Kara Andrade

My friend Ingrid is having a baby and I feel so helpless. I sit outside in the livingroom among the women, her mother-in-law, her sister-in-law, the mid-wife who peacefully goes in and out of the bedroom where she is giving birth. It is quiet except for the sound of the bubbling water in the fish tank, the cat meowing, the tea kettle which boils over with water, whispering and the utter agony of her cries of pain. Gity, her Iranian mother-in-law is praying in Arabic from a small book which she reads with her dark glasses, bending her entire body into her prayer at one corner of the dark sofa, she emanates tranquility.

“This only happens once in our lifetimes,” Gity reminds me and her daughter. “It is truly a gift that Ingrid gave us.”

I thought I would come here like a photographer, a professional gig for a friend, but it’s more right now and while my instinct is to document, my heart tells me to be empathetic and to respect her privacy.

The mid-wife comes out and we hang on every word. “She’s at 8 or 9 cm, but something is holding her back.” She needs her comfort zone back.

We empty the livingroom, it is her home again, quiet and safe without the pressure of anyone expecting her to perform on their terms. I flee to the dark corners of the baby room and write. From time to time I hear the creaking of the bed and the door. The midwife pokes her head in from time to time with the nicest, warmest smile.

When I asked Gity, who has had four children, two of them twins, and the midwife about the amount of pain she’s in and what the experience of labor is they tell me  this:

It’s like things are happening in your body, like your body is stretching and things are happening inside you that you can’t control, you feel what the baby feels, like you’re going to die, like your bones are going to break, you can’t say anything, you become like a child, language is gone. The first one you’re lost because you don’t know if it’s the beginning or the end. Every moment you think it’s the most intense. It feels like your baby is going to come out of your ass, like it’s the size of cantaloupe and there’s no way out.

I cringe, I cannot fathom my body stretching into another dimension. Gity looks at me intensely and then she says “It’s like a difficult exam you cannot fail. You just have to get through it.”

While we didn’t send any of you postcards, we do have plenty of images from the road that we’d love to share with you, so here goes! I promise I will write more this week.

A couple of days ago The Guatemala Times published an interesting post entitled: “International Community agrees: Guatemala urgently needs fiscal reform” and I wanted to pull out a significant statistic:

“Today and yesterday many of the 150 country delegations that participated at Conference for Reconstruction and Transformation of Guatemala expressed their support for the plan proposed by the Government of Guatemala. At the same time it seemed clear to most international participants that Guatemala will never be able to move towards development if the tax revenues stay below 10% of the GDP, the lowest in the region, even lower then Haiti.

The Sub- Secretary of the United Nations (UN), the Mexican, Alicia Bárcena, who is also the executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) warned: “no country in the world collecting less then 10% of GDP and with a public spending of only 4.5% of the GDP, can exercise effective management, it is a State without the power to act”.

I sent this along to a few friends who are businessmen and know Guatemala to get their take on this. I, of course, have my own theories, but here’s some of the comments they sent along:

COMMENT 1:

Maybe this is the foundation of how to attack it: “It is a problem caused by severe social inequality, a weak state, very low governmental budget and therefore a weak organizational and coordination response of the actions needed to tackle the problem.” Let us turn this into the advantage.

We go after the financial side and make it even more community driven. We also allow the information to flow freely. Some very interesting possibilities for collaboration between two awesome organization here, yet informal. Hmmm I see a lot of interesting approaches from this conclusion. – Erik

Comment 2:

“I was startled to see just how low the tax collection and the government spending %s are and I look forward to seeing your elucidation of different approaches to the problem.

Our attorney in Guatemala, Gladys Porras, worked for SAT (the Guate equivalent of the IRS) as a trial attorney in tax evasion cases and recently left the agency to go into private practice. Every day she had a new case in a new town for 3 years! She told me that during that time the SAT estimate was that the % of citizens who had income sufficient to require the filing of tax returns and that voluntarily complied with the requirements rose from 40% to something over 50%.

That tells me that not the very rich and the kind of rich people evade taxes but also the middle class (I don’t think the poor are required to file). So it is endemic, which is not surprising due to the prevailing culture of rampant corruption in the country.

In the article Pres. Colom says that the business community is blocking tax rate increases. I believe that but I also believe the average citizen is against increased tax rates as they have no reason to believe that the government would use the increase in revenues to benefit them. Based on history, this is a perfectly logical conclusion.

So, if not from the rich (who have almost all the power), the middle class (who do not have much power) and the poor (who only have power when they are in outright revolt — and just why would they revolt in favor of a concept so unappealing on its face as taxes — then where could the pressure for fiscal reform originate?

Here are my off-the-cuff responses to the question, listed in order of importance and potency:

#1: The international community. The conference referred to in the article undoubtedly was initiated by that external force (just as the fledgling moves towards legal reform in Guate was caused by the US and the UN). So that means the US government and multi-lateral agencies such as the UN, IMF, the World Bank, and the IDB. They threaten to cut off aid, military supplies, loans etc., if fiscal reform does not happen. They are the ones that posses Big Carrots and Big Sticks.

#2: “Enlightened” business interests. Just as Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and some other mega-billionaires are pressing for the continuation of estate taxes in the US, some big players in Guate such as WalMart, Big Chicken (Pollo Campero) etc. could come to the realization that the development of a stable, growing economy which benefits the majority of citizens (a.k.a. consumers) is key to greater profits and get behind financial/fiscal reform. This group possess Big Carrots (a.k.a. money for politicians) but few if any Big Sticks as it is well known that businesses everywhere hedges their bets and buys the corporation of all political elements (and that all such elements, left, right and center, are eminently and equally subject to these thinly disguised bribes).

#3: The pollis (the Latin term I use for the general population although in Rome pollis was just those eligible to vote, not the general population) has no Big Carrots but does have a Big Stick as it posses the power of extreme disruption and outright insurrection. Interestingly, while the demands of groups one and two would be, first and foremost, more revenue for the government to spend on services to the public, the pollis would demand just plain more services. (The pollis never worries about where the money for government services comes from.)

So, as I see it, the ideal analogy for the causation of fiscal, financial, and democratic reform in Guatemala would be a pressure cooker. Heat from the outside (see #1), an inflamed “water” (the pollis — see #3) and a shaky lid (big business, see #2, which sees that all this is bad for business) that tries to hold things together. Now, if I could only solve my own personal problems ….
Bob”

When I ask mi mama if she ever paid taxes, she sucks her teeth and says the equivalent of “Please, do you think I’m stupid?” Mi abuela retorts: “What for? So the crooks in the green palace get it?”

I honestly think it has to do with trust – among classes, from class to state, from individual to individual, organization to organization and business to business. Mix and match any of these combinations and there still isn’t any trust any way you put it. There is a certain fabric of trust that is missing for many reasons, but on the national level many people, even the middle class are against paying taxes because they don’t trust the government (how could they after the war and now the syphilis experiments, it takes two to tango on all these occasions) to look after their interests or well-being. It never has, why would we expect anything different?  The wealthy are used to looking after their own interests and doing whatever they want as long as they have money; the middle class is barely scraping by and they certainly don’t trust the rich to pay their share or the governent to take care of them; the poor are in the daily struggle and all the nonprofits (local ones in particular) provide the band-aids when the whole thing is hemorrhaging.

Our bedroom one year ago.

SF BAY AREA – Waking up in one’s own bed after after being away for one year is as close as I’ll get to waking up in a time capsule, buried amid the rubble, rain and weeds that grow around it like a rock. I stare at the red room we painted years ago and look around the partial emptiness from a night’s worth of unpacking. My little shortwave radio I carry everywhere I roam sits on the table next to me and I turn on the news. All in English. There’s public radio here. The foreclosures have been cancelled because of mistakes.

It’s Columbus Day and the windows have steam on them from the chill outside and our warm bodies inside. I amble about, make the bed the way the nuns taught me, eat my oatmeal, pick up my paper in my white socks (curse when I realize my Wallstreet Journal has been stolen) find the physical vessel for this next phase, touch the plants, re-arrange the dishes and then I just listen to this new quiet of change, of settling in. We’re here for three months and i don’t know how much to unpack to signify the long journey has ended and how much to leave packed and ready to sell, to ship to move to another storing unit. Things are liquid and in motion even with the semblance of stillness. I have populated my desk quickly and I turn off the lights to hide in that tunnel of pixels.

“It’s like a spaceship just landed!” Brad said as he walked in for his pajamas. We’re sharing a closet here as well, and so my office is no longer a closed space for my landings on Mars.

Outside my smile is less strained and I relax into the street when I surface from my office in the back of the house. Everything looks wider and more expansive, and yet I’m fearful in that same old way. I stop looking around, behind, and out of the corner of my eye. There is nothing there. No one is following me. I pull my bag close to me, hide my celphone and pull the credit card and cash out of the wallet. I’ve left the dummy wallet back at home I think to myself. Why did I bring a bag? Anyone will see I have my things in there.

The roads are smooth and dark, like a deep dark mirror in the middle of the blazing sunlight. I hit the button to signal I want to cross the street and the pedestrian icon rings from the other corner of the street. A few people pass me, none of them smile or say “Buenos días!”. I am thirsty but Angelica isn’t there for me to say “Kal awech Angelica!” and to watch her make orange juice while the marching bands pound the city’s heart in La Antigua’s central park. It’s quiet and it’s like I’m inside in the middle of the outside world.