As María spoke, I cuddled the sleeping baby closely to my chest, proud that I had helped bring her into the world. “Have you given the baby a name yet?” I asked.
María shook her head. “We thought some mother had already named her, so we simply called her Little One.”
“There was never time to give her a name,” I said.
María thought a moment. “If the baby has no name yet, maybe we should call her Milagro. It’s a miracle that she survived when so many others died.”
I nodded in the dark. “Milagro is a good name,” I said. “Our little miracle.” What had happened to Milagro truly was a miracle. I looked down at the little infant and also at Alicia cuddled by my side, and I pulled them both closer. “Milagro’s mother would have liked that name,” I said.
I reached out and ran my fingers through Alicia’s long black hair. This day had brought me another miracle. “I’ll never leave you again,” I whispered to Alicia, fearful that I might be making another false promise.
With three more bodies to feed, I pushed myself even harder to find food. Alicia walked everywhere with me, and always I had to make sure she was safe. María watched the baby and tried to find special foods for her.
Whenever I tried talking to Alicia, I saw her eyes glimmer with thoughts, but she barricaded those thoughts behind silence. Each night in camp, she sat, digging with a small stick in the ground, or rocking back and forth as she gazed away toward some other section of camp or toward someplace known only to her.
It was more work feeding the five of us, but we survived. In the months after Alicia’s return, the camp grew even more crowded. It hurt the most to watch the children, knowing that the war hadn’t allowed them a childhood. They couldn’t cry or play or laugh or shout. They feared each new day, mindful that they must always be still or die. Now those same children huddled alone, gazing at the world around them with frightened eyes. In the Ixil section, the Mam section, the Kakchikel, in our Quiché section, and in other parts of camp, mothers kept their children close to their sides and hushed their cries.
Alicia behaved the same way, clinging always to my side, refusing to smile, laugh, or speak. When she thought no one watched, she took a stick and hit at the ground. Sometimes she hit the ground so hard that her small knuckles bled. Her silence failed to hide the fear and hurt and the anger that she struggled with. Night after night I watched Alicia struggle with her feelings and thoughts, and I felt helpless.
One afternoon I picked up some old cloth rags from beside the dirt road and wound them tightly to make a small ball. I took the ball and rolled it to Alicia. At first she sat and stared at it, but after much coaxing she finally pushed it back toward me. After that it was nearly a week before she stood and kicked the ball, and still another week before she allowed herself to chase the ball.
Other children peeked out from behind their mothers’ cortes and watched us. Slowly Alicia began to play, trying to keep the ball away from me or chasing me, but still she remained hidden inside her silent world without expression.
Each day I made time for play, even when we could find no food. We played in the mornings early before the heat came, and some days we also played in the evening after the sun had set. Alicia sometimes allowed a grunt when she kicked the ball, but nothing more.
One evening as Alicia and I chased each other, kicking the ball, a young boy approached. He walked slowly toward us, as if unable to resist the temptation of play. I kicked the rag ball to him, and he reluctantly kicked it back. When I kicked the ball again, it rolled past him. He stared at it with a somber face for a moment, then walked slowly after the ball and kicked it back once again. After that, the boy, Alfredo, returned to kick the ball with us whenever he saw us playing. It was three days before he ran for the first time. It was longer yet before he laughed.
Still the other children only watched.
The next child to join us was a tall, skinny girl named Laura. I doubted she was more than eleven or twelve, but her size and her haunted, serious eyes made her appear older. She kicked the ball with hesitant bunts, clenching her fists and biting at her lip in anger whenever the ball got away from her.
Kicking the ball straight wasn’t important. Smiling was. Purposely I pretended to miss the ball each time I kicked, or I pretended to fall. Finally a faint smile creased Laura’s lips. It was hard for me to laugh and act happy when inside I felt like crying, but it was good to see guarded smiles steal across the faces of those children who played and those who watched.
Each week more children found the courage to join us, and each day they kicked the rag ball harder and harder. Sometimes their kicks were fierce. It hurt me to think what memories caused such anger. Seldom did laughs or shouts escape their mouths, and then only by accident.
Because the rag ball kept shredding, I finally approached one of the aid workers who had come to recognize me. I gathered my courage and asked her, “Is there anyplace you can get us a ball?”
The American aid worker shook her head. “This isn’t a playground. This is a refugee camp.”
“The children need to learn how to be happy again,” I argued, afraid I might make the woman mad. “To be happy they must play, and to play we need a good ball.”
“What the camp needs is more medicine and food,” the woman said firmly.
“A ball is medicine,” I argued stubbornly. “It makes children happy again.”
The woman finally relented and promised, “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Each day I returned and asked the woman, “Did you find a ball yet?”
Each day she shook her head. “I’m trying,” she said.
“Can you try harder?” I begged one day. “The children need to be happy today, not tomorrow. Please.”
Maybe she wished to rid herself of me, I don’t know, but the next day when I returned, the woman went to the cab of her van and brought back a real leather football. She called it a soccer ball.
“Where did this come from?” I asked.
She smiled. “From one of the other aid workers, who doesn’t know yet that he donated it. Take care of this ball. There won’t be another one.”
“I will, I will,” I promised.
I felt like the richest person in the world that evening when I presented the children with a real leather ball. Word spread quickly, and children from other parts of the camp came to play with us. To make sure the ball wasn’t stolen, I left it with María when it wasn’t being used. Nothing was safe if left unattended in the refugee camp. If María was too busy cooking or caring for Milagro, I carried the ball myself, and each night I slept with Alicia on one side of me and the ball on the other side. It meant too much to all of us for me to let it out of my sight.
Sometimes Milagro sat for hours with the ball between her small pudgy legs, rolling it forward and back between her knees. María and I always made time to play games with Milagro. We were her mothers now, smothering her with attention and extra food. She loved when I found bullion cubes for her to suck on. Her dimpled cheeks and curls couldn’t hide her strong will. All of her short life she had needed to be strong.
Alicia remained mute, stubbornly refusing to open her guarded world. I did find hope, however, when one night an old stray cat wandered through camp looking for scraps. Carrying a stick, Alicia walked deliberately up to the cat and crouched. I feared she would hit the animal, but instead she reached and gently stroked the small cat. She looked over her shoulder to make sure no one watched.
After that, Alicia saved a scrap of food each day. She would approach the cat when she thought nobody watched. We all learned to pretend we were busy with some chore when the cat wandered into camp.
In time, Carmen and María became close friends, sharing food and helping each other to gather firewood. I was nearly sixteen then, and realized that the war could continue on for months or years. None of us had wanted the camp to become our home, but we had no choice.
Maybe for
this reason I, too, enjoyed sitting in the evening and listening to refugees from our section of camp speak of other places, especially the United States of America. I liked to go and listen to talk about the great opportunities that existed outside of our hole of filth. I also hoped to see the teacher, Mario Salvador, again. Mario never spoke much, but he always had a smile for me, and I could tell that others respected his few words as I did.
No matter what was said each night about escaping to the United States, our discussions always ended with someone reminding the rest of us, “It’s illegal and dangerous, and you’ll need money.”
For me, life was already dangerous, and earning money in a refugee camp was impossible because nobody had any. We had no fields to grow corn or coffee, nor had we any marketplace to sell anything. Everything in camp was begged or traded for, if not stolen. And where could we go for hope? Hope was not something to be handed out from the back of a truck like rice or beans.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
As the months passed in camp, new refugees arrived with fresh stories of more military death squads and new massacres in the cantóns and pueblos back in Guatemala. Each day more people were being taken from their homes never to be seen again, and more refugees on the trail were coming under attack by the soldiers. Still, we feared that the Guatemalan Kaibiles would soon attack our camp in Mexico.
We lived in fear, but by year’s end the number of trucks arriving with donated food and supplies had more than doubled. Aid workers began construction on two rows of sheet metal buildings for the oldest and the sickest refugees. Still, it was dangerous collecting food. Strong people muscled their way to the front of every crowd, while the old and the weak watched helplessly. Sometimes whole families waited all day only to watch the last truck drive away empty.
One day I ran to an arriving truck. Before a crowd formed, the driver crawled from the cab. He carried a stick, and as I watched, he scraped a long line in the dirt from the truck out across the open ground. “I give food only to people who stand on this line,” the driver shouted.
At first refugees ran and jostled for positions on the line, but soon everyone waited patiently. I liked what the driver had done. Usually the old and sick never had a chance. Until that day, the only place a line formed was at the water truck, because they used a single faucet.
Other drivers must have seen what happened. Soon, all trucks refused to unload unless refugees formed a line. When this happened, lines began forming even before the trucks arrived. Overnight, collecting food ceased to take up all of my time. For the first time, I noticed refugees standing or sitting around camp, visiting with one another.
With the extra time, I found myself restless, unable to run from my emotions and thoughts by working every waking hour. In the evenings I took Alicia with me when I went to listen to the men talk about life outside the camp. Because of my age, and because I was a female, I might as well have been invisible during these discussions, but on the nights that Mario Salvador stayed later than the rest, I would sit and talk with him. He reminded me of Manuel, though younger.
Because of Mario, I found new hope in the future. Mario never talked about toilets that flushed or swimming pools. He spoke about the children and the tragedies that war brought to them. He spoke of the Indios and of self-worth. For the first time, I allowed myself to recount events from the night of my quinceañera. I shared memories of the night I returned to our cantón from market, and I allowed myself to speak of the massacre in the pueblo. Mario listened to me patiently, nodding kindly to show his understanding. He even wept quietly at times.
Seldom did Mario speak of himself except to say that he had lost his wife to the soldiers. “I loved her very much,” he told me.
One night I asked him, “When do you think the war will end?”
“Which war?” he replied.
“I know only about the one with the soldiers and the guerrillas,” I said.
Mario shook his head. “That’s only one of many wars. For you, being a female is a war that you’ll fight all of your life. For both of us, being Indio is a war we fought even before the soldiers came.”
I nodded. I had been fighting so hard.
Mario continued speaking. “Three years ago, the rains failed to come where we lived. Our crops grew like fields of weeds. Finally, in desperation, my brother, Edgar, and my father, they decided to travel to the western coast to pick cotton for a season. This frightened me, because I’d heard how the rich Latinos treated the Indio.
“They rode for a whole day in the back of an overloaded truck to the coast. The patrón who owned the large farm where they worked, he treated my brother and father like dogs. They had worked for only a month when one day the patrón had airplanes spray chemicals on the fields without warning. Chemicals landed directly on Edgar and two other workers. When the spray cleared, the three couldn’t breathe, and they gasped and held their hands to their faces.
“The patrón claimed he had personally warned the workers, but Father told me later the patrón wasn’t even in the field that day. For three days Edgar’s skin blistered and he struggled to breathe, so Father brought him home. For a month the curandero did everything she could to heal Edgar with herbs, but nothing helped. His breathing became very shallow and he finally died.
“We were helpless to do anything, because we were only Indios. Our voices and our lives meant less to the Latinos and to the government than even the dogs. I don’t think the patrón would have ever sprayed his dogs. There was nothing we could do when Edgar died except bury him and say our prayers.”
Mario stared at the ground as he spoke, his voice growing hard like mud in the hot sun. “After Edgar’s death Father returned to the farm, but the patrón refused to meet with him. The patrón claimed that Father was a troublemaker and that if he didn’t leave right away, he would be arrested. And so Father left without even an apology from the man who had killed his son. An Indio has no right to complain.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Mario nodded. “We have many wars and many enemies,” he said.
Because of our talk that night, I found myself the next day thinking about my people, the Indios, while I stood in line waiting for water. Here in the camp, a whole generation of children was growing up with no education of any kind. They weren’t learning to weave, plant, or cook. Nor were they learning to read or write. They were growing up as beggars, knowing only the dirty hand-to-mouth existence of a refugee camp. That day, waiting in line, an idea formed in my mind.
One week later, as Mario and I sat talking, I suggested my idea. “What do you think about starting a school for the children?”
Mario looked at me to see if I was serious.
“We already have a teacher,” I added with a smile. “This is our home now, and we might be here for years. The children still need to be educated. Otherwise, being Indio will always be a shameful thing.”
Mario nodded. “You’re right. Children grow up with nothing if they don’t learn pride and dignity.”
I knew at that moment that Mario Salvador was a good teacher. A good teacher didn’t criticize an idea simply because it came from a young woman instead of from him. A good teacher embraced new ideas, just as Manuel always had.
We talked long that night about our new school. Mario agreed that he would be the teacher and I would help him with the younger students. We hoped we could find some paper and pencils. After having found a ball, I felt certain that I could find school supplies.
“It may take a while before children start coming to the school,” Mario warned.
“Many things take a while,” I said. “Even starvation takes a while.”
Mario smiled at me. “I know now why you survived the massacres. You were too stubborn to die.”
I laughed, trying to ignore the lingering feeling that I had survived only because I was a coward.
By the end of that week, I had made it known around the Quiché section of camp that a school would be starting. I encou
raged parents to come as well. Many children would be too afraid to come alone, although by now many knew me and knew each other from playing with the ball.
Our school started in October, a time of heavy rains in the Chiapas area of Mexico, and a steady downpour greeted our first day of school. Children walked through ankle-deep mud to join us. Sitting around, covered with pieces of plastic or cardboard, wasn’t as easy as learning in a schoolroom with a blackboard and desk, but it was better than learning nothing and abandoning hope.
Our first students huddled together, their eyes filled with fear and distrust. Still, their curiosity had brought them to us. Standing with no cover, Mario welcomed the small group of thirty children and an equal number of parents that had showed. Then he did something that surprised me. He walked to the side of the group and picked up off the ground an old and flattened carcass of a dead rat. “What is this?” he said, waving the dead animal at the children.
Some children screamed and some laughed.
“It’s a baby soldier,” Mario said.
The children and parents laughed nervously.
“Tell me—what weighs one hundred and fifty pounds but runs from a mouse?” Mario asked. When nobody guessed, Mario answered, “A soldier without his gun.”
Telling “bad-soldier jokes” was Mario’s way of helping the refugees to confront and fight back against the monsters that had victimized them so tragically. Within minutes, Mario had others making up their own bad-soldier jokes.
“What is this?” a little boy named Pedro asked, flapping his arms and jumping in circles.
We all shrugged our shoulders.
“It’s a soldier without his helicopter.”
Everybody laughed at the child’s joke.
One parent asked, “What do you get when you mix a pig and a soldier?”
“An ugly pig,” one of the children shouted.