Her dad worked as a builder, including most of the work on our house. He is now charging around $30 a day, and his sons get like $25 a day. They work six days a week; you can figure out how much they earn per week.
The niece only has that job because she is young and has a "good presentation." That translates into she is gorgeous. Married women with kids don't even get that job paying $60 a week. Unwed mothers cannot always find any job at all.
Widows are really in bad shape.
No woman of even the most basic intelligence is going to have her husband arrested and jailed unless she is convinced he is going to kill her, or experiences a burst of total insanity.
A really attractive woman, widow or divorcee or unwed mother, may find a man who wants her. But, sometimes he says the kids have to go. So, they go to the grandmother or, well, somewhere. That is why that little girl next door that I like so much (see my posting in expat on a moral dilemma) is with her grandma; she is a natural child and the man who was willing to shack up with her mom didn't want someone else's natural child.
Unattractive women, well, they are in really bad straits. My closest neighbor is around 50, has two kids between 12 and 16, she is fat and not at all attractive. There is a woman struggling to get by. She did laundry by hand for a while. Then, she got enough money to start selling roast corn (not roast sweet corn; they eat corn in Mexico we don't feet tohogs in the US, sweet corn is unknown) in the town square. Now she has expanded to selling threads; yarns; embroidery supplies; AND roast corn, in the town square. She either rents a small place in someone's house by the arrroyo to store her inventory, which her son pushes in an old wheel barrow at the end of day. Before that, she had to push it all the way to her house and that was a terrible job.
Once, one of the boys came over and asked if we could help take a snake out of their rather poor house. My wife happens to like snakes, and they were surprised to see her lead the charge while I lagged noticeably behind.
If it had been in our house, we would have taken it far away and released it. But, where they lived, my wife reluctantly agreed that I should kill it.Another time, around 4 am, they banged on our door. The oldest boy got stung by a scorpion and they wanted a ride to the government hospital. He was hurting too much to walk. I dropped them off, and went back to sleep. Later, I was embarrassed when she made us a gift of a liter of milk. I don't need a gift to help a kid who is suffering. But, I understood it would offend her if I refused the milk, as poor as she is.
Another neighbor, a spinster, who lives with her elderly father and a unhealthy brother, came to us and asked for a bucket of water to give her father a bath.
I could tell more similar tales, but my point is, when women can have it this tough, silly laws like those are a sick joke.
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