COVID 19 in Chiapas Mexico

I received word last night. Tim, Juan Jose wrote, in Comitan we are very sad. Marve, my uncle, was very sick for a month and almost died. Many friends and co-workers are sick or have died.

Juan Jose said he did not believe in COVID before but that he does now.

Today, he wrote, there are many people on the street in special funeral clothing. I thought I was in Wuhan, China at first but no, this is Comitan. We are not going outside. 

I’m sad too, with my friends in Comitan in Mexico just north of Guatemala.

Marve lives a few houses down the street from Juan Jose. Marve and his wife have a tortilla making business inside their house. They make tortillas for the families in the Cruz Grande neighborhood. In America they would have been retired by now but since Mexico has no Social Security they are working in their seventies.

Theater on the Central Plaza, Comital, MX
Thanks to Wikipedia

They are my age and I think of them. I think about how they suffered while Marve was sick. 

On any ordinary day, for decades, in barrio Cruz Grande young women and girls are seen on the sidewalks with their bundles of tortillas made at Marve’s house. Each woman has her own schedule, and the schedule of Marve’s family and the neighborhood are constructed around this making of, getting, and eating tortillas. Nobody paid too much attention. It was the same for the rising and setting of the sun. You can count on that and the making of tortillas. 

The last time we were at Marve’s house we sat with them in the court yard. There was Marve, his wife who is blind, and their adult daughter. Maybe Juan Jose’s parents were there. We chatted in the sunshine and we felt that we were among family. Their young employee was operating the tortilla machine just off the court yard.

I seem to recall that they gave us a gift to remember them by, since we were leaving on the bus that day. Then Marve asked if we would buy him a wrist watch. His had stopped keeping time and he couldn’t find a reliable one in the city. We agreed to do that and he gave us some pesos. I hope that watch has played a small role in keeping the daily rhythm of Cruz Grande.

But now COVID-19 has sickened Marve. Will he have the strength to continue?

How will the tortillas be made in the Cruz Grande neighborhood if Marve can’t do it? Are the women even coming out of their houses to get tortillas? It seems with COVID we only count the dead and those who are no longer infected with the virus. What will happen to life with Marve struggling with his health and COVID rampaging through the city?

The BBC says that 10,000 people died in Mexico in the last three weeks. Marve isn’t part of that ghastly statistic. Nobody is measuring or counting the toll of sickness and pain from the virus. In Cruz Grande in Comitan it spreads out from Marve’s house into the neighborhood.

Juan Jose is a school teacher and he tells me that school will not open in July as it normally does. He and his family are leaving the city to live in the country.

Mexico, like the United States, has a leadership that has failed its people. Each government, and many of its other persons in power in government and business, has prioritized something called an economy rather than the protection and well being of people. So little has been invested in creative solutions on how to care for each other and so much has been invested in restarting this monster called the economy.

Marve and the family’s tortillas are certainly part of the economy of Cruz Grande and I suppose the Mexian economy. Why is it that no one in leadership is showing us how to protect people like Marve or the next of those whom we love and need from being taken by COVID? Why is taking care of each other less important than the most recent economic statistics?