STORY by CHAN TRAN
PHOTOS by TRICIA COYNE
Maria Alejandra Marcillo feeds her family of five with $6 a day.
She wakes before the sun peeks out behind the dawn’s gray clouds and simmers water to a medium-low heat on the stove. With a red towel secured around her breasts, Maria stirs 20 cents worth of cocoa mix into a rusted pot. Water droplets from her morning shower dribble down her arms as she places a single slice of white bread on each plate.
Every morning Maria dresses her two sons in baby-blue school uniforms and fixes breakfast. Each night she unravels after a long day at work by chatting with her 16-year-old daughter.
But despite her domestic routine, Maria calls herself a gypsy.
“If there’s not enough for us, there is less for them.”
During a late-night raid in January 2002, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, threaten Maria and her family, forcing them to flee their home in Colombia and escape to Ecuador.
“It’s only going to be a few days or a few months in Ecuador. Things will get better, and we can go back to Colombia,” Elias Genera says to his wife before they flee.
Four years later the family remains here, struggling to afford a home, struggling to eat and struggling to fit in.
More than 40 years of internal armed conflict between leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups have ravaged Colombia, leaving hundreds of thousands dead and two million displaced.
About 3,000 people are kidnapped or slain in Colombia each year, which is an average of nine or 10 people a day. Wives witness their husbands shot. Children are recruited as soldiers. Families must feed and pay the guerillas—or be killed.
Colombia’s largest guerilla group, the FARC, finances its revolution through kidnapping and ransom, drug trafficking and extortion. It collects war taxes from successful farm owners, residents and businesses and targets anyone alleged of conspiring with the military or paramilitaries.
Since 2000, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has established offices in Ecuadorian cities like Quito, Lago Agrio and Ibarra to protect and assist victims of the Colombian conflict. The UNHCR guarantees refugees will not be deported to a country in which they face persecution.
More than 7,000 Colombians apply for refugee status in Ecuador each year; however, the UNHCR estimates there are about 250,000 displaced in Ecuador.
With the help of other non-governmental organizations, the UNHCR provides $2 million worth of humanitarian assistance for shelter, food, education and medical care each year. The agency supplies fleeing families with rice, oil, flour, sugar, tuna, a gas tank and a mattress for three months, but then cuts aid so they won’t depend on the UNHCR.
Even so, many Colombians still complain about lacking employment, inhumane living conditions and insufficient help from the agency and government. The refugees are angry and frustrated because they don’t get all that they expect, says Rafael Zauala, the UNHCR project assistant in Ibarra, a town in northern Ecuador located about 40 miles from the border of Colombia.
“People think things,” he says. “They think we have money. They say they know, but they have no proof.”
UNHCR-sponsored cultural festivals and workshops, for example knitting and computer training, are offered to both Ecuadorians and Colombians, with hope of integrating the two cultures and waning distrust of the unknown.
“Colombia’s seemingly permanent violent state makes people think all Colombians are drug dealers and guerillas,” says Elena Jimez, a social worker at the Diocesis of Ibarra, which provides humanitarian help and counseling to refugees. “Ecuadorians think that person could be their next-door neighbor, so they don’t trust him.”
Many refugees report discrimination as their biggest challenge because Ecuadorians perceive Colombians as competing for the same jobs, especially when 80 percent of the Ecuadorian population is below the poverty line.
“If there’s not enough for us, there is less for them,” says Jorge Pozo, the Ibarra municipal government chief of social action. “If it’s so hard for Ecuadorians to find proper work, it’s more difficult to help this extra-special group.”
The Ibarra municipal government has yet to officially recognize and respond to the refugees in its community, Jimez says.
“We have more important and urgent programs, and we’re dealing with a small budget,” Pozo says.
The Ecuadorian government dumps more responsibilities on the cities and provinces without increasing their budgets and fails to supply a state policy addressing the refugee problem, Pozo says.
“As far as I’m concerned, the refugees receive no help from the central government,” he says. “It’s not that we don’t (want to help). It’s that we can’t.”
“You do everything we say if you don’t want anything to happen to your children.”
At 1:20 a.m. on a Sunday in January 2002, a door knock wakes up Elias and Maria.
The five men at their doorstep appear no more than 23 years old, but are guerillas capable of murder. Clad in jeans and T-shirts, they look like civilians, except for the green handkerchiefs hiding their faces and the threatening bulges under their shirts.
“Where is your brother?” the men ask, pacing around the living room while Maria and Elias sit forcibly on the couch.
“I don’t know,” Maria says. “I swear to God, I don’t know.”
Eight days earlier, Maria’s brother Sixto and his family fled Colombia. Sixto stopped paying war taxes and hid his sons from the guerilla army, so the FARC wants him dead.
The guerillas visit Maria, who lives 45 minutes from Sixto, to search for her brother and terrorize her family.
The FARC demands Elias work with them to blow up buses, kidnap or kill.
Elias jumps to his feet and says, “How can I do that to my children?”
The largest man shoves Elias to the couch and presses his gun to Elias’ forehead.
“Are you not a man?” the guerilla says. “What are you afraid of? Do you not wear pants?” Elias holds up his hands, fighting back tears and begs the man not to shoot.
“You do everything we say if you don’t want anything to happen to your children,” the guerilla says. Maria sobs beside her husband, too scared to move, feeling cold sweat run down her hands.
The guerillas stay at the house for another hour, talking in low voices among themselves in the kitchen. Before they leave, they tell Elias, “We give you until tomorrow night to think about an answer.”
They instruct Maria: “We give you until the next night to tell us where your brother is.”
The last man out the door looks the youngest of the five. “Maybe, it’s better for you to leave. You could be killed,” he advises Maria and Elias. “You know they carry out their words.”
As soon as the sun rises the next morning, Maria and Elias visit the mayor and tell him what happened. He says they should leave for Ecuador and hands them 80,000 pesos ($30). With three changes of clothes, the family crosses the Colombian border on a bus Jan. 11, 2002.
“It’s hard to speak of that night,” Maria recalls of the guerilla visit. She cups her face in her hands, hiding the tears spilling down her cheeks. Maria apologizes for pausing the interview for one minute. “I thought they would climb upstairs and kill all the children. Or worse, they would kill both of us, and my children would be left alone in this world.”
“What did we come to?”
A few shanty tumbledown homes, much more like sheds, pepper the desolate mountain region near Ibarra. From the bus, 12-year-old Leidy Dahiana Genera sees indigenous people, no taller than a yardstick, with mahogany skin adorned in layers of colorful woven cloaks.
Tears roll down her chin. Compared to Colombia, Ecuador feels empty and archaic. “What did we come to?” Leidy Dahiana questions.
The family wanders the streets until they pass a restaurant, El Zaguan. Owner Quadalupe Rosero sees the famished children, takes the family inside and feeds them.
“Do you have a place to sleep?” Rosero asks Maria.
For a year and a half, Maria’s family sleeps in the back of the restaurant in a suffocating, sauna-like room with no windows and only a curtain signifying the bathroom. The family shares one mattress, which is always damp from the wet floor and the sweat from their backs.
In exchange for rent and food, Elias, who once managed a farm in Colombia, waits tables and Maria washes clothes and cleans Rosero’s home without pay. When El Zaguan goes bankrupt, the Generas lose their home.
Desperate, they find work on a farm in Las Monjas, 20 minutes away from Ibarra, and dwell in a 10-by-13-foot room between cow stalls and guinea pigs.
“It was a room not fit for a human being,” Maria recalls.
While the Generas milk cows, feed guinea pigs and harvest tomatoes, the barn tries to swallow their dignity, but the family transform it into their home. They acquire two twin-size beds and sweep away the hay, cow feed and dirt. But they can’t expunge the swarming flies and lingering odor of guinea pig urine and feces.
After 11 months of stomaching swine conditions, the Generas move to Aduana. The farm owner never pays Elias his last month’s salary.
In Aduana, Maria works 13 hours every day as a nanny for three children. She quits because she has no time for her own. Elias works for a year at a hotel restaurant until a new manager fires him because he is Colombian.
The family lives comfortably in a one-bedroom home for $40 a month. The landlord, Hernan Maldonado, a taxi driver, adores the boys, Andres, 12, and Jason, 14, and often invites Elias over for drinks. When his marriage fails, Maldnado pursues Maria, soliciting sex for money. “Think about your situation,” he says. “I can give you what you need.”
“You must respect me. I’m a married woman,” she says. “Even if I didn’t have a husband, I wouldn’t sleep with you.”
Maria never tells her husband about Maldonado, even when Maldonado gropes her thigh while Elias is away. “Imagine what he would have felt,” she says. “Imagine what he would have done.”
After Maria’s rejections, Maldonado accuses the family of wasting electricity and water when, in fact, water leaks because he purposely cuts the pipe. One evening, Maria finds her boys crying after Maldonado yells at them for leaving the faucet on.
“If you have a problem, you say it to me,” she tells Maldonado. “You don’t say anything to my sons.” Maldonado calls the boys liars, and their argument fuels until Maria slaps him across his face.
He throws her against the door’s edge, gouging a deep gash in her arm. The inch-long scar is still visible today.
Elias, who works until 3 a.m. that night, knows little about the fight. Maria never tells him about her arm.
Unwelcome at Maldonado’s, the Generas venture to nearby town Caranqui, where they live in a five-bedroom home with 19 people. After three months, they pack their bags again because the rent is too expensive.
Four months and two homes later, the gypsies find their current three-bedroom home, which they share with three families, including Maria’s brothers, Rafael and Jesus.
While Elias lacks the proper refugee papers to work legally and can’t hold a steady job, Maria’s housekeeping employers don’t require paperwork. The Generas’ opportunities wither to hotels and restaurants that hire on a day-to-day basis. At one hotel, a male worker harasses Maria.
“Why don’t you get a friend to help you economically,” he says.
“What are you insinuating to me?” Maria asks.
“You can go out with me and have a beer.”
After Maria rejects him, the other male employees humiliate her. They dirty her clean tablecloths, throw the towels she hung on the ground and leave dirty handprints on the white sheets she already bleached. She finds dishes she washed, shattered on the floor.
Maria cries to her husband, “Let’s go. I can’t bear this anymore.”
“Patience, patience,” he says. “It won’t be like this forever.”
After missing a single day of work because she is sick, the hotel manager tells Maria not to come in anymore. Four days later, the manager fires Elias because she says she has to make cutbacks.
A week later, a newspaper ad announces the same hotel is looking for a new waiter.
“We waited too long.”
Elias wants a job, but he’s not legal.
Refugees endure a formal interview process through the UNHCR to gain recommendations for legal refugee status. These recommendations are given to the Ecuadorian government, which ultimately makes the final decisions.
The refugee approval rate in 2006 is 40 percent, a decrease from last year’s 48 percent.
When the Generas arrived in Ecuador, they didn’t go to the UNHCR immediately because they didn’t need extra aid for food and housing while living at the restaurant. As the result of delaying their first visit to the agency, they appear suspicious.
Liliana, a UNHCR worker, says, “In three months, you are well-established. You probably don’t need help.”
To declare refugee status, Maria and Elias need written proof of the FARC’s threats. These are documents they need to get from Colombia—a life-risking trip they are too afraid to make.
Liliana gives them a certificate that says they can’t get deported to Colombia, but doesn’t grant refugee status.
Since then, the document is updated with a refugee seeking asylum identification card, which doubles as a driver license and work permit. Work keeps the Generas busy and away from the agency, so they never receive their new cards.
A year ago, three migration officers stop the family for their refugee papers. The officers believe the certificate is fake and take the family to the UNHCR, where they receive the updated cards and schedule an interview for refugee status.
Eight days later, Maria and Elias face two one-and-a-half-hour-long interviews separately. The interviewers ask and re-ask details, checking if Maria and Elias’ stories match.
Their refugee status is rejected.
“We waited too long,” Maria says.
She also thinks their stories don’t agree because Elias often confuses dates, events and facts, due to a past head injury, which affects his memory.
Their seeking asylum cards expired, so now, the family has to obtain another type of visa to stay in the country legally. Last month, Maria’s cousins in Colombia delivered the documents they need, so the Generas can get their visas in Quito.
But they don’t have the time or the money.
“I worry about tomorrow.”
In a cluster of weathered, plastic G.I. Joes, two frowning black eyes stare back.
The beady eyes belong to a dirt-smeared baby doll, salvaged from the streets and drafted as another toy soldier. Its uniform is constructed with faded denim patches, worn table-cloth scraps and crumpled notebook paper. Street rubble soils its once golden-blond synthetic hair.
Andres and Jason love playing with toys, but their parents can’t afford them. So they make their own.
“They are not the kind of boys who ask,” Leidy Dahiana says. For this family, there are no presents on birthdays. There is no Santa Claus on Christmas.
The Generas live with 16 people in a house they can barely afford for $50 a month per family.
In a 10-by-8-foot space, Andres and Jason sleep on the floor under their sister’s bed. Their parents have their own room, and their uncle Jesus, aunt and 7-year-old cousin share another room. The living room is converted into another bedroom, where Rafael, his wife and three children sleep on a twin-size bed and the floor.
The families store their food in the landlord’s refrigerator because they can’t afford one. They own no chairs except for 1-foot-tall stools. Their tattered loveseat lost its cushion and sits low to the ground. Its arm bares the yellow foam picked to pieces by anyone who sits down. A hunter green polyester fabric covers the dining table, which comfortably seats two, not 16.
Maria works 10 hours a day, seven days a week because Elias cannot—he’s been unemployed for six months.
For $6 a day at Hotel Montecarlo in Ibarra, she lugs 30 pounds of sheets and towels up four flights to wash, iron, fold and hang dry. For $6, Maria tries to pay the rent and feed her family.
The family eats chocolate and bread for breakfast. At lunch, Leidy Dahiana cooks rice and lentils. On a good day, they have meat. The children have the lunch leftovers for dinner, while the parents brew coffee and eat bread in near darkness, since only one flickering bulb lights their hovel.
“I worry about tomorrow,” Leidy Dahiana says. “I’m afraid the situation will get worse.”
Last Wednesday, the family couldn’t eat. Elias begged for oil, rice and tuna fish at the UNHCR.
Since they moved to Ecuador, the Generas can’t afford to send Leidy Dahiana to school. Instead, she wakes up at 8 a.m., makes the beds, cooks lunch and washes dirty clothes.
However, “Those who carry the responsibilities are my parents,” Leidy Dahiana says. She knows her parents cry, but not in front of the children.
Still, Leidy Dahiana yearns to go to school like her brothers. She wishes she had homework, but instead, she worries about the rent or if her brothers will eat today.
“I’ve seen in the news there are people in this world that can’t eat or they don’t have a home,” she says. “That’s my fear: That these things will happen (to us). I’m afraid of that ultimatum.”
Every day, Elias hunts for jobs. He takes anything, even if it’s only a fraction of what his Ecuadorian co-workers earn. Elias faces discrimination because many Ecuadorians view Colombians as thieves and liars, especially when this bias is exposed in the newspapers daily.
“We’re not all the same,” Elias says. “I am not like those criminals.”
But he later admits, “I fear that desperation will make me do something crazy.”
Even at school, Andres and Jason suffer discrimination from other students and teachers.
“What are you doing here?” a teacher asks Jason. “You should go back to Colombia.”
“Colombians only come here to steal,” a sixth-grade boy tells Andres.
“The school is driving me crazy,” Elias says. “They keep asking me for money, and I keep telling them, ‘No. No. I don’t have it.’” Teachers send home notes demanding money for notebooks, musical instruments, uniforms, textbooks or soap.
On average, school costs $80 to $100 per student. The UNCHR offers partial stipends for school supplies to families with a seeking asylum or refugee status card, but unfortunately, the Generas’ cards expired.
Andres and Jason have outgrown their school uniforms and need new ones. Maria can’t afford $27 black shoes for Jason’s uniform, so the school sent him home. The boys didn’t go to school today because they don’t have their English textbooks.
The family can’t make this month’s rent. They need to sell their furniture, pack their bags and search for another place to live.
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Elias says.
They are gypsies. Always moving. Never settled. After four years in Ecuador, the Generas still can’t find a place to call “home.”