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Reporter's Notebook: The View from Jaltenango

Reporter’s Notebook: The View from Jaltenango

By Jaman Matthews, World Ark senior editor

photo: Russell Powell

Jaltenango is a dusty outpost in rural Chiapas, a grid of rough streets carved into the wide, dry plain below the mountains. From there, we took a three-hour drive over terrible roads to the coffee-growing communities where Heifer works, in the misty tropical highlands known as the cloud forest, around El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve.

The road deteriorated the further we traveled from Jaltenango, as did the weather forecast. In each small town we passed through, people hopped in and out of the back of the truck. Hitching a ride can save them an all-day walk. Once off the blacktop and into the mountains, travel slowed even more. During the rainy season, slick roads and mudslides are common. The roads twisted back on themselves as they climbed the mountains, and we tried not to look down the sheer sides. Eventually, on the other side of the mountains and around a bend, a small group of houses appeared.

photo: Russell Powell

Poverty is an elusive concept to pin down. Most of us have a preconceived idea of what poverty looks like. The people in these coffee-growing communities didn’t fit those stereotypes—there were no skeleton-thin children, no one was dirty or ragged, the view down into the coffee plots was breathtaking. There were even a few vehicles in some of the villages.

But all of these things hide the hardscrabble existence here. The vehicles are used to go to Jaltenango once a month for basic supplies, like beans and corn, not for joyriding. The children may not be thin, but they are often severely undernourished. And even though the villages are surrounded by coffee, we never had coffee in any of them. Families here do not, it seems, drink the product they grow any more than an Iowa corn farmer consumes what he grows. Coffee is the way they eke out a barebones survival.

We arrived in the community of Rio Negro. I had traveled from Heifer’s headquarters in Little Rock, Ark., to what seemed like an impossibly remote village in the mountains of southern Mexico. As we talked to a family of four in Rio Negro, the husband mentioned that, before the arrival of the Heifer project, he had gone to the United States for one year to work as a roofer. When I asked him where in the U.S. he had worked, he replied, “Arkansas.”

This was more than a chance encounter in an age of globalism; it was a realization that poverty has many faces. If a family cannot stay together because there is not enough work or money for them to survive otherwise, surely that is poverty.