Torrential rain poured off the man’s head and dark clothing. He was piled in a jumble of bones near a resident’s front door, yet no one came to rescue him. One dim streetlight cast a shabby ray of light further on.

In addition to the pelting rain against my parka, I could hear gurgling water making its way to the river below through the additives to the gutters in this garbage laden town: cow dung, dog feces, candy wrappers, corn husks, plastic bottles and dirt.

It was mid-evening in May 2015 in San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala. This otherwise busy enclave of 40,000 residents, 1,500 cows, 1,000 cornfields and 2,000 feral dogs was quiet, like a Sox game in a rain delay.

Gone for now were the women in ankle-length skirts rushing to the corner store for last minute bread, pairs of turned-on teenagers groping each other in dark corners and tiny children kicking a plastic ball down the hilly streets.

I jogged a little distance down the steep rutted street to escape him and the symbol of him.

My motto is “no messing with bolos”, the local word for drunken men passed out on sidewalks. My vow to avoid unconscious men with imbalanced body chemistry is based on experiences. A bolo once climbed through a restaurant window and sat at my table. He had trouble understanding he was not welcome and had to be removed by the owner, a friend of mine.

But my daughter and husband had other ideas and stopped to help him. They checked his pulse and tried to rouse him, get him to stand and say his name and address. He was small, like most Maya men, maybe 5’4”, and in a stupor. He was soaked through but not responding to touch or sound.

Seeing their gesture of kindness jarred me. Maybe he wasn’t a predator as I had been trained early in life about drunks on the street, but a helpless human being, verging on hypothermia. There were more reasons to stay than to flee.

I was wet, cold and tired and not in the mood for a needy human. What could be done anyway? What was my obligation to this lifeless form? He was a stranger to me and I no more than an onlooker in his town. I knew that finding him services was near impossible in a town where there was no United Way, Salvation Army, or even a home for drunken men to flop for a night. This was Guatemala, a version of the old wild west, where the men still wore cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats and carried machetes on their belts instead of six-shooters.

2006

I had first visited this densely congested town in 2006 as an idealist seeking to help the “less fortunate.” I was also a mom brought to Guatemala out of a wish to educate her white privileged teenage children to other sides of life. Our family of four had come for a two-week immersion in a Spanish-speaking, indigenous culture far from tourist sites and other Caucasians. Two weeks of home stay, living with the real deal Maya family, teaching English to eager students and then, in my mind, obligation met.

Kids, you are now free to explore more diversity. You now know that not everyone has faucets that pour potable water. Not everyone has indoor plumbing, electricity flowing from walls, WIFI and computers in living rooms. Not everyone has a living room. There are homes with no books and no bookshelves.

Some countries have rivers clogged with trash, diapers and plastic bottles. Some have feral dogs and cats that are poisoned on a regular basis to keep their populations in control. There are towns with no dog parks sharing imperatives with little leagues and soccer matches. There really are places without grass soccer fields and cozy bookstores serving lattes.

Our connections did not end with that first visit. Despite language and cultural barriers, we discovered commonalities with the people we had come to help. Friendships formed and we began to return yearly, then semi-annually. We also found enormous need and we knew we had the means to help.

During my first few trips I experienced a honeymoon “halo effect”. I left each visit gushing over the colorful happy people living an ancient agrarian lifestyle of farming and open-air markets in the valleys and hilltops of rolling green mountains.

I found much to admire. I envied their happy family units brimming with pride and love for their children living harmoniously in family compounds of multiple generations. Childcare was spread amongst grandmothers, aunts, daughters and daughter-in-laws without regard to biological kinship. They seemed to have encapsulated the meaning of life within community, faith and family, with minimalist lifestyles far from the siren call of materialism.

One Saturday morning I observed 18 women and children cooking a lunch of tortillas and boiled chicken together in a small kitchen. A murmuring peacefulness, similar to that of a well-run preschool class, spread a canopy of care over the children. The adults giggled and kindly teased each other.

And did I also notice they were poor? I tried to overlook the differences between us. I tried to not see the housewives, like myself, keeping order without benefit of vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, washing machines, refrigerators and central heating. I tried to not look beyond the faces of the happy children into their futures of limited education and few jobs. I tried to not feel guilty that I had so much and why was that? Wasn’t it just the luck of birthright?

After a few years of peering through the holes in the canopy, I swung to a more realistic attitude sprinkled ungenerously with cynicism. I saw that the people were proud but also poor and stuck in their poverty. They didn’t have any path out of poverty. I also noticed that they accepted all this misfortune with a smile. Why so happy? I began to wonder.

And I cast blame onto them. I noticed they lacked ingenuity. Every store had identical brown eggs, junk food packages and agua pura for sale. Where were creativity, invention, and entrepreneurship? Why should I choose one dark tienda over the next just a few dusty yards down the same rutted road? No wonder no one stood out from the crowd, no wonder no one made any money. If they could only invent a more creative approach to retail, have a few more signs, advertisements they could make a killing….

I also lapsed into whining about toilet roll holders and unsanitary bathrooms. I turned to dark humor such as a game called “I know I am in Guatemala when….” In this game each participant supplies an answer to the phrase “I know I am in Guatemala when…” with such examples as:

• My seat-mate on the chicken bus is asleep and drooling on my shoulder,
• My suitcase acts as my night stand,
• My hot shower turns out to be cold,
• My faucet has no running water, ever,
• My taxi driver insists I roll up my window to the size of a child’s fist so thieves can’t get their hands in,
• There is no fire department, ambulance, health clinic, safe shelter in this town of 40,000.

In this manner, we would joke about the frustrating inconveniences and often frightening challenges of this country. Was any harm done by these observations and gossip? Of course not, the prevailing atmosphere of the town was peaceful, non-violent, content, despite what they lacked by our standards. We could afford to be a little cynical if it made our trips less stressful. After all, we were local heroes. We were admired. We were Doing Good.

They were prospering with our help. The school we had helped to start was flourishing. There were kids getting educated and trash being used for positive results. They had a functioning fire department and an excess of firefighting equipment. My husband’s name was written on the ambulance and fire engine he helped bring to the town. The town turned out for a parade given in his honor.

2010

Then on October 18, 2010 we got a troubling phone call. The oldest son, age 32, of our host family and best Guatemalan friends had been murdered. He had been found naked and hanging in a ravine near home. Fausto had been killed by machete or blunt instrument. No one was sure yet. He had left on Friday night and was found early Sunday morning.

Fausto was the father of two young girls. He and his wife, Katya, lived with his parents in the family compound, which modestly sheltered three generations. They had just one room where they all slept but all shared the kitchen, and the cooking and cleaning, with the four other families living in the house.

Fausto was a success story. He was educated, employed, sober, married, a loyal family member and a kind man. He was also a deeply identified Maya. He had schooled us on the Mayan culture our first summer in Guatemala. He told us of the traditional symbols attached to each of our birthdays that predicted personality and destiny.

He had a law degree and worked in the capital, two hours from Comalapa. His was a brutal commute without a car so he often stayed in the city for the workweek returning home on Friday nights. I had witnessed the joyful reunions of Fausto and his young daughters.

We assumed that the police would uncover and arrest the murderer post haste. We knew it was a small town and everybody knew everyone else’s business. This was only the second murder in ten or so years. We heard rumors that he had some wrangling over indigenous land rights. We heard rumors that an uncle was involved in a personal dispute over family land. We even heard rumors that he had been having an affair and the woman’s husband killed him. But whatever the reason, we were certain justice would prevail and the family would have their closure.

May 2015

There has been no investigation, no persons of interest brought forward, no suspects discovered or interviews conducted. We ask his heartbroken parents for news every time we speak or visit, but they have nothing to share.

The family has little choice but to accept the indifference of the larger social net and bury their grief. This is an injustice for all. How can a family remain whole when the larger system is so broken? How can a community remain strong without protection?

In the highlands of Guatemala, where the indigenous live, there is an abominable absence of infrastructure and protective services because of government apathy, prejudice against the indigenous and years of corruption draining the public coffers. The man lying on the sidewalk represented what I loathe most about Guatemala: Witnessing the enormous need of the people coexisting alongside the prevailing indifference of the system.

The sign of this neglect was represented by the very sidewalk that supported the bolo. As a sidewalk, it barely deserved the label. It was not a reliable and uniform platform for walking, jogging or strolling children. Rutted, uneven, randomly wide and thin, high and low, it would flunk any test administered by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Nor could it promise protection from horses, cows, cars and the small three-wheeled taxi-cabs called Tuk-Tuks.

Ten years before I found the sidewalks part of an old-world charm of the town. The sidewalks were unique and crafty like hand-spun things found on an Etsy site. Now the poorly constructed sidewalks, feces in the street, running water for only two hours every day, trash in the rivers, absence of potable water, and scuffed and ragged shoes on hungry children had become unacceptable signs of a corrupt government unwilling to do its job. And signs that the community had drunk the Koolaid: why weren’t they mad like I was?

Our work in Guatemala could be part of the problem. Helpful non-profits enable the government to remain passive. As long as a number of do-goodnik agencies fill in a critical mass of gaps in social services, the people remain grateful for the help, beholden to their benefactors and beneath the level of civil unrest.

In the USA, when confronted with ravings, begging or sleeping in the street, I walk briskly away, avoiding the human being on the other side of the equation. I am “free” of the burden of another human’s suffering because I assume the “system” will care for him. The police or homeless patrol, local church, friends or family will show up to protect him from himself. It would be easily cast from my hands.

But in Guatemala there was no chance that a Pine Street Inn van would shuttle this man to a protected environment later that night. His fate fell on our shoulders, the citizen police.

Guatemala is a Do It Yourself (DIY) country. If one wants potable water it is best to buy it at the store. If its electricity you need, best to string it from a pole down the block. If you need to suppress a fire, find a puddle. If your son is murdered better solve the crime yourself. Citizens have been conditioned to expect nothing from their government.

The man was also part of what I signed up for when I began visiting a part of the world where the indigenous people are considered “other”. The last war on the indigenous lasted for almost twenty years. It was backed by the USA who (wrongly) believed that it could prevent Guatemala from falling to the communists by supporting a war on a group who had a right to rise up against oppressors. In this town we know people affected by La Violencia. People who lost fathers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers. Mothers who were left with four children and no means of feeding them after a husband “disappeared.” I know mothers who were forced to beg neighbors to foster two or three of their children.

We didn’t leave the man in the street but getting him help was challenging.  We found that there were no addiction services, not enough emergency vehicles, no homeless shelters and most sadly, no sense of duty and compassion flowing from public employees.

Eventually, a passerby stopped to aid our meandering search for a solution. He had a cell phone so we made a call to the fire station. We learned that the town’s single ambulance was on another call 40 minutes in the opposite direction. After another fifteen minutes of debating options, the man agreed to retrieve his truck from his home. After three of us lifted the man into the flatbed of the small truck, my husband volunteered to ride with him, sheltering him from the wind-driven rain with a small broken umbrella. My daughter and I climbed into the tiny cab of the Toyota where the driver cranked the fan and heat to high. The Good Samaritan, whose name we learned was Mason, had recognized us. He asked about the school, our friends, the Otzins, and other small-town affairs on our three-mile trip to the fire station.

Upon arrival, our obligation was not so simply dispatched. The young firewoman on duty protested. “He’s not my problem.” An ambulance driver who soon arrived complained that the man would become combative after sobering up. Out of options, we left him at the station, on a sheltered bench, uncertain of his fate.

Did we leave with a feeling of satisfaction? Without follow-up, a network of addiction services, jobs, housing and universal health care there is slim hope that the man is getting the help he needs. And yet it would have been inhumane to leave him on the street to a possible death of hypothermia.

What of cynicism and hopelessness? There is no easy answer. A society’s value is reflected in the care extended to its most vulnerable citizens. If the government is inactive on this score private citizens must pick up the challenge. In a DIY country, there is no pubic safety net. Being your brother’s keeper may appear optional but in Guatemala, it is a necessity. And bolos will continue to menace the sidewalks until a social safety net can be implemented.

Will I be a citizen police in the future? It’s hard to say. Even his co-citizens were reluctant to offer a helping hand. They know even better than I that no good deed goes unpunished in the streets of Guatemala.