¿Cual es mejor?

My teacher and I were talking about the war today... Earlier this week she told me with a huge smile on her face about being with her father as he taught the community about the bible and the faith, he was a Catholic catechist. So I asked her, if her father was affected or threatened at all during the war because he was a catechist... and was just the kind of person that was targeted by the government... take out the tendons, whiddle away at the spirit and you can kill the heart of the people.

It turns out that he is disappeared. I sat across from her transfixed as she told me about what life was like with a father who is disappeared. He was a target because as a leader in the village he spoke out against the quality of education the children of the village were receiving... and the answer he got was the same one many other Guatemalans received... a visit in the night...

Would it have been better, she wondered out loud with tears in her eyes, if he and her brother had simply been taken outside and shot in full view of the family? That way they would have known... as it is now everytime she hears a story of what someone experienced who was disappeared she wonders if her father experienced those horrors or maybe worse?

As the sun set and their father was taken the children who still lived at home were forced to become adults by the time the sun rose the next morning... someone had to work the field, earn money, support the family... so the children were forced to attempt to fill those roles. Her mother looked in every ditch, every hospital, every clinic, every field for her husbands body... but never found it.

My teacher was the oldest in the family so she already had a lot of education when her father was disappeared and even went onto university... her siblings however, were young and while one sister made it to the sixth grade the rest only completed second grade. A sad reality for many in rural Guatemala.

She showed me a picture of her and her sister side by side... my teacher has a smile, full cheeks, wrinkles only from smiling, and relatively new clothes... her sister looks sad, worn, and years older than her older sister. Her life has been hard.