No Milk for One Year

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Ruth Marleni Rumualdo is the mother of 14 children. Eleven of them depend on her and her husband, René. There may not be much on Ruth’s table, but there will always be beans: beans for breakfast, beans for lunch, beans for dinner — a diet complemented with tortillas. They have work —farming their own crops— but they don’t have money. Rising prices have forced the family to cut back on foods like eggs, rice, and milk.

Her youngest is three years old, and they can no longer afford to give him milk. “He always used to ask for milk with coffee, but it’s been almost a year since I stopped giving him milk. Everything is so expensive now,” Ruth says. The $60 the family brings in each month is not enough. Some days they have no money at all. Today, May 2, 2023, is one of those days. Ruth is cooking flor de izote (Yucca blossoms) over wood fire, because she doesn’t have the three dollars to pay to refill their government-subsidized propane tank.

Ruth lives with her extended family in a community in the canton of El Jícaro, in the municipality of Tacuba, Ahuachapán, and the family has always farmed what they eat. Sometimes she finds temporary work and earns five dollars a day, but not usually. El Jícaro is located in Central America’s dry corridor, where the food crisis has been exacerbated by intense, long-lasting droughts that cause regular crop failure. Living there means being at the mercy of food insecurity. In 2014, the United Nations provided 120 tons of food relief to families who live, like Ruth’s, in the cantons of Tacuba.

 

In this area, high levels of malnutrition have already caused stunted growth in children. René Magaña, Ruth’s husband, is a community leader, and says without hesitation that the situation they face now is far worse than before: “People have stopped eating as much, due to the lack of work, the lack of production, and the rising cost of food.” He says the number of farmers in the area who never received agricultural relief from the government are too many to count, despite the fact that the Bukele administration promised there would be more than half a million beneficiaries. “In this community, our main livelihood is farming, but when we checked, between 50% to 60% of registered farmers were never included [among the beneficiaries].” René was one of those who never received any aid.

Without the government providing bags of seeds, farmers here run the risk of not being able to plant, because they don’t have the money to invest in seeds that are more resilient than the ones they save themselves.

Ruth and Rene’s house is made of adobe, bamboo, and earth, with tin sheeting for a roof and siding, and is divided into two rooms by a short corridor that has been converted into a kitchen. A large vanity-style mirror, with black trim and the phrase “deseo amor” (“I yearn for love”) written in capital letters, hangs on one of the bamboo and adobe walls. This is Ruth’s improvised beauty salon, where she offers haircuts for one dollar.

 

Ruth tries to make the most of the old hair clipper she received as a donation from a charity. Her first customer of the day —and the only one she’s had for several weeks— is Antonio, an old man who waits silently in front of the mirror with a towel around his shoulders, while Ruth finishes chopping izote flowers to add a little more flavor to the beans she’s cooking.

Sometimes an extra expense sneaks its way into her family’s list of problems: this month, the school notified Ruth that she would need to contribute $0.25 to help the school buy sugar.

Ruth’s youngest children are starting to come home from school. Five of the 11 are still in class. Last year, one of her daughters started ninth grade, but then she dropped out to get a job sweeping and cleaning the house of a lady who lives in a community nearby. The others, the older boys, are all farmers. They help each other with the planting and share in the harvest. But now, one of them is detained under the state of exception. According to René, he was arrested on April 9, 2022 while working on a plumbing project to help bring more water to the community.

René says the family still does not know anything about what happened to him: at first, they thought he was in Mariona Prison. But when one of his daughters went to ask about him, she was told that he was in Izalco. Due to a lack of money, René has not been able to travel to find out what happened to his son.