Out of respect for people's privacy, I won't use names here but I will tell the story of one family's experience with the pandemic. These are friends of long standing, a family with three adult daughters. The mother runs a family business, and the father was a leader in both local and national indigenous movements. I have known them since 2011 -- I met the father together with some other friends and we've stayed friends ever since. I am very close with the oldest daughter, who was closest to her father in terms of their political leanings. They were both activists and very committed to the indigenous movement and oppositional politics in general; I had always viewed Doña C., the mother, as more or less apolitical. She is a member of an Evangelical church, and the two younger daughters also attended church; the father, W., and the oldest daughter, E., were not religious at all. I stayed with them often, but during the pandemic we were not in as close communication as we had been. One of the daughters is married but lives in the same town as her parents, and the other (I think the youngest) still lives at home with her parents. This is not uncommon in Guatemala, for unmarried children to live in their parents' home (and sometimes even to live in their parents' home after marriage or on the same piece of land in rural areas).
E., the oldest daughter, has been an advocate and educator around sexual and reproductive rights -- a touchy subject in a socially conservative country where abortion is still illegal and where, in indigenous communities, people are reticent to talk about issues concerning the body, sex, and sexuality. E. had taken a job in Santa Cruz del Quiché, a few hours away from her family's home, starting in early 2021, and was traveling back and forth to her hometown -- something that many Guatemalans do, as they often have to leave their hometowns for work. It is not unusual for someone from Xela, for example, to work in Guatemala City, and return to Xela on weekends, returning to the capital on Sunday night or Monday morning for work.
I don't quite know who in the family first contracted COVID, but the entire household, except the father, who travels a lot to the capital and elsewhere pursuant to his involvement in the indigenous movement, came down with COVID sometime in February 2021. That is to say Dona C., and the two daughters at home, E. and D.
E told me that she almost never went out. The government imposed lockdowns (toque de queda) but even when that was lifted, she rarely went out. In fact, as we ate dinner tonight at an upscale restaurant in Santa Cruz del Quiché (SCQ), she told me that she still rarely went out except for work. "But at some point I had let my guard down and wasn't taking all the precautions and that's how I got infected."
At first they quarantined at home, but then all three were all hospitalized. They were afraid to go into the hospital because they'd heard bad things about the care that one received there. And as E. explained to me, the government set up special hospitals for COVID patients. These were usually housed in facilities that had not been designed as hospitals, according to E. In Xela (the nearest large city), the COVID hospital was set up in a big field near the local airport, in a building that was used for the fiesta patronal (the patron saint feast, colloquially know as la feria (the fair). The three women were all hospitalized, and to E's surprise, the treatment they received was excellent. "I really respect the health workers." But the facility had a high roof and since it hadn't been designed as a hospital, it was very airy -- and it gets quite chilly in Xela at night, as it is one of the highest-altitude cities in Central America. While they were there, the father, W., became infected with COVID -- they think from a meeting he attended in Guatemala City -- and was also sent to the same hospital. As Doña C. told me, "Just as we were leaving, he entered."
But the three women recovered, and so they thought that W., the father, would also recover. E. told me that during the first several days that her father was in the hospital, he remained very active and engaged, using his cell phone to communicate with people on Facebook and WhatsApp, attending meetings and workshops and training sessions (capacitaciones) on Zoom. "People didn't realize that he was attending meetings from the hospital."
But instead of getting better, like the rest of the family, he worsened, and was put on oxygen (not an intubation but non-invasively, through an oxygen mask). He didn't want to be in the hospital, and E. thinks that his resistance might have been part of the reason that he died. I won't go through the entire story of what happened from a medical perspective, but after three days on oxygen, he had a hemorrhage (I think cerebral) and died. Only one person from the family was allowed to go to the hospital to identify the body, "so that they wouldn't mix the bodies up and give us the wrong one." There were four other people who died the same day, and two of them within the same hour as W. E's younger sister D. went to the hospital to identify the body, and E started making phone calls to other members of the family.
But there was a problem - the family did not have a burial plot in the local cemetery. Doña C. had told me a bit of this. "We had been talking for years about buying a plot in the cemetery, but he always kept putting it off, saying, 'later, later.'" The hospital only gave them 7 hours to arrange the burial (something to do with the COVID protocols). Doña C's parents had purchased a burial plot, and they had erected a monument with 4 spaces -- two for the parents, and the two on top for Doña C and her sister. According to E, "But my father never got along with my mother's family. My mother's mother never liked my father, and my father never liked my mother's mother. So if they didn't like each other when they were alive, why would we put him to rest with them?" But they still had to find somewhere to bury him. E called some of the cousins on her father's side of the family, and one of the cousins had purchased several burial plots in this cemetery, and gave one of them to the family so that W could be buried.
E also decided that it was important to let W's other children know about this. He had had a few children outside of his marriage, but E was the only one in his "official" family who kept in touch with her hermanitos -- the ones she knew about (she thinks there were probably others). This part of W's life wasn't something that I knew about until my last trip to Guatemala in 2019, when E told me that her father had another family (not entirely uncommon in Latin America). After her father died, E simply told her mother that she was going to let the other children know, "because he was their father." And so they all came together for the burial (or maybe this was after the actual burial).
Ironically, Doña C's bakery did very well during the pandemic, according to E, because bread was something easy for people to consume; they could come into the bakery and buy bread for the family and then would have food for a while.
W's death left a big gap, however, in the local community where the family lived. He had been a member of the alcaldía indígena (indigenous mayoralty) in the municipality -- I remember attending his initial installation some years back (maybe 2013 or 2014). And even before I sat down to eat and chat with E, another mutual friend had told me that when W died, the alcaldia indígena had kind of fallen apart. E is trying to continue in her father's footsteps. As she told me, "Each of us [the three daughters] is carrying on a part of what he did." One daughter, D., is a lawyer and works with groups on human rights. The third daughter, A, is a teacher. E works around sexual and reproductive rights and is also involved in the indigenous rights movement.
According to E, "My father wasn't just a national leader, he had a presence in the local community." She is very concerned about the gap that his death left in the indigenous mayoralty in their town. But, as she told me, "I have my own trajectory." Nonetheless, she says that she tried to participate in some of the meetings, more or less in her father's place, when they were held by Zoom. But, she told me, there is one person in the mayoralty, a woman, who was opposed to E's participation. "Every time I attended a meeting and tried to speak, she kept blocking me."
But E is thinking of trying to find a job closer or in her hometown, so she can live at home and try to play more of a role in the local community.
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