Separated Twins’ Parents Get No Peace

Television crews knock on their door at all hours. A Hollywood producer is chasing the rights to their story. People want to know if they have an agent.

The parents of the formerly conjoined Guatemalan twins: Will their lives ever be the same?

The father, Wenceslao Quiej, who until recently earned about $2 a day bagging bananas, hopes not.

“I want to return to Guatemala and have a better future than the one I had,” he said late Monday, after a long day dealing with People magazine, The Times and NBC’s “Today” show.

The family arrived by an incredible stroke of destiny. A medical philanthropy group learned their conjoined baby daughters faced an uncertain fate living in a Guatemalan state hospital and brought them to the UCLA hospital where a medical team separated the girls.

Today, Quiej, 21, and his wife, Alba Leticia Alvarez, 22, stay at the Los Angeles apartment of a cousin, visiting their daughters in a hospital where TV crews wander the pediatric floor and occasionally erupt into loud squabbles.

“They’ve been interviewing me every day,” Quiej said. “Every morning, the phone starts ringing, and it keeps ringing until we go to bed.”

Instant fame followed a 22-hour operation that has touched hearts around the world. Already, a foundation is talking about creating a job for Quiej in Guatemala City so he and his wife can be with their daughters while the twins get the long-term medical care doctors say they will need. He currently holds a 65-day visa that he would like to extend and said his wife’s tenure in the U.S. is more open-ended.

Radio, TV, newspapers and, apparently, Hollywood, are all interested in recounting the journey of the young banana packer and his wife from Belen, a remote hamlet at the foot of a volcano, to center stage of the world’s media capital.

It is a story that begins four years ago on a river-laced stretch of Guatemala’s Pacific Coast, where daily rains nurture orchid-filled tropical forests, as well as a banana industry serving U.S. supermarkets.

It was here that Quiej met Alba Leticia Alvarez during her village’s May 2 Santo de Las Cruzes festival, one of the religious celebrations that are the backbone of provincial social life.

Quiej, then 17, thought Alvarez was pretty. She was shy, and unlike Quiej, she could converse in Kakchiquel, one of dozens of Mayan languages. He began to court Alvarez a year later, after starting work in the banana fields alongside his father, Wenceslao Quiej Sr.

Quiej and his father’s workday began at 4 a.m. with a 90-minute bus ride along the rain-swollen Rio Bravo to the lowlands of the Bella Mar II banana farm in Tiquisate, 35 miles south. Their work ended at 3:30 or 4 p.m., but workers often did not make it down the rutted stone road to Belen until 7:30 or later, Quiej said.

“It is a life of necessity,” Quiej said, shrugging.

When Quiej turned 20, he and Alvarez married at the yellow cinder-block church in Belen, a settlement with limited electricity and where many people lack running water. He moved in with his wife’s family in Las Cruzes, 11 miles from the banana fields. And then, he said, he looked forward to becoming a father.

‘Bereft of All Hope’

At the end of her pregnancy, Alvarez suffered wrenching pains and the family took her to the city of Mazatenango, an hour’s drive from Belen. The girls were born by caesarean section on July 25, 2001.

When Quiej had his first astonishing look at his daughters, Alvarez was still under anesthesia. The girls were joined at the head, facing opposite directions. Together, they weighed 8 pounds.

“I felt sad, bereft of all hope,” Quiej said. “They were so skinny. I thought they would die.”

But the girls began to eat “very hungrily,” he said. When his wife awoke, he told her they had twins, but he wouldn’t let her see the girls, and he began to search for a way to tell her they were conjoined. Two days later, he still hadn’t found the words.

“She wanted to see them, but I didn’t show her,” Quiej said. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t. They’re not right.’ ”

By the third day, the clinic had alerted the state hospital in Guatemala City and arranged to send the twins there. Then Quiej told his wife she could see her new daughters.

Alvarez declined to be interviewed for this story. A photo of her, taken at the clinic that day, shows her staring at the girls, her hands covering her mouth, a look of despair on her tear-stained face.

Mother ‘Emotional’

“I told her not to cry. She was very emotional,” Quiej said.

The twin girls, according to relatives in Guatemala, quickly grew strong. When they learned to smile, they were all smiles. When they learned to speak, they sang out “Mama” and “Papa” to the doctors, nurses and relatives who visited their room at the Guatemalan Institute of Social Security hospital.

“We were so worried, but the Maritas were happy, God bless them,” said their grandmother, Loyda de Jesus Lopez, 47, using the family’s nickname, “the little Marias,” for the twins, Maria Teresa and Maria de Jesus.

“When you walked into the room, they held out their hands so you would hug them,” she said.

Visits to the hospital required a five-hour bus ride from Belen. Quiej said the family made the trip to Guatemala City every eight days, but occasionally 15 or 20 days would pass before they could visit. Sometimes they had to return the same day.

“We wanted to hug them and cradle them a little, but we had a long road home,” Quiej said.

The Guatemalan Pediatric Foundation took an interest in the twins and began to investigate whether they could be separated, but Quiej said the idea stalled.

An international medical charity, Healing the Children, alerted UCLA. Dr. Jorge Lazareff, the pediatric neurosurgeon, flew to Guatemala to see the twins, and in June the charity paid to fly the girls and their mother to Los Angeles.

Quiej’s relatives in Los Angeles visited Alvarez and the twins.

Nevertheless, Alvarez “felt very alone,” he said. “She couldn’t get used to hospital food, so my family would bring her chicken and beef stews, like we cook in Guatemala.”

Quiej said Lazareff insisted that he fly to Los Angeles for the operation. When Quiej arrived on Aug. 2, he and Alvarez moved in with his cousin.

“I felt happy,” he said, “happy we were all together again.”

Girls Remain Stable

The surgery was complex: UCLA surgeons had to cut through the bone, redirect shared blood vessels and cover the exposed brain with skin. On Tuesday, they remained in critical but stable condition.

“In two months, if they’re running around and going at each other as sisters do, we’ll know they’re coming along,” said Irwin Weiss, the pediatric care specialist.

The doctors have donated their services and UCLA hopes to recoup the cost of the twins’ care, estimated at $1.5 million, through donations.

The family’s L.A.-based relatives know press attention is the best way to drum up support, and they try to persuade Quiej and Alvarez to give interviews at the hospital. But when they do, they are often dismayed by the questions.

Quiej said one Spanish-language reporter asked his wife which girl she would choose if they could save just one.

The other day, Alvarez got upset when she saw photographers had been allowed to take pictures of the girls before she arrived at the hospital.

Wife Reluctant to Talk

Quiej is more comfortable with the attention. But his wife’s reluctance often prompts the couple to back out of interviews at the last minute, prompting reporters to try again on their doorstep.

Reporters who traveled from Guatemala were refused an interview until a relative persuaded the parents to talk.

Alvarez has been very nervous since the operation, explained a cousin, Victor Hernandez. “She’s from a little village. This has been a lot of pressure.”

It’s all a little overwhelming.

“A Spanish-language reporter said I was a machista, that I was prohibiting Leticia from giving interviews,” Quiej said. “But I don’t.

“The truth is, sometimes Lety just doesn’t want to talk.”