Janitor Sweeps, Cracks Books

Feb. 15, 2009 -- At the Farside dormitories on the campus of Purchase College SUNY, words like "constitution" and "independence" echo across the halls, resonate from inside bathrooms and end inside a small, dusty closet filled with mop buckets.

The man inside is Jaime E. Jaramillo. He is a janitor and is studying for a test, the naturalization test that will make him a citizen of the country he has lived in for more than two decades.

"The town where I come from is a balmy place," he said, smiling in reminiscence. "The people are cordial, amiable and humble."

Born in Milagros, Ecuador, Jaramillo, the father of four, is a retired sergeant from the Ecuadorean army who came to the United States in 1988. He is one of many immigrants who work in maintenance at the college in Purchase, a suburb in New York's Westchester County.

"Jaramillo collaborates," said his supervisor Lexer Bedom. "He works hard."

So do most of the people in Milagros. According to Jaramillo, many of them work in the pineapple industry. But there are few jobs in town, so he enlisted in the military in 1966, at the age of 20. There, he benefited from the decent pay of the military.

But after serving for 22 years, including during a war, the worn-out Jaramillo retired. That same year, unable to find work in Ecuador, he applied for a visa and came to America.

"It was easy to get a visa," Jaramillo said, dipping a mop in the brown water of his squeeze bucket. "It's hard for other people to get one, yes, but the consulate knows that a veteran won't stay abroad for too long."

An economic crises in Ecuador in 2000 led the country to abandon the sucre and adopt the U.S. dollar as its official currency. Because the poverty level remains at a high 36 percent, almost everyone there wants to emigrate, and, Jaramillo says, many aim for Europe or the United States.

So, with a five-year visa, Jaramillo left his family and arrived in the frizzling summer heat of Miami.

"The intensity of the humidity was the first thing I hated," he said. "Then came the solitude." Family life is close knit in Ecuador, he says, but here in the United States, it was one of the first things he lost.

Nonetheless, America had jobs, and Jaramillo wasted no time. Within two weeks, he moved in with a sister in New Jersey and began working as a house painter.

"Mother of God! I was making $10 an hour, $400 a week," he said. "With one dollar I had 125 sucres."