Introducing Kaleb, Regina and Mayte

On 9 October Jan and I paid our annual visit to Pasitos de Luz, the charity where our son Chris works. Pasitos’ building is set in farmland along a deeply rutted dirt road which the rains fill with deep pools of water. As we approached, four vultures flew low over the road, possibly seeking out a dead cow or some other carrion.

The bus that brings children to Pasitos was just behind us, newly rotulado with images to promote the charity as it takes children for a day of therapy, education and good food. So soon after we arrived the dining room was full of hungry children impatient for their breakfast. We fed a breakfast of pureed courgette, beans and potato, washed down with jugo verde (green juice, whose ingredients vary, but typically include pineapple juice, prickly pear fruit, celery, spinach) to Kaleb, a cheery little boy with Downs syndrome and Regina, who also had Downs and whose left arm was missing its hand and part of the forearm. Kaleb and I celebrated his hearty breakfast by jiggling to the rhythm of the Village People’s YMCA.  

 

Breakfast with Kaleb and Regina

Also at our table was Mayte, who was nine years old that day. So, before they day’s therapy and education sessions could begin, we all gathered in front of the table where Mayte was now wearing a plastic silver tiara and colourful garlands. Her mother, siblings and grandparents, stood behind her. They had brought a cake to mark Mayte’s big day. We all sang along to the Mañanitas, the Mexican happy birthday song and then gave a rousing porra, a chant heard at football matches and on many special occasions. At Pasitos the porra ‘words’ were roughly: A la bim a la bam a la bim bom bam, Mayte ra, ra ra! Followed by loud applause.

Kaleb with a book donated by Thames & Hudson

After the distribution of the cake, we moved on to the nursery, where more children, fresh from their therapy sessions needed to be fed. Gael, who was my responsibility, proved tricky. He was really more interested in his juice or the banana smoothie, but I was told that this was a trick to avoid eating his vegetables. While Gael and I were engaged in quite a struggle and negotiation, Jan has a more amenable charge, Sebastian, a chatty young boy.

Kaleb playing with a glove puppet book (a bee) donated by Book Aid international

Jan and Regina reading a book donated by Book Aid International

We had brought our annual suitcase full of books donated by Book Aid international and Thames & Hudson, which this year included a substantial number of board books, some with special features such as flaps, animal ears and glove puppets. Jan and I are long out of practice with young children, so our efforts to entertain the children were as amateur as usual. The glove puppets brought smiles to some faces, and another with rabbit ears excited some interest.

While we were on the play mat showing the children the books and trying to avoid our glasses being removed, an official looking group of people arrived, led by a figure dressed in sombrero, check shirt, blue jeans, an elaborate leather belt and boots, the rural man-of-the-people look for local politicians. This turned out to be José Antonio Arreola López, formerly Director of Development of Social Wellbeing, now a newly elected regidor (municipal councillor) of Bahía de Banderas, apparently the wealthiest municipality in the state of Nayarit.

After talking briefly to Jan, the José Antonio introduced himself to me, adding that his nickname is el güerito, a Mexican slang term that denotes a person of fairer complexion than the typical Mexican darker hue. I joked that, in the güerito department, I was easily the winner. I asked him if the municipality has any programmes or funds to support disabled children. He said that there is not much political interest in that kind of thing, but that his mother had recently died of cancer so he was hoping that children with cancer could benefit from the facilities of Pasitos de Luz. Although Pasitos cares for children with disabilities, not cancer, the management of the charity hope that the personal interest of the güerito might translate into a beneficial relationship.

 

Over lunch Chris, Jan and I shared a table with the accountant of Pasitos de Luz. I asked her whether Pasitos receives any support from the federal, state on municipal governments. The answer was not really, although the charity refers families to a federal agency known as DIF (Desarrollo Integral Familiar: Integral Family Development). She also told me that the families of disabled children receive a monthly payment of 2,000 or 3,000 pesos (about £80-£120). In short, although the Mexican government provides some elements of support, the parents (often a single parent, usually a mother) of a disabled child are pretty much on their own, except for the helping hand provided by (rare) charities such as Pasitos de Luz.

 

How to fund the needs of these children is the daily preoccupation of Chris and his communciations team. 

Pasitos' capital projects

Pasitos' necessities

To find out more about the essential and inspiring work of Pasitos de Luz go to: https://pasitosdeluz.org/

Inequality on Banderas Bay

 

Luna is 7 years old, a) slight girl with a winning smile. She has two siblings and lives with her mother (her father has left the family) in the second floor of a house reached by concrete stairs outside the building. The family home is extremely simply furnished: two mattresses on the floor; a single chest of drawers; a kitchen in a corner consisting of a single gas ring and a refrigerator (essential in tropical heat to stop food spoiling). There is a fan to provide a modicum of relief from the heat. Luna’s mother cannot afford a washing machine so she washes the family clothes by hand in a concrete basin on a terrace. Luna’s mother is a chamber maid in one of the many hotels in the area. When time comes to pay the water and electricity bills her mother works extra hours (5am to 5pm) so as not to fall into debt. Luna’s mother has but one ambition: to leave for her children a comfortable home of their own.

 

There is one complication to this story: little Luna has cerebral palsy. This has meant that she could not walk, communicate verbally, or even gesture to something she needs. And, of course, she cannot walk up those concrete stairs: her mother must carry her up. Until recently, her grandmother also helped care for Luna, but as the little girl has grown and her grandmother has aged this has become more difficult.

 

We know all this because Luna enrolled at Pasitos de Luz, the charity where our son Chris works, four months ago, and his boss Arturo told us of Luna’s case one evening over dinner. The carers at Pasitos have started to address little Luna’s many needs. She was severely underweight because of a severe infestation of intestinal parasites (not at all uncommon in Mexico). These have now been purged and she has been given a sustaining diet. Pasitos has provided her with a sturdy wheelchair. Pasitos’ physiotherapists are helping her to raise herself from a seat using a frame, to move her arms and legs; one of her brothers takes her for therapy sessions in the hydrotherapy pool. She is receiving some basic education for the first time in her short life. And she has learned a few words and to point to something she needs. A video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPgz_LBAhN4 shows some of the care she has been receiving.

 

When we arrived in Bahía de Banderas, we checked into a hotel of the kind where Luna’s mother works, to share some luxury with our son and his partner: comfortable rooms cooled by air conditioning; swimming pools; sauna and steam room; all-included meals and drinks. When we checked out we left the customary tip of a few hundred pesos for the person who cleaned our room daily. But if Chris did not work at Pasitos we could have little idea of the conditions in which our chambermaid lives. And, of course, Luna and her brothers will never experience the comfort we enjoyed.  

 

After a few days in our hotel, we moved into our regular apartment. Every year this is cleaned weekly by Jovita, who charges 600 pesos (depending on the exchange rate around £30: we pay extra) to sweep and mop the floors of three bedrooms and bathrooms, a large sitting/dining/kitchen room, and an outside terrace. She takes two buses to and from our building. Unfortunately, Jovita caught dengue fever (transmitted by mosquito bites) since we last saw her, so she spent several weeks unable to earn any income. She has now recovered, but on Mondays, when she cleans our apartment, her daughter Yuliana, a business administration student in the local university, helps her.

 

We invited Chris and his partner Kourtney to a family-owned restaurant that serves tacos and tortas (a Mexican take on the sandwich) from breakfast to 4pm six days a week. Like many such businesses, the restaurant and kitchen are the front of the family home. A hearty lunch for four set us back about £40, a good quarter or less of what we would have paid at a more formal restaurant that caters to the tourist trade. After we had paid (cash only like most such businesses) we asked one of the family members whether the boom in construction had benefited the business. His answer was in two parts. The increasing number of condominiums has not yet brought in more (mostly Canadian and American) tourists. The customer base remains mostly Mexican working-class. The main negative impact is a severe shortage of water in the high (dry) season (mid-October-May) when water is diverted from Bucerías to the luxury hotels in Punta de Mita at the entrance to the bay, including watering the golf course of the Four Seasons hotel. So this little business has to make its own provisions to ensure it has water when it needs it.

 

The draw of the tourist market in Bahía de Banderas brings sellers of goods, from sweets and snacks on the beach, textiles and ceramics, jewelry and silver goods, and other items, in some cases from remote areas of Mexico. A few days ago, we met for dinner one of Chris’s neighbours, Lucía, a manager for a multinational agrochemicals company, and her son Max, in a new Italian restaurant on our street. A man came by selling woven cotton bags, which caught the eye of Kourtney, Chris’s partner and a fashion designer. He told us that his bags are made in Copalillo, in the north of the state of Guerrero, where he comes from and where he still has several family members. Guerreo is the area I have studied and whose history I know in some detail, but I have never been to Copalillo, so I looked it up. Copalillo is a town of some 7,800 people, and the head town of a municipality of the same name, which has a further 41 towns and villages, and a total municipal population of 16,000. Twenty seven percent of the population is illiterate; eighty five percent is indigenous (meaning they speak a native Mexican language, principally Nahuatl and Mixe); there are eight medical centres staffed by ten medical professionals (one for every 1,600 people); 58% are defined as being in extreme poverty.

 

I recalled attending a seminar of the treasurers of the largest municipalities in the state, chaired by the then-governor of Guerrero, Rubén Figueroa, in Chilpancingo, the state capital. During the meeting the governor remarked that, while those present represented the wealthiest areas of the state (Acapulco being the municipality with the largest tax revenues) many others lacked funds even to buy pencils for the municipal office. A few weeks later I visited the mayor of Buenavista de Cuéllar, not far from Copalillo. He sat alone at an empty desk in an office with two chairs and a filing cabinet, which I suspect was not very full of papers. I imagine that if I were to visit 21^st-century Copalillo the mayor’s office would resemble that of Buenavista nearly half a century ago.

 

A more uplifting tale of the ethnic handcrafts market came from our annual visit to a shop that started out six or seven years ago as a small place called Arte Zapoteco (Zapotec Art - the Zapotecs are an Indigenous people of the southern state of Oaxaca) that sold handwoven textiles (mostly cotton) in traditional designs. In recent years, the business moved to a larger shop that sells textiles, basket ware, ceramics and wood products – essentially an interior décor store. This year we planned to buy some items for our son John’s new flat in Tokyo, but found that, while the handmade quality remained the same, the designs were very much international interior décor fashion, a sort of handmade IKEA. We questioned the young man who served us about the new look of his wares. The business, he explained, is a cooperative of 26 families (about 260 individuals) in Teotitlán del Valle, in the Valley of Oaxaca. The cooperative had realized that, if they stuck to selling ethnic goods their market would remain small. The condominiums going up around the bay are sold to Canadians and Americans who decorate them according to their tastes – so the cooperative produces what that market demands. Those who work in the store send sketches and samples to Oaxaca where artisans manufacture for customers whose tastes and culture are far removed from traditional Zapotec motifs. A new store is opening soon in Las Juntas, a suburb of Puerto Vallarta, and the products are sold by some stores in USA and decorate a hotel in Italy.

 

As usual, we have learned many stories of life in the area from taxi drivers. One man was born in Puerto Vallarta in 1960, son of a farmer who grew fruit and vegetables, and fathered twelve sons (we don’t know how many daughters) from two marriages. The family land was sold – nobody grows food anymore the driver told us. His eleven brothers, his son, daughter-in-law and two grandsons live in the USA. His son has now regularized his immigration status, but entered the USA twice as a client of coyotes (people traffickers). The first crossing, from Piedras Negras, Coahuila, to Texas across the desert involved a stay of days in a coyote’s ‘bunker.’ The second was from Miguel Alemán, Tamaulipas, also into a desert region of Texas, this time in the back of a truck for several days. Our driver has seen Puerto Vallarta change from a small farming town by the Pacific, to an international resort with, he estimated, 1,800 taxi drivers and 1,800 Uber drivers.

 

A younger man, for some reason named Ulises by a father who knew nothing of Greece, had limited his family to two children. We discussed President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) two days after his term had ended, and two days into the period of his selected successor, Claudia Sheinbaum. Ulises was suspending judgement on Sheinbaum, for whom he voted, but his assessment of AMLO was clear: the rich hate him but the poor like him. He gave Mexicans aged over 65 a monthly pension of 10,000 pesos (a little under £400). This, Ulises said, was the first state pension they had received; it was not much, but enough to feed a pensioner. I suggested that some of AMLO’s reforms (such as involving the army in the management of airports, customs, a new train line and other infrastructure projects) were not sensible, and indeed dangerous. But for Ulises, AMLO had helped the poor and that was all that mattered.

 

The condominiums that are rapidly changing Bucerías sell to Canadian and American expatriates and tourists a dream of luxury ocean-front living; a lifestyle most Mexicans could not dream of in their own country. The luxury lifestyle is made possible by the uncomplaining hard work of Mexicans who live modest, often precarious lives inland from the ocean-front apartments, lives that the visitors do not see. In the last six years the government of AMLO has done some things to improve the lives of Mexico’s workers: the minimum wage has been increased, some social programmes have dispensed cash to certain needy groups; and that state pension so valued by Ulises. The result has been the first reduction in poverty in Mexico for quite some time. But, on the other hand, AMLO’s government diverted money from education and health to fund dubious mega-projects. A friend in Mexico City told us that he decided to see if he could get the medicines he needs free from the government-run health system. He discovered that it takes two months to get a 15-minute appointment. When his turn came, he showed his list of medicines to the doctor who told him that she could prescribe one of them and only for fifteen days. He would have to make a new appointment (two months later) to be provided with another 15 days of medicine. He gave up and continued to pay for the drugs he needs. Let’s see was Dr. Sheinbaum will do for the poor.