking to the weavers (trying to at least…most of the women speak very little Spanish or none at all), and watching them weave. I field questions about the states (no, not all people from Missouri are brown), my family (the women think my brothers are very handsome), and of course my marriage status (in Tamahú I was betrothed to a boy who is still nursing). They talk about me in Poqomchi’, and I smile.

It is during these excursions that I am repeatedly humbled by the generosity of Guatemalans. I am from one of the richest countries in the world living in one of the poorest, and yet these women give me the best of what they have. In every house I am greeted with a beverage and food (I probably exceed my daily needed caloric intake in just liquids). The women scramble to find me a seat and make sure that I am comfortable. I leave loaded down with fruit, bread, and tamales.

During one trip to Tamahú in which I had planned to just visit houses, I was surprised to find all the weavers in the representative’s home preparing a huge lunch in my honor. I was served first (as always) and given the best piece of chicken, larger portions of rice and soup, my own basket full of tamalitos, AND an eating utensil. Later when all the Coke Lights caught up with me, Yolanda sent her son out running to find a “door” for the outhouse (semi see-through plastic sheet) and a role of toilet paper (I could have used the near-by newspaper, but I wasn’t exactly sure it wasn’t meant for reading). The women found the situation very amusing.

That day in Tamahú, I received an invite to one of the weavers’ birthday party. After over an hour ride in the back of a truck on a dirt road through the gorgeous Polochic Valley and a near hour hike up into the hills through banana trees and a coffee farm, we finally reached Zoila’s one room, dirt floor, wood house—the poorest house I have seen in Guatemala. Even though it was Zoila’s party, I was treated like the guest of honor and superfluously received more attention than the birthday girl. I ate tamales, sipped instant coffee (they can’t afford the good coffee growing all around them), chatted with the women, and played marbles on the dirt floor with the barefoot children. And yet amid the joyfulness of the gathering, I was overcome by a profound sadness and an even more acute sense of purpose here—sadness for the poverty surrounding me and purpose for the charge I have been given to work to alleviate it.

These women who have so openly accepted me and so munificently given to me are counting on me to find them clients. My ability to find them buyers directly affects their ability to work and provide for their families. For all the generosity the women of Nu’Kem have shown and will continue to show me, I desire so greatly to succeed in that task.