A FULL TIME WORKER AT 14

This is the oldest photo of our family. It was shot in 1931. From left to right: Letty (5), Mom (24) and Lilita (2)


Mom and Letty sat quietly looking at each other and glancing toward me, without knowing what to say or what to do. I got up from between them and walked straight to my dad; I embraced him, and as I did so, I started to cry out loud as well. He embraced me strongly while he kept kissing on my head and on my ears, then he sat down in his chair and he sat me on his lap, just as he used to do when he wanted to feed me from his plate when I was about 5. We both cried for several minutes, then, he let me loose and said, his voice still mumbling, “son, I don’t know what we are going to do with you, I don’t know what’s ahead, but I want you to know I love you for what you are, not for what you could have been”, and continued: “we’ll have to see, we need to discuss this within the family and come up with a decision that is good for you”. Now, please show me those awards you’ve gotten from the school. C’mon son, go get them, I want to see them, I really need to see them!.

A decision about my future had to be taken very soon as my parents had soon to go back to Pallatanga and resume their villagers life. It was clear for all of us, my parents had no means to enroll me in a comparable school, but even worse than that, there were no comparable schools in Guayaquil, not even in the rest of the country, so, there was no way I could attend a school as good as the Seminary, but, it was clear for all in the family that I was going to continue my high school education. I just had this compelling idea imbued by my mother, that “the only way to walk up the ladder of society was through a good education”, and, of course, as to be expected, my mother was fully behind me. There were moments when my father had suggested I should go back to Pallatanga and become a farmer entering the agricultural trade, after all, his reasoning was, “we we are farmers, our forefathers and their forefathers have been farmers just as almost everybody in our place”. Besides, he reasoned, “I’ll be always behind him, not only parenting, but also tutoring him; he can surely be a great farmer”.

My mother was radically opposed to the idea of having me return to Pallatanga and become a farmer. For her, going back to Pallatanga was like going back to the “middle ages” after having lived in modern times. In a matter of days, my parents and I, with my three sisters and brother Pepe as counselors, discussed the alternatives, then evaluated the ideas until we got to a consensus. I would have to look for a job as soon as possible, a full time day job which would allow me to go to school at night. It was not going to be easy, simply because jobs were not abundant in those days (they are even scarcer today), but, not only that, it would have to be a job in which I, as a young teenager could perform well, could make enough money to be self sustaining, and which would allow me time to be a full time night student as well.

It took about two days to figure it all out. My sister Lilia and her husband Lolo, who had been married for about six years and were the parents of four children, owned a bakery shop in downtown Guayaquil, not very far from the old main building of the University Of Guayaquil on Colon Ave, almost at the corner with Chimborazo St.
Lilita (that’s how we called my sister Lilia), volunteered to talk to her husband Lolo to find out if he could employ me full time in his bakery shop. We found out soon, that, coincidentally, he had been looking for a person to do the menial work of sweeping and mopping the floor, cleaning the shelves, arranging the exhibition of the fresh, warm bread coming out of the wood fueled oven into the glass protected shelves, and then be ready to mind the customers business as they hurriedly came to buy milk and warm bread for their morning breakfast. All this had to be done very early in the mornings, as at 5:45 AM the doors of the bakery had to be open for customers to do their morning pre-breakfast shopping. The job fitted like a glove for me. My day would start a 4:00 AM, I would work until 12:00 noon, would have time for napping for about two hours before having lunch afterwards, then I would have time to do my school homework, and, at seven O’clock in the evening I would attend night school with classes until eleven in the evening. Bingo! I had it.

My salary was going to be $150 Sucres a month, an amount which would allow me to be self-sufficient and pay for my school ($50/month), as my salary included three meals a day and a place to sleep at my sister Lilia’s apartment, just about two blocks from the bakery shop. I didn’t feel like I had the best job in the world, but I felt very happy that I would be able to continue my education, even if it meant my childhood was suddenly cut short for good, and adulthood suddenly came over me with all kinds of responsibilities other people didn’t get until they were well over twenty.

I registered myself at the “Eloy Alfaro” Night School. My school was good, above all, my math teacher, Professor Nicolas Escandon was one of the best in town, and he helped me excelling in this subject which had always been one of my favorites.

As for my job, it was tough, especially because of the early waking up. Children of my age would normally sleep at least until 6:30 AM before being helped to get up from their beds by their mothers. Not me. My brother in law, Lolo would come at 3:45 AM knocking on my door to say only once: “Rafico, ya!”, and I was supposed to be ready in fifteen minutes to walk the two blocks to the bakery with him, every single morning from Monday to Saturday. There were times I felt like I hated his voice! “Rafico, ya!” began to sound like “wake up you lazy one, we are late for work”, or something like that. Any way, it hasn’t passed as one of my favorite phrases, but it reminded me of the old saying “early birds get the warms”, which in those days, I sometimes felt like changing it to “early warms get eaten by the birds”

It didn’t take too long for me to learn my job. In a matter of four weeks I was doing everything I was told to do in about half the time I was assigned to do it. By this time, the tricycle man who used to do the bread delivering to the grocery stores down Chile St. to Portete Ave., and back on Chimborazo St., got sick and quit his job. Lolo though that in spite of my short legs and lack of a full grown man’s strength, I could do the job as long as the tricycle’s seat was lowered a bit and the “young man” (meaning me) put some extra effort pushing the pedals. I didn’t hesitate to accept the job (not that I had a choice, anyway). Suddenly I found myself in the streets, riding the tricycle loaded with a big basket full of paper bags filled with bread for deliver to the small grocery stores in the route previously assigned to the man who just had quit.



The old U of G building at Chile St. in 1930. This was the point of start of my route to deliver bread in my tricycle when I was 14


This is how I started my “career as a street smart kit”. The job required many things, but more than anything, I had to be good at dealing with adults many times my age, I had to be good at numbers, I had to be patient, I had to be punctual (bread delivered late was not accepted). Sometimes I had to smile at a bad joke, or had to digest a bad word addressed to me for my insistence in collections. This is perhaps when I started to learn the "real language" of people in the streets of Guayaquil, this was, no doubt, my "University of Life", at its best.

The people I used to deal with were good, honest, hard working, most of them Serrano people who had migrated from the Highlands and have come to Guayaquil to fulfill their dreams and raise their families in the metropolis. For them, having a grocery store in any corner of the big city of Guayaquil was the fulfillment of a dream, their children will be born in Guayaquil, and they could aspire to a better life than their forefathers’ who had been peasants for generations. I learned from them many enduring lessons, the most important of which was their love and loyalty to the place they were originally from, which did not prevent them from loving and caring for Guayaquil, the city they had migrated to, and the city they never intended to leave. They were Serrano by birth but Guayaquileno by heart. In many ways I was a replica of these people, except that I never wanted to be a grocery store owner, I always wanted to go much farther, I always dreamed of being a part of a much wider world with the sky as a limit, and I knew that getting there would only be possible with hard work and education, that, I had it in my blood, that was seeded in my blood by my mother!