|
|
Vol. LXII, No. 10
|
|
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
|
|
|
|
Vol. LXII, No. 10
|
|
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
|
In his job at an agency called International Compassion, the Guatemalan children’s advocate Leonel Xuya is responsible for some 16,000 youngsters. Last week he shared some of the threads of his life with several dozen students at Stuart Country Day School of the Sacred Heart.
Speaking in Spanish, with lower and middle school Spanish teacher Cathy Quinlan translating, Mr. Xuya, who is of Mayan descent, spoke of a hardscrabble childhood in rural Guatemala. When he was three his parents were divorced, and Mr. Xuya and his then-pregnant mother were forced to leave his father’s house. “It was difficult to survive,” he recalled.
A scholarship and the advice that “this is your only opportunity” got Mr. Xuya through grade school to the 10th grade. “I studied hard,” he said. One of his blessings, he noted, is that he “can keep a lot” in his head. Good fortune smiled on him again when he applied for, and received a scholarship to an upper-level school.
When he eventually went to work, Mr. Xuya saw the kind of poverty he had experienced during his own childhood, and he made a commitment to work for poor children. The commitment stuck; after two years at the University of Minnesota “a lot of friends encouraged me to stay in the United States,” he said. But he remembered his promise to work for disadvantaged children back home in Guatemala.
Mr. Xuya, who met Ms. Quinlan when she visited Guatemala through a church trip, said that he is grateful for the chance to come here and “see other possibilities. I can go back to Guatemala and offer children another vision of how to live.” His several stops before returning home, however, included a visit with Princeton University in Latin America (PiLA), a non-profit organization that provides year-long service work and non-profit sector fellowships in Latin America. He had already spoken at the Nassau Presbyterian Church the day before, and would be giving a talk on ancient cultures at the Westerly Road Church later that day.
During the question and answer session that followed his talk, students, some of whom had studied the Mayans, asked Mr. Xuya what they would see of the old culture if they visited Guatemala today. “A lot of values that we’ve inherited from our people,” he responded. These include “308 different kinds of clothing,” which often reflect what is happening in the lives of the women weaving the cloth. He also reported that the Mayan calendar, which consists of 20 months with 13 days in each month, is still in use.
Noting that this is Black History Month in the United States, one questioner wondered about racism in Guatemala. In his reply, Mr. Xuya noted that unlike blacks in America, the indigenous people of Guatemala are in the majority. They don’t, however, participate in decision-making, and being poor and Mayan is a double strike against you; being a woman, besides, makes it “a triple problem.”