[LINK] "Charity offers hope to Mexico's Mixtec elderly"

[rfmcdonald]

Al Jazeera's John Holman reports about the fate facing the elderly among the Mixtec, an indigenous people of Mexico whose demographic pyramid has been hollowed out by migration to the United States.

Cameraman Gustavo Huerta and I were heading to meet an elderly population which has been frequently forgotten by their own society let alone the wider world.

The Mixtec is beautiful in a hardy, spiky kind of way. But the arid soil doesn't give much to live on and the majority of the young and able stream out of the region to Mexican cities or the US rather than trying to scratch a living in the fields here.

It's been that way for decades. And while the young leave, the children and the elderly are often left behind. The children are waiting their turn- for the old there is no such hope.

Many are left to eke out their lives in increasing poverty. That’s the recurring story in the village of Atenango where from a one room shack we picked up Guadalupe, an indefatigable 80-year-old who was to be our translator with the elders in the village who only spoke Mixtec.

She cheerfully interjected every utterance with colorful profanities, often offered up her own colourful interpretation in the midst of a translation, and probably wouldn’t make it as a UN translator - but it worked for us.