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Nestled high the beautiful mountains 45 minutes north of
the famous tourist city of Antigua, lies the little farming area, or
aldea, of Santa Marta.
A visit here is a 200-year step back in time. About 2,400 people
live in and around what passes for their ‘town square’, consisting of a
few teeny-tiny tiendas (one-room convenience stores) and the
small elementary school. You can’t miss the large piece of earthmoving
equipment abandoned there 30 years ago. It now serves as the town’s
centerpiece and the children’s only playground equipment. The school has
almost no paper, pencils or chalk, few books and, no toilet paper. As a
practical matter they ignore the government rule that all students must
wear shoes.
Walk around and you’ll meet little
children with no shoes, some peeking shyly behind doorways, and
pigs, dogs and a few cattle—all sharing the single dirt road. They’ll
all be interested in you and curious as to what brings you to this
off-the-beaten-path village.
The few jobs available here are
planting, tilling and harvesting the local crops of corn, beans, and
cabbages on fields owned by others. When there is work, men earn $3 a
day, women and children about $2. The people live in poverty and there
is much sickness, skin infections, worms and malnutrition.
At 7,000 feet elevation it gets cold
at night and they don’t have much to keep them warm, so they are
very uncomfortable and there is a great deal of sickness.
Life is very hard here as in all the
villages we care for — even if they have their own produce to sell,
it’s a long, uphill and one-hour walk to the highway. Bus service is
infrequent and expensive. It’s common to see men, women and little
children carrying very heavy loads for long distances.
How does your day compare with that
of a mother in Santa Marta? She rises at 5:30 am to make tortillas,
washes her clothes by hand in a cement sink, then must go looking for
small trees or fallen branches to chop with her machete. She and her
young children help collect firewood and carry it back up the mountain
to their dirt floor home made of corn stalks, all the while with a baby
on her back!
“The
people are too poor to pay—but Anita sometimes
receives berries, vegetables and even live
chickens!"
Every clinic day, Anita piles people
into her pickup from Santa Marta, to save them a forty minute walk to
the clinic. Those are just a fraction of all the people waiting in
line for Anita and Team each clinic morning! The people are very poor,
but they are very appreciative and sometimes pay us with a little box of
berries, a few melons, or other produce. Once in awhile, Anita even
receives a live chicken! (Which Rachel always wants to keep as a pet,
but we donate to a poor family in San Lucas.)
The only local church is a tiny cement
block and wood building, whose Assembly of God pastor is named (really)
Jesús! He travels one hour by bus then walks another hour on the dirt
road, (and repeats this to go home) two times a week for services and
visiting. The people don’t have money to give but he, too, sometimes
gets small gifts of fruits and vegetables.
We love caring for the gentle, but
poor people in Santa Marta and hope we can continue to serve them in
their need. Malnutrition is a big problem and skin infections, worms and
bronchial infections are common.
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