The Family: Rigoberta Menchu

Rigoberta Menchu grew up in San Miguel Uspantan and is part of the Quiche people. She wrote this testimony about her life at the age of twenty-three, which she notes at the beginning. 

Rigoberta makes it clear from the beginning that her life and the lives of her family members was not an easy one. Hard work and unfair treatment were apart of her life literally from her birth, since her mother basically had to rush home from the fields in order to not give birth to Rigoberta  on the plantation she was working at. Her family was literally always working, whether on a finca or on their own farm. Unlike the fincas, though, they actually enjoyed working on their own farm, which makes complete sense after you look at the way they were treated at the fincas. It made me so so sooo mad hearing some of the things that Rigoberta and her family had to go through. 

Skipping over the landowners and their treatment of their workers for a moment, the transportation that the workers used to actually get to the fincas in the first place really disturbed me. They had to take the lorry to get to town since they lived in the mountains. These vehicles were usually packed with people and their animals and took several days to reach town, so go ahead and imagine that smell. The smell would be overwhelming because on top of the fact that people were packed together with animals, there was also no opening to see outside or get any fresh air. This led to a lot of people puking. On top of that the drivers would drink alcohol and be very drunk during the journey (which is not safe - "don't drink and drive"), and would not stop to let people go to the bathroom during their trip! So sweat, animals, puke, and people wetting their pants. Yay. Roadtrip! No. It brings to mind learning in my history classes about the colonists sailing slaves across the ocean.

So they survive this trip and finally reach the finca (whichever one they're actually working at this time - cotton, coffee bean, etc.). People usually expect to walk away from a hard day of work with extra money in their pockets. However, for many of these people they walked away with much more debt than they came to work with. They are paid so little in the first place that it really is not that hard to spend it all, especially when the landowners are tricking you into spending it. Rigoberta recalls a time when her father, stressed and feeling low, went to the cantina to drink alcohol and forget his troubles for a moment. The overseers charged him for much more rum than he actually drank and put them in so much debt that it took them several work sessions to try and pay it off.

On top of the debt, Rigoberta lost two brothers to the working conditions, too. These people have to pick a certain amount of beans or cotton in order to "earn" their small wages, and that usually requires a long day of working in the heat. Rigoberta's youngest brother got sick from these conditions and malnutrition, and then his mother was forced to watch him die because she could not afford medicine for him. In fact, if it was not for her caring neighbors she would not have even been able to afford to bury him. The sense of community and looking out for one another that Rigoberta's family and neighbors acted with was the main thing that brought back my faith in humanity.