Life in the Camp

"They might be building the school here.  They're getting the sticks ready to go build their school.."

"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]."

"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.