Day 6 Money money money

I visit Josefa again today and meet another of her sisters and her sister’s grandchild who is hanging onto her knees. We speak together but when he gets restless and lets her know he wants to go, she immediately says goodbye and heads off with him.

Several of the womyn in the village want me to give them something. Two womyn especially look so terribly thin, their clothes hang in ragged folds around their tiny bodies. Josefa has water from a pipe emerging from the ground from a huge tube outside her home but doesn’t have a bathroom. She also has a single burner hotplate and has borrowed a rice cooker from her son.

I wonder about how I look like a dollar tree to the womyn here: they are always asking me for money or clothes – one peso, will I leave my clothes when I go, do I have something to eat, do I have a school bag for the children? And the hardest one, the children are hungry.

To me, it looks like the children are getting all the food the mothers and grandmothers are missing. 

Every womon suffers patiently through my Spanish and even speaks English with me, probably after they see how I murder Spanish, they are not so shy to speak English.

I wish I could feed everyone. I wish I could fix everyone’s roof and provide a toilet and bathroom for everyone. I wish I could make the minimum daily needs for everyone more accessible all around the world.

The money I am thinking about spending to rent a car is probably more money than 10 families live on here in Cuba for a year. 

There is two systems of money: the CUCs which are pesos for the tourists, and pesos which are the money for the people. Those Cubans closest to the tourists make so much more money than those people farthest away.

Of course, giving people money while I’m here will not sustain them in the long run but might quell their hunger temporarily. I wish we could have a ‘adopt a grandmother, mother, grandchild family’ program where we in the u.s.ofa. can share our huge wealth with the poorest people here. It is obvious which Cubans work around tourists, and which Cubans have so very little.