Life in the Camp
Building a House and School
"This shows them building."
"The roof...that material [I guess they could hammer it in]. They had to. It's like a cardboard but it's water repellent. It's like a very thick, thick cardboard."
"They might be building the school here. They're getting the sticks ready to go build their school.."
In the Fields
"This is out in the field."
"Maybe they dug a well out in the field... I know with the Mayans, what they would do, they would collect water in the rainy season -- in an area like that a [catch basin]."
Water
"Yes... Water... because some days you didn't get any. Imagine, you have a family with like 3 or 4 kids; You need water to drink, to bathe, to cook. What do you do if you get one bucket the whole day. You come in [from] the fields and you're hot & sweaty. You're not going to get a bath every day. And if you have a kid that's got diarrhea, and you use rags for diapers because there's no disposible diapers. "
[Did you get rationed on your water?] "Yeah, if everybody else got a bucket, I got a bucket. They were resilient... very resilient"
"We are waiting in line. The truck brings it [water] in, puts it in those tanks, and they get distributed."
"She's got her little bucket right there. At that age, you go to work. "
Although we did get school started, both in Chiapas and in Campeche. In Chiapas, we had kids who had been thru 3rd grade or something, who could read & write, and they became the teachers....We tried to get them supplies and helped them figure out what to do. We had schools.. We tried to make it as [normal] as best we could. In Guatemala, a lot of them didn't go to school. They didn't have schools in the villages where they lived. [What language did they learn how to read & wrote?] All in Spanish.
[Did they have different Indian dialects that people spoke?] Yes, sometimes I would have meetings with the woman and ... I would say it in Spanish, and there would be somebody woul would translate it into Mam, somebody else into Q'anjob'al, another person into Q'eqchi'... So, the meetings would last a long time because everything had to be translated into numerous languages. There were people from all different parts of Guatemala coming across.
Everybody gets to carry water, even if your old.
In the Kitchen
"Kitchen area"
"Trying to start the fire."
"Kitchen - they had eggs! -- Somebody had chickens."
"Their clothes are amazing. Which was so sad in Chiapas because so many times in Chiapas, a lot of them had to run without getting [their clothes]."
"Cans of powder milk we would bring. We would have nutrition programs in all the different camps. The women would have one meal a day where they could feed the kids. It might be milk or oatmeal or whatever we could get them. "