Learning to Live with Less
By bringing students from prosperous countries to Guatemala to live with rural families and learn Spanish, Lynn Haanen hopes to expose them to how the poor live and to create lasting social change.
By Douglas Haynes
One of the toughest things Lynn Haanen ’04 has ever done is dismantle bookshelves to build caskets for babies who have died. Since 1997, when she began directing Guatemala’s Escuela de la Montaña (Mountain School) — a nonprofit Spanish language school — Haanen says it’s been “very, very common” in nearby villages for children to die from preventable diseases within their first year. Often, they die from respiratory illnesses as a result of being strapped to their mothers’ backs while the mothers cook over open wood stoves.
“If the family can’t afford a casket, they build a casket,” she explains. “We’ve given away a lot of wood to make caskets with. Wood and nails.”
Then the family has to bury the child in one of rural Guatemala’s crowded municipal cemeteries. “You go up there, and you bring your own shovel, and you dig the grave yourself and hope that the spot that they showed you doesn’t have other caskets in it already,” Haanen says.
By Douglas Haynes
One of the toughest things Lynn Haanen ’04 has ever done is dismantle bookshelves to build caskets for babies who have died. Since 1997, when she began directing Guatemala’s Escuela de la Montaña (Mountain School) — a nonprofit Spanish language school — Haanen says it’s been “very, very common” in nearby villages for children to die from preventable diseases within their first year. Often, they die from respiratory illnesses as a result of being strapped to their mothers’ backs while the mothers cook over open wood stoves.
“If the family can’t afford a casket, they build a casket,” she explains. “We’ve given away a lot of wood to make caskets with. Wood and nails.”
Then the family has to bury the child in one of rural Guatemala’s crowded municipal cemeteries. “You go up there, and you bring your own shovel, and you dig the grave yourself and hope that the spot that they showed you doesn’t have other caskets in it already,” Haanen says.
Unsettling experiences like these are commonplace for Haanen, a Wisconsin native who has lived most of the past twelve years in one of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest countries. But that doesn’t mean she’s numb to them.
“On a human level, it’s so important to be with people and to accompany them and to be responsive to them,” Haanen says. “But it’s more than just being part of the job. I think it’s being a responsible human being, and I think that’s something that’s all too often missing in life in the First World, that we don’t really put as a priority, taking care of other people.”
This is why Haanen directs the Mountain School. She believes that if more Americans visited developing countries, they would create a more compassionate society. “If people were exposed to how people live in the Third World,” she says, “they would shop differently and would push for government policies that promote sustainable development here.” By creating an opportunity at the Mountain School for more privileged people to experience living conditions in a developing country, Haanen hopes that she’s generating lasting social change, not only in Guatemala, but also around the world. By the time she leaves at year’s end, she will have introduced some two thousand students to the reality of rural Guatemalan life.
“On a human level, it’s so important to be with people and to accompany them and to be responsive to them,” Haanen says. “But it’s more than just being part of the job. I think it’s being a responsible human being, and I think that’s something that’s all too often missing in life in the First World, that we don’t really put as a priority, taking care of other people.”
This is why Haanen directs the Mountain School. She believes that if more Americans visited developing countries, they would create a more compassionate society. “If people were exposed to how people live in the Third World,” she says, “they would shop differently and would push for government policies that promote sustainable development here.” By creating an opportunity at the Mountain School for more privileged people to experience living conditions in a developing country, Haanen hopes that she’s generating lasting social change, not only in Guatemala, but also around the world. By the time she leaves at year’s end, she will have introduced some two thousand students to the reality of rural Guatemalan life.
The Mountain School, like many Spanish schools in the country, uses language instruction to generate income for social justice and education programs in surrounding communities. This particular school is unusual, however, due to its remote, rural location and the degree to which it immerses students in the daily lives of displaced farm-worker families. All of the Escuela’s students study Spanish four hours a day, five days a week, one-on-one with a local instructor. Started in May 1997 as a rural sister school of the Proyecto Linguístico Quetzalteco de Español (PLQE) — a collective of Spanish teachers in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s second largest city — the Mountain School began with an average of three students per week.
The school building itself is an old plantation owner’s home in the Pacific Slope community of Nuevo San José, about an hour’s drive down the Sierra Madre Mountains from Quetzaltenango. It houses up to fourteen students at a time, and in a typical year, more than four hundred people from fifteen countries learn Spanish there. Nuevo San José is a community of Mayans who have lived and worked for generations on a nearby coffee plantation, or finca. After struggling for more than a year to get the plantation owner to pay their salaries, community members won their back wages and benefits but were evicted. In 1993, twenty-seven families from the community pooled their resources to purchase the land at Nuevo San José, with assistance from the Catholic parish in the nearby town of Colomba.
The school building itself is an old plantation owner’s home in the Pacific Slope community of Nuevo San José, about an hour’s drive down the Sierra Madre Mountains from Quetzaltenango. It houses up to fourteen students at a time, and in a typical year, more than four hundred people from fifteen countries learn Spanish there. Nuevo San José is a community of Mayans who have lived and worked for generations on a nearby coffee plantation, or finca. After struggling for more than a year to get the plantation owner to pay their salaries, community members won their back wages and benefits but were evicted. In 1993, twenty-seven families from the community pooled their resources to purchase the land at Nuevo San José, with assistance from the Catholic parish in the nearby town of Colomba.
While studying there in 2004, I ate three meals a day, like all Mountain School students, in the dirt-floored kitchen of a local family. On my first evening in Nuevo San José, Haanen took my fellow students and me through the village and introduced us to our host señoras. Before I could say more than a nervous “Buenas tardes” to Victoria, my host, six of her seven children pulled me by the hands into a ring-around-the-rosy-like song and dance with words that I couldn’t decipher. As we circled around the room next to a pile of unshelled ears of corn almost as tall as me, I smelled corn tortillas cooking on a wood-fired stove. Before long, Victoria’s oldest daughter, Claudia, told me to have a seat in one of two plastic chairs pulled up to a wobbly-looking plastic table in the kitchen. Another daughter, Martha, set an overflowing bowl of refried black beans and rice in front of me to eat with a pile of warm, mealy tortillas.
During the following week, I looked forward to every meal with Victoria and her children, who played soccer with me in the dirt path beside their house and asked me to borrow books from the Mountain School to read aloud to them every day. One evening before dinner, Victoria’s husband, Felix — who was gone half the week working at a gas station in a town an hour away by bus — gave me a tour of the village, showing me the community’s new two-room school, its coffee and banana fields, and its meeting place: a sheet-metal structure open on one side and supported by poles.
During the following week, I looked forward to every meal with Victoria and her children, who played soccer with me in the dirt path beside their house and asked me to borrow books from the Mountain School to read aloud to them every day. One evening before dinner, Victoria’s husband, Felix — who was gone half the week working at a gas station in a town an hour away by bus — gave me a tour of the village, showing me the community’s new two-room school, its coffee and banana fields, and its meeting place: a sheet-metal structure open on one side and supported by poles.
“I think the reason students come here is [that] we’re involved with the community,” Haanen told me one evening on the patio of the four-room, cement-block casita she shares with her partner, Bob Hilliard, who is from England. While we drank Guatemalan rum and Coke and listened to the perpetual trill of tropical insects, Haanen said that more than anything else, she wants students to accompany local people in their struggle to survive, so students leave with some idea of what it means to be poor.
Alisha Laramee, one of the students in my group, heard about the Mountain School from other young adults in the U.S. who had studied Spanish in Guatemala or were involved in social justice activism.
“I chose the Mountain School because I wanted to spend time in a rural area with families and with a community,” Laramee says. “The meals my host mother made were delicious, but mostly I just wanted to talk to her and know a little bit more about what it means to have lived her life. Inevitably, any student who visits the Mountain School leaves with greater feelings of awe and respect for humanity than visiting any mansion or eating any four-course meal could ever give.”
Alisha Laramee, one of the students in my group, heard about the Mountain School from other young adults in the U.S. who had studied Spanish in Guatemala or were involved in social justice activism.
“I chose the Mountain School because I wanted to spend time in a rural area with families and with a community,” Laramee says. “The meals my host mother made were delicious, but mostly I just wanted to talk to her and know a little bit more about what it means to have lived her life. Inevitably, any student who visits the Mountain School leaves with greater feelings of awe and respect for humanity than visiting any mansion or eating any four-course meal could ever give.”
One of Haanen’s professors at UW-Madison, Latin American historian Steve Stern, echoes this sentiment. “The world needs socially responsible ways to connect people from prosperous countries with people in less prosperous places,” he says, and Haanen’s work with the Mountain School “breaks down the separation between outsider and insider. That’s pretty remarkable.”
Averse to polarities that keep people apart, Haanen directs the school with the conviction that “the work of social justice doesn’t have to be politically left or right.” She credits UW-Madison with nurturing this belief.
The first time that Lynn Haanen traveled outside Wisconsin was during her junior year at UW-Madison, in 1976, when she went to Washington, D.C., to work for the late Senator Gaylord Nelson LLB’42. She was a political science major then and had already been involved in campus politics, such as the teaching assistants’ struggle to unionize, which she acknowledges as her “first exposure to issues of class and what it means to be a worker.”
“It was an exciting time,” Haanen says, when “demonstrations were a big part of being on campus,” and students were quite integrated into the Madison community. One thing that particularly appealed to her about Madison was an active community providing help to refugees from war-torn Central America.
Averse to polarities that keep people apart, Haanen directs the school with the conviction that “the work of social justice doesn’t have to be politically left or right.” She credits UW-Madison with nurturing this belief.
The first time that Lynn Haanen traveled outside Wisconsin was during her junior year at UW-Madison, in 1976, when she went to Washington, D.C., to work for the late Senator Gaylord Nelson LLB’42. She was a political science major then and had already been involved in campus politics, such as the teaching assistants’ struggle to unionize, which she acknowledges as her “first exposure to issues of class and what it means to be a worker.”
“It was an exciting time,” Haanen says, when “demonstrations were a big part of being on campus,” and students were quite integrated into the Madison community. One thing that particularly appealed to her about Madison was an active community providing help to refugees from war-torn Central America.
Then in 1978, Haanen’s father left her mother and brothers, leaving them “economically pretty destitute,” she says. “So I decided to take a year off so I could work full time and be in a position to help my mother and my brothers, and then go back to school and finish.” But in the fall of 1979, she was appointed to the county board, and then she started a new job working for the North Farm Cooperative. She put her plans to return to school aside.
Haanen went on to work as a legislative aide in the Wisconsin State Senate and as co-director of constituent relations for Wisconsin Governor Anthony Earl in the mid-1980s. “The UW reinforced in me that you have to contribute to the world,” she says.
During the 1980s, Haanen became increasingly involved in the Wisconsin Coordinating Council on Nicaragua (WCCN) and fell in love with the country on a trip there in 1988. In 1993, hoping to spend a year working in Nicaragua at women’s centers connected with WCCN, Haanen first journeyed to Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, to learn Spanish. She chose the PLQE Spanish School there for its involvement with social and political issues. The school educates through lectures, conferences, and excursions to meet with union leaders, former guerrillas, political and human rights activists, health workers, and others.
Haanen went on to work as a legislative aide in the Wisconsin State Senate and as co-director of constituent relations for Wisconsin Governor Anthony Earl in the mid-1980s. “The UW reinforced in me that you have to contribute to the world,” she says.
During the 1980s, Haanen became increasingly involved in the Wisconsin Coordinating Council on Nicaragua (WCCN) and fell in love with the country on a trip there in 1988. In 1993, hoping to spend a year working in Nicaragua at women’s centers connected with WCCN, Haanen first journeyed to Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, to learn Spanish. She chose the PLQE Spanish School there for its involvement with social and political issues. The school educates through lectures, conferences, and excursions to meet with union leaders, former guerrillas, political and human rights activists, health workers, and others.
Although Haanen intended to stay in Guatemala for only three or four months, she ended up accepting a job offer from the PLQE. In 1997, when the PLQE bought a property in the coffee-growing region of Colomba Costa Cuca — one of the poorest areas in Guatemala — to start the new Mountain School, Haanen was named the school’s director.
When Haanen arrived in Nuevo San José, she was the first foreigner most of the residents had met. Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war had just ended, and families were living in sheet-metal shacks and subsisting mainly on what they could earn doing day work on the plantations. The average wage on the coffee plantations then, as now, was about $2.60 a day.
As Haanen describes her neighbors’ situation, her normally light-heartedvoice turns to quivering indignation. “I get so upset, because it’s really not fair that people here have to live in these conditions, and have to face the kind of crises that they have to face, and have to die because they don’t have access to adequate health care,” she says.
Although Haanen faced distrust at first, her goal was to develop relationships in the community. She did not want the school to become a paternalistic development project that simply handed out money to those it deemed in need.
When Haanen arrived in Nuevo San José, she was the first foreigner most of the residents had met. Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war had just ended, and families were living in sheet-metal shacks and subsisting mainly on what they could earn doing day work on the plantations. The average wage on the coffee plantations then, as now, was about $2.60 a day.
As Haanen describes her neighbors’ situation, her normally light-heartedvoice turns to quivering indignation. “I get so upset, because it’s really not fair that people here have to live in these conditions, and have to face the kind of crises that they have to face, and have to die because they don’t have access to adequate health care,” she says.
Although Haanen faced distrust at first, her goal was to develop relationships in the community. She did not want the school to become a paternalistic development project that simply handed out money to those it deemed in need.
One of Haanen’s first strategies to establish relationships was to recruit fifteen local women to cook for and host Mountain School students. By offering a hard-to-come-by salary, she was able to overcome some initial skepticism and find willing employees. But first, she had to ensure that they would provide safe, nutritionally balanced meals.
“We had to convince them, first of all, that amoebas and parasites existed,” Haanen recalls. “I still have this memory of this woman holding up a glass of water and saying, ‘It looks clean to me.’ ”
Still, Haanen feels that the local women performed well, despite difficult circumstances. “We would not have opened the school [and had] meals in the community unless we had a pretty high level of trust in them from the very beginning,” she says. “In my experience with eating with them, they were very, very careful under circumstances that none of us would be able to deal with.”
Haanen’s community relations skills were tested, however, when a week before the first students arrived, her new employees backed out of their agreement. Haanen called a meeting, and eventually she elicited from the potential hosts that they were embarrassed by their poverty and worried that they couldn’t feed the students well enough on the pay the school had proposed. The women assumed, Haanen recalls, that they had to serve fruit and meat at every meal, something impossible for most rural Guatemalans to afford.
“We had to convince them, first of all, that amoebas and parasites existed,” Haanen recalls. “I still have this memory of this woman holding up a glass of water and saying, ‘It looks clean to me.’ ”
Still, Haanen feels that the local women performed well, despite difficult circumstances. “We would not have opened the school [and had] meals in the community unless we had a pretty high level of trust in them from the very beginning,” she says. “In my experience with eating with them, they were very, very careful under circumstances that none of us would be able to deal with.”
Haanen’s community relations skills were tested, however, when a week before the first students arrived, her new employees backed out of their agreement. Haanen called a meeting, and eventually she elicited from the potential hosts that they were embarrassed by their poverty and worried that they couldn’t feed the students well enough on the pay the school had proposed. The women assumed, Haanen recalls, that they had to serve fruit and meat at every meal, something impossible for most rural Guatemalans to afford.
Haanen assured them that students were coming to see what life is really like in rural Guatemala, and she promised to pay them well enough to make a profit. The women agreed to try the arrangement, and a year later, they gave positive evaluations of their experiences. “Students come and share our poverty,” one of the hosts said. Now local women clamor to get on the waiting list to feed Mountain School students, and the school provides a stable source of income to thirty-two families.
Abelino Gómez, Hannen’s administrative assistant since the school’s founding, has also found his life changed. Previously, Gómez had worked for coffee plantation owners who, according to Haanen, expect employees to simply follow orders without question.
“The first few years that he was working here with me, he would not even invite someone in for a drink of water, because he felt it was not authorized,” Haanen says. “Now you can see the difference in him. He takes initiative on things. He knows he’s a representative of the school, and he acts that way. And, increasingly, he is the person that we put out front to the community.”
Abelino Gómez, Hannen’s administrative assistant since the school’s founding, has also found his life changed. Previously, Gómez had worked for coffee plantation owners who, according to Haanen, expect employees to simply follow orders without question.
“The first few years that he was working here with me, he would not even invite someone in for a drink of water, because he felt it was not authorized,” Haanen says. “Now you can see the difference in him. He takes initiative on things. He knows he’s a representative of the school, and he acts that way. And, increasingly, he is the person that we put out front to the community.”
During my second visit to the Mountain School, I had breakfast one morning with Gómez before he went to work. Chickens and crowing roosters ran around our feet in his kitchen. He said he likes working at the school because he has a lot of responsibility, and there’s no boss. Gómez calls Haanen his “compañera,” a term of respect that indicates he sees her as his colleague. Haanen seeks his opinions about everything from what groceries the school needs to whether she should lend money to a local woman who wants to take her sick father to a traditional Mayan doctor.
Haanen also hires maintenance staff, night watchmen, housecleaners, and seven Guatemalan teachers. Rony Escobar, the school’s most experienced teacher, sleeps in a dormlike room at the school during his work week. Though his family lives several hours away by bus and he could make more money using his training as a lawyer, Escobar chooses to work at the Mountain School, he says, because it allows him “to help develop the country.”
“I’m a neighbor here, not just a worker,” Escobar says, “and this gives my job great personal satisfaction.” His work in both the community — building brick stoves, for example — and as aSpanish teacher are connected by what he calls his “responsibility to teach about the reality of life in Guatemala.” This form of education gives him hope that the situation in Guatemala can improve, little by little.
Haanen also hires maintenance staff, night watchmen, housecleaners, and seven Guatemalan teachers. Rony Escobar, the school’s most experienced teacher, sleeps in a dormlike room at the school during his work week. Though his family lives several hours away by bus and he could make more money using his training as a lawyer, Escobar chooses to work at the Mountain School, he says, because it allows him “to help develop the country.”
“I’m a neighbor here, not just a worker,” Escobar says, “and this gives my job great personal satisfaction.” His work in both the community — building brick stoves, for example — and as aSpanish teacher are connected by what he calls his “responsibility to teach about the reality of life in Guatemala.” This form of education gives him hope that the situation in Guatemala can improve, little by little.
Escobar also identifies the Mountain School’s largest community project — the Young Leaders Scholarship Program — as a source of hope. In 2005, the program enabled ninety-seven local seventhto twelfth-graders to pay for the fees and materials of a secondary education. These students also attended regular meetings at the school, reinforcing the idea that they are special, “which is not a message that kids in the country here get very much,” Haanen says.
Haanen finds inspiration in the local scholarship students’ avid thirst for knowledge. Many of them frequently pick coffee, cut and haul firewood, take care of their siblings, and still find energy for their studies. Seeing this keeps her motivated.
Returning to UW-Madison to finish a degree after nearly twenty-five years away from college could be a daunting experience. When Haanen decided to take a yearlong sabbatical from the Mountain School in 2003 to finish her bachelor’s degree, she faced the extra challenge of having lived in a developing country for ten years. But when she returned to Madison, she was impressed by how user-friendly the campus had become since the late seventies. The university “does everything possible to help you succeed,” she says, “and I can’t say enough about how good my experience as a returning student was.”
Haanen finds inspiration in the local scholarship students’ avid thirst for knowledge. Many of them frequently pick coffee, cut and haul firewood, take care of their siblings, and still find energy for their studies. Seeing this keeps her motivated.
Returning to UW-Madison to finish a degree after nearly twenty-five years away from college could be a daunting experience. When Haanen decided to take a yearlong sabbatical from the Mountain School in 2003 to finish her bachelor’s degree, she faced the extra challenge of having lived in a developing country for ten years. But when she returned to Madison, she was impressed by how user-friendly the campus had become since the late seventies. The university “does everything possible to help you succeed,” she says, “and I can’t say enough about how good my experience as a returning student was.”
Faculty members such as Steve Stern, Leigh Payne, and Richard Davis eased Haanen’s transition by encouraging her to bring her life experiences into the classroom. Despite Haanen’s undergraduate status, Stern, chair of the history department, welcomed her in his graduate seminar Political Violence and Memory in Latin America. “What was really clear to me,” Stern says, “was that she was a remarkable person who was deeply committed to social justice work.” Her participation helped everyone to learn more, he adds, because her field experience enabled her to see between the lines of what was obvious and raise the level of discussion.
Although Haanen knows everyone in Nuevo San José and considers it home, she insists that she knows only one layer of social relations in the community. “I’m keenly aware of what I don’t know,” she says, naming friendship in rural Guatemala as a mystery that still eludes her. Nonetheless, she can imagine living in Guatemala the rest of her life. The primary obstacle to this is her lack of long-term financial security.
“I will be fifty next year and have to find a job that pays more and includes a pension or, at the least, access to the U.S. Social Security system,” Haanen says. “I do not want to find myself at retirement age without the ability to choose where I want to live. If here, I want the resources to visit family and friends in the U.S.”
Although Haanen knows everyone in Nuevo San José and considers it home, she insists that she knows only one layer of social relations in the community. “I’m keenly aware of what I don’t know,” she says, naming friendship in rural Guatemala as a mystery that still eludes her. Nonetheless, she can imagine living in Guatemala the rest of her life. The primary obstacle to this is her lack of long-term financial security.
“I will be fifty next year and have to find a job that pays more and includes a pension or, at the least, access to the U.S. Social Security system,” Haanen says. “I do not want to find myself at retirement age without the ability to choose where I want to live. If here, I want the resources to visit family and friends in the U.S.”
With this in mind, Haanen and her partner, Bob Hilliard, recently decided to leave the Mountain School in December 2005. “I am not worn out or burned out,” Haanen explains, “but the school is very successful now, so it’s a good time to bring someone else in with new ideas and energy.”
Haanen and Hilliard — who does the Mountain School’s accounting — will continue to raise funds for the Young Leaders Scholarship Program and help with anything the PLQE collective asks. In the meantime, they plan to live for six to twelve months in Hilliard’s native England, where they can more easily explore future possibilities.
Leaving Nuevo San José will be so sad for Haanen that she has told few people in the community. “I have avoided talking about this, because whenever I tell anyone I am leaving, we both end up in tears,” she says.
Another reason Haanen doesn’t take leaving lightly is her delight in her job. “There’s no such thing as a typical day. That’s probably why I’ve stayed here,” Haanen says. “I think Bob finds it more frustrating than I do, because he’s maybe not as used to it. I’ve always had jobs where you had to be able to drop everything and deal with an immediate crisis or an immediate interruption, so I kind of thrive on that.”
Haanen and Hilliard — who does the Mountain School’s accounting — will continue to raise funds for the Young Leaders Scholarship Program and help with anything the PLQE collective asks. In the meantime, they plan to live for six to twelve months in Hilliard’s native England, where they can more easily explore future possibilities.
Leaving Nuevo San José will be so sad for Haanen that she has told few people in the community. “I have avoided talking about this, because whenever I tell anyone I am leaving, we both end up in tears,” she says.
Another reason Haanen doesn’t take leaving lightly is her delight in her job. “There’s no such thing as a typical day. That’s probably why I’ve stayed here,” Haanen says. “I think Bob finds it more frustrating than I do, because he’s maybe not as used to it. I’ve always had jobs where you had to be able to drop everything and deal with an immediate crisis or an immediate interruption, so I kind of thrive on that.”
But Hilliard is a staunch advocate of the school’s mission. Rather than expanding the Mountain School, which Hilliard and Haanen fear would have a detrimental impact on the local community, they would like to see similar projects start in other rural villages that desperately need jobs. “Replicating this model in fifty different rural communities would make a huge difference in the Guatemalan economy,” he says.
A recent letter that Haanen wrote gives tragic confirmation of the need for jobs. In late February 2005, four girls from the neighboring village of Santo Domingo, one of whom was a Young Leaders Scholarship recipient, drowned in Tapachula, Mexico. The fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds had gone to Mexico to work in a packing plant to earn money for their families.
“They all should have been in school instead of far away from home working,” Haanen wrote. “Their deaths were the direct result of the poverty and high unemployment of our area.”
A recent letter that Haanen wrote gives tragic confirmation of the need for jobs. In late February 2005, four girls from the neighboring village of Santo Domingo, one of whom was a Young Leaders Scholarship recipient, drowned in Tapachula, Mexico. The fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds had gone to Mexico to work in a packing plant to earn money for their families.
“They all should have been in school instead of far away from home working,” Haanen wrote. “Their deaths were the direct result of the poverty and high unemployment of our area.”
Haanen is the first to admit that neither she nor the Mountain School can single-handedly change the harsh realities of life and death in rural Guatemala. But she’s bearing witness to them. When I last saw her, she was taking pain medicine to a man named Maximiliano, who could hardly move on his wooden bed covered with rags. “He’s had constant health problems since he suffered an accident on the job two years ago,” she said. With no worker’s compensation or health insurance, he can’t afford any medication, and his family is in constant financial stress because he can’t work.
“I have this feeling that his body is just giving out, and there’s not a whole lot that the doctors are going to be able to do for him,” Haanen said on the way back to the school. Then she stopped walking. A little girl was playing alone in the dirt beside the path, and Haanen paused to chat with her. Although she had just visited Maximiliano, Haanen still mustered a smile for the girl.
I remembered what she once told me: “Life is so immediate here.”
“I have this feeling that his body is just giving out, and there’s not a whole lot that the doctors are going to be able to do for him,” Haanen said on the way back to the school. Then she stopped walking. A little girl was playing alone in the dirt beside the path, and Haanen paused to chat with her. Although she had just visited Maximiliano, Haanen still mustered a smile for the girl.
I remembered what she once told me: “Life is so immediate here.”
Find out more about the Mountain School and PLQE.
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