Hooray! The New Engine Exhaust Pipe is Installed!

Two weeks after ordering (as predicted), our new piece of engine exhaust pipe arrived, and Peter has successfully installed it. We will be able to cast off the dock tomorrow. On Monday morning, we will pick up our sails and have the rigging inspected. With any luck, we will be in the waters of Belize sometime on Tuesday!

One advantage of spending a month in a small country and staying in the same place for weeks with not much to do is that there is time to converse with local people and expats, to learn more than the usual tourist does, and to reflect on the lives of the people for whom this place is home. Guatemala is the most densely populated of all the Central American countries and has a larger percentage of native (Maya) people as part of that population than any other nation in the region. There is a wide divide between the rich and the rest, and poverty, lack of education, employment opportunities and malnutrition are major problems. 

A couple of days ago, I read about George Clooney being appalled to learn that children are working on the coffee farms in Guatemala which are a source of beans for Nespresso, the brand with which he is associated through advertising to the public and through his membership on its Sustainability Advisory Board. Reading or hearing about this through the media, a conscientious person in a first-world country might automatically condemn this practice and hold the company responsible for child exploitation. However, being here and having traveled in other third world countries, and having talked with people here on the ground about the livelihood of the local people, I think that it is unlikely that Nespresso or its farmers are actively recruiting children for the workforce. This does not mean that there are not children working on the farms; there probably are. However, these children have been encouraged by their families to seek work to get money for the most basic necessities such as food, to stave off starvation, or they have taken it upon themselves to work. It must also be kept in mind that this is an agrarian culture in which children are in the fields with their parents and grandparents from a young age and begin helping when they are able. For the local people, there is nothing unusual or wrong with children doing manual labor. We see it all the time. We have been served food by pre-teens in family-run restaurants. Just today, we saw four barefoot teenagers working, manually driving pilings for a new dock.

Four teenager manually driving pilings

There simply is not enough of many things in Guatemala:  food, clean drinking water, education and employment. The population, which is growing faster than any other in Central America, cannot be sustained by the resources available. Recent droughts have caused crop losses and localized famines. Currently, 60% of the population is living in poverty and at least half of the children, who comprise about 50% of the populaiton, suffer from some degree of malnutrition. 

Given this situation, it is not surprising that teenagers, if they can, are working to survive. And what else would they do with their time? The government provides free education to children only through sixth grade. Beyond that, there are private schools in some areas, and those families who can scrape together the tuition usually can only do so for one child, almost always the oldest boy. Therefore, most children pass the age of 12 are not in school. What do they do? They look for employment; they marry and start having children at a young age. At around the time of puberty, as has been normal in human culture for millinnea, they become part of adult society. 

If first-world cultures find this appalling, if they believe that childhood should extend through the late teens and that youth should be afforded education and leisure, then they need to do more to assist in making education free and available to teenagers in places such as Guatemala. Child labor will not be eradicated (if, indeed, that is a necessary objective) by company policies forbidding the hiring of teenagers or even those younger. One practical tactic is for Nespresso and other international corporations to supply facilities, teachers, books and other materials to allow children to be educated past the sixth grade in the communities and areas where they are hiring or subcontracting labor. Another way to deter child labor is ensuring adequate nutrition in the population through directly supplying food or promoting sustainable agriculture that is adaptable to a changing climate.

Until recently, children in places such as Guatemala, probably had no idea that free public education through 12th grade is a reality for most children in first world countries, so they did not realize what they were missing. Cell service and the Internet are rapidly changing the local people's awareness. Yet, while I have observed poverty, I have not noticed people doing any type of work being disgruntled. The four young men we saw doing pile driving earlier today were joking and laughing as they worked with no shoes, no helmets and no harnesses high above the water with an extremely heavy tool. Yes, it might be nice if life here offered them more but, on the other hand, they are not expecting more and as long as at least their basic needs are met, they seem to be happy.