Bernabella
Bernabella comes to my door in Antigua early every Thursday with flowers. She delivers flowers all over town. I have seen her passing flowers through car windows, banging on doors and delivering them to offices. Based on the fact that the youngest of her ten kids is fourteen she is likely in her middle to late fifties. Actually, recently she told me that she is fifty-eight. Her husband who has health issues is sixty-three. Actually, it quite remarkable that her husband is still around. Many are not. Of their ten children seven are chicos and she reports that they all live in Guatemala. None have migrated to the United States.
Bernabella, her husband, ten children and twenty-seven grandchildren live in El Hato, an indigenous Kaqchikel community just outside of Antigua but some fifteen hundred feet higher in elevation. There is one chicken bus in the morning that brings the residents to Antigua for work and one in the late afternoon that takes them back up the hill. One morning Bernabella apologized for being late. She said that the bus was descompuesto, broken down, so she had to walk down the hill and into Antigua, about 2.6 niles, to collect her flowers, put them on her head and start on her route of the day.
Early on Bernabella gave me her flip phone number but told me, “don’t text me because I can’t read.” But she is a whiz at doing math in her head to make sure one pays the right price for her flowers. She stuffs the proceeds of each transaction into her bra and has a blue satchel where she can put any goodies that she might receive along the way. Sometimes, her youngest son comes along to help her if he is not in school. If not, it takes two of us to lift the flowers back on to her head. She is bit camera shy but one day relented saying, “just don’t put it on Facebook.” She estimates the load on her head at seventy-five pounds. I don’t think she weighs much more than that. I can only envy her back muscles.
Recently Bernabella told us that her twenty-seventh grandchild, born this past January, needed formula as her daughter had suffered complications at the birth and was not able to provide breast milk. As is not uncommon here the father of the baby has taken off thus the daughter may also be suffering from depression. Apparently this was the first incidence after ten children and twenty-six other grandchildren where formula was needed and Bernabella was befuddled and distressed about the price. My housekeeper told her where to go in the Antigua market to find Similac at a reduced price. She was very grateful. But the following week she reported that she could not remember the name so I wrote it on a piece of paper for her. In the meantime I sent Estela, my housekeeper, to the market to buy some Similac and some recycled baby clothes. An entire wardrobe cost about eight dollars. Bernabella had reported that the baby had no clothes as any available money went for diapers and formula. The following Thursday we gave the clothes and formula to Bernabella. She blessed us and tossed the formula and clothes into her blue satchel tied around her waist and off she went.
Later in the day I caught up with Bernabella near my lawyer’s office. It turns out that we share a lawyer. I probably pay more than she does knowing my very generous lawyer.
So, if you are in Antigua and you see Bernabella please brighten your day by buying some flowers and, at the same time, by lightening her load.
