Chris asks Florinda more and more probing questions about her life. He says her experiences are an excellent motivation for him to practice his Spanish and he is eager to make his questions for her clear. Today, he came home from class with some fascinating stories.
Last night I asked Chris to find out about Guatemalan folk tales, but Florinda told him today that their children are tired at the end of the day and do not need to be told stories to fall asleep! When he pressed her, she did tell him one old story her father told her when she was a little girl. It is about two (ahem!) Mayan children. When their mother dies, their father remarries a wicked woman who doesn't care for them in the least. She has such disdain for them, she brings them out into the forest and leaves them. The children are clever and bring corn with them, leaving a trail so that they will be able to find their way back. Unfortunately, the birds and the forest creatures eat all of their corn and so they are ultimately lost until they find the oldest woman in the world. She is so old, she is nearly blind and cannot fend for herself in the same way she once was able so the children help her with her tasks and in exchange for their service she feeds them tortillas. At this point, I was expecting the boy to grow plump and juicy off of those tortillas and... but instead, Florinda's story ended here with a "happily ever after." I guess at least one Mayan storyteller found the cannibalism in the original Grimms distasteful and away it went.
Because Chris and I have been shopping the markets and cooking dinner each night, he asked Florinda about recipes and she shared with him some ideas for soups (lots of lima beans and peas) and said that mint is the primary herb used in Mayan cooking. People don't have ovens here so their cooking is all stove top which makes me wonder a bit about the fact that there are cake mixes in almost every store we visit. This is probably not an issue I can convince Chris to ask her about! She also talked about the natural remedies they make for all sorts of illnesses, although each remedy she told him about was to treat a belly ache. They dry the leaves from the apasote plant to toast with garlic and wrap in a banana leaf as a compress on the abdomen. They also make a paste from the colla de zorrio plant which they rub on the abdomen. It sounds like perhaps there are a lot of abdominal illnesses here that they treat in any number of ways.
Chris likes to talk about food and can relate to discussing illnesses, but he really leaned forward when Florinda began to recount tales of her own educational and social experiences as an indigena in a ladino world. She and her siblings suffered terrible discrimination in an educational system where the overwhelming majority of maestros are ladino and hold their Mayan students in low regard and measure the two groups using a double standard. Florinda suggests that there is absolutely no intermarriage between the two groups and that when she was in school there weren't any play lot friendships, either. She recounted to Chris a time when she was a senior in high school (called escuela specificada, it is a three year vocational program that rounds out their preparatory education), she arrived to class and the teacher presented the students with a seating chart in which all of the ladinos were in the front of the room and the indigenas were in the rear. This injury was the worse because the people of Spanish descent are much taller than the Mayans and so it was impossible to see past them to the instructor. This was intolerable to Florinda and so she stood up in class and commanded the attention of those around her and told her teacher that the Guatemalan constitution guarantees the equal rights of both groups. She said the indigenas were not animals and that they had rights. She created quite a stir and her teacher was furious. The next was a part of the story I had trouble understanding but it had to do with some sort of teacher/student council to which only ladino students were invited. In any case, the time Florinda went to class, the seating chart had been redone and several of the indigenas had been moved forward. Her seat, however, remained in the rear. Florinda still sees the woman today but they do not speak to one another.
She went on to tell her sister's story. The girl is now 21 but experienced terrible frustration when she was 15 years old in escuela basica. That year, she had several issues, the first when one of her rubber sandals broke in class and her teacher called her to the front of the room and to dress her down. Florinda made it clear to Chris that her sister was wearing the very best shoes their father could afford but they were admittedly very cheap. The teacher used Florinda's sister as an example and informed the class that the students should all be wearing much nicer shoes than she was wearing and certainly should be wearing shoes with heels. She went on to say that the girls should change their hairstyles each day for class, despite knowing that the indigenas where their hair in a traditional style. The girl was debased and returned home that day crying.
Another time, the teacher stepped out of the room and several students were having difficulty with their math work, a subject in which Florinda's sister was quite gifted so she moved to help them. When the teacher returned to the room, she accused the girl of doing her homework in class, took her notebook and refused to return it. When the girl tried to explain what she had really been doing to her teacher, the woman slammed a door in her face. Florinda went to the school to talk to the teacher and she was treated in the same way: a door in the face. Florinda persisted, banging on the door and finally the teacher returned the notebook but threatened to destroy it if the girl caused her anymore difficulty.
Florinda's sister is in law school now in Solola, with the goal of protecting the legal rights of indigenas. She attends classes on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and it will take her six years to complete her course of study, for which she has a scholarship for books but has to work during the week to pay her tuition: 700 quetzales a month--an enormous financial burden. She is still a minority student; there are few indigenas in law school here, but the nickname the other students have given her is Rigoberta Menchu, after the 1992 Nobel Prize winning promoter of indigenous rights. Needless to say, in addition to buying school supplies for Florinda's children, Chris and I are thinking about kicking a little something in for her sister's law school education. Our relative wealth is embarrassing.
Florinda shares these stories with pride, although admits her husband says that hers is a familia of nerds because none of them ever have to repeat any grades!
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