One of the many women of Alex and the grandmother of Beyker, Estela has been my housekeeper for almost twenty years. When construction was finished on my first house Alex, who was then still in favor, asked me if I needed a muchacha. He said that he had an esposa, or wife, who had worked for gringos for three years. That part, as it turned out, was not true. When asked for their information for a reference the gringos had conveniently left the country. However, Estela passed an interview and has been here ever since, long after Alex disappeared into the bowels of the Guatemalan justice system.
Estela has classic Mayan features but, like many since the civil war that targeted the indigenous, she denies her quite obvious heritage. Yes, her grandmother spoke a funny language but she is not indigenous. Neither of Estela’s parents are educated and Estela was their fifth and last child. She was often hungry which no doubr accounts for her morbidly obese size and her inability to turn down anything edible, particularly carbohydrates. Estela told me that she often went to school hungry, that when there was no money they ate tortillas and salt for breakfast and lunch and bread for dinner. That carbohydrate heavy diet has not only resulted in many who are morbidly obese but also a very high rate of diabetes in Guatemala. Estela, at forty-six already suffers from diabetes. There was a point in time that Estela was sent to live with her grandmother because of being “molestado”, molested, by her brothers. While that word has dire implications in English it has a range of less serious meanings in Spanish. It could have meant simply that her brothers bothered or pestered her or it could have meant something else.
Estela likes to cook and is a good cook with an expansive repetoire aided no doubt by cooking classes that I sponsored early on and an ongoing relationship with “mi maestra,” a trained chef with whom she does occasional catering gigs. In my house the meals are nutritionally balanced and healthy but I suspect that does not translate to Estela’s home where funds are more limited. As evidenced by her daughters’ unfortunate slide towards obesity I suspect that the carboydrate heavy diet of Estela’s youth prevails.
Many years ago I visited the then home of the family. It was a very small, two level concrete structure with a dirt floor. There was a small, sad looking, plastic Christmas tree lying in the dirt. The living quarters were on the second level. There was a dark bedroom/living room with two beds, a gas station calendar hanging on the wall and a round florescent tube in the ceiling to provide a bit of light. The “kitchen” consisted of a pila, the universal concrete sink, an electric hot plate and several wooden cabinets overflowing with clothes, pots and pans, dishes and more. There was a window but there was no glass in it. There was no bathroom. The family had to use a communal toilet that was controlled by Estela’s sister. The toilet and the sister’s more elaborate house, had been purchased with funds sent from the United States by the sister’s absent husband. When the sister was out of sorts she cut off access to the toilet and Estela’s children used plastic bags which they stored under their bed. When the children were not in school they were confined to the house by their mother who as a war survivor kept her own children confined as she had been for, what she perceived, was their safety.
I did some fundraising and raised enough money to buy a small lot in a neighboring community and build a very modest cinderblock house with six rooms nine feet by nine feet, two toilets, a shower, a solar water heater and space for a small garden so the children could play outdoors. Estela’s difficult sister with the toilet stopped talking to her over jealousy about her good fortune.
Over the years I have paid for school, swimming lessons, first communion outfits, Alex’s much needed vasectomy and much more. I even made a contribution to a bail fund for one of Estela’s brothers who had been deported and had beaten up his “wife’ who had made off with his coyote payment for his return trip to the United States.
Estela is devoted to her three children and now her two grandsons but she wasn’t really paying attention when both of her daughters managed to get pregnant as teen-agers. She became a grandmother at age thirty-six with a certain amount of reluctance until the little guys turned up and she quickly became their greatest fan and caregiver.
Once upon a time I was able to get Estela who is clearly capable of being more than a housekeeper and cook to dream a bit. I told her that she could go back to school and build on her sketchy sixth grade education. She resisted saying that she would just focus on her children. I persisted and she told me that, if she could, she would study law and “help the women.”
While, in the beginning, Alex and Estela seemed to have a good relationship things deteriorated fairly quickly. There were rumors of other children of Alex’s in the market and elsewhere. Alex’s behavior in general began to be suspect. One day I asked him if he had other children and he answered in the affirmative and offered to bring them by the house. Once again my insatiable curiosity ended up costing me a lot of money. More kids to educate.
Shortly thereafter Alex was arrested and, for a time, Estela’s life and that of her children was turned upside down. However, she steadfastly maintained that any other children that Alex had were innocent and also victims of his behavior. And today those threeof those innocents, two of Alex’s other children, plus Diego, are now teenagers and live in my house where Estela looks after them.
I am certain that Estela would prefer to be cooking rather than cleaning but her three kids all suffer from being so confined when they were younger. Thus they have not yet made it possible for their mother to retire as a housekeeper. There is a great resistance to taking advantage of the education that I have provided and rise above their humble beginnings. Estela’s older daughter, despite having a university education, has been unemployed for a number of years. However, just this week she started a job with the Antigua government overseeing everything related to the environment. Estela’s son has a high school education but works as a day laborer along side people with litttle or no education. Only her younger daughter is showing the potential to leave the village and make her way in the world. She is currently working full-time for a call center, is in her third of five years of university studying criminology and political crime and is a single parent of seven-year old Beyker.
However, Beyker’s mother turned down the same international school that she attended for her son and opted for a very traditional Guatemalan school. We gringos have to understand that, while we think our ways are best, there is, understandably, resistance and adherence to traditions. And just maybe our ways are not best. Estela and her family are only too eager to accept the financial perks but remain committed, traditional Guatemalans suspicious of many of the ways of the gringos. And who knows? Maybe they are right.