Pablo Loja was sitting in a conference room Friday at the Casa de Maryland immigrant center in East Baltimore, trying to remember the last time he had worked before the snowstorms came.
The 36-year-old Ecuadoran man smiled, looked at the ceiling, tapped his left hand against the long, wooden table. He tried to remember, but he could not. More than once he used the word difícil, which hardly needed translation.
In what is usually a slow time of year for day laborers - often immigrants, trying to pick up a few dollars painting, hanging drywall, doing carpentry, moving furniture or washing cars - the weak economy has made this winter particularly difficult.
Then Maryland was buried in snow, and phones at Casa's five employment centers started ringing with requests for help - 500 between the two storms, said Tarsila Talarico, who manages the Baltimore center. "That's significant," she said.
She said the calls have come from businesses and homeowners and the centers, in Baltimore, Rockville, Wheaton, Hyattsville and Silver Spring, have been able to fulfill them all. Most are looking for someone for a day or two or a few hours. It helps those scraping by until things pick in the spring, but it's hardly a windfall.
With Talarico interpreting his Spanish, Loja, who has been in this country for three years, said that he's put in 12 hours of work on three snow shoveling jobs at homes in the city and Baltimore County since last weekend. Each job paid between $10 and $15 an hour.
He doesn't have a car, but he said he made it to the jobs by hitching rides with friends who do. He also had a job clearing snow from a roof of a garage on North Avenue over the weekend.
His specialty as a day laborer is painting interior walls. If not for the snow, he said, he would have no work at all right now.
His wife and two daughters live in Cuenca, Ecuador, in the southern half of the country, just below the equator, where he said they sell some produce grown on their land. Temperatures were in the 80s there Friday and it was humid. Loja said when he's working, he can send some money to them; when he's not, he cannot.
He said he lives in a three-bedroom apartment in East Baltimore with three other men. One of them, Julian Pisa, who also came here from Ecuador three years ago, has also been able to make a few dollars shoveling snow.
Pisa is 44, with a wife, two daughters and son back in Cañar, Ecuador, about 30 miles north of Cuenca in the center of the country. Pisa said Friday that his specialty is tile installation, but he had not had any of that work lately.
During the past week he said he worked at a car wash and helped on a moving crew. On Thursday he spent nine hours shoveling snow at three churches in East Baltimore for $10 an hour.
Talarico said the two men and their tough economic straits were probably typical of the people who come through the center seeking work, help with legal issues, taxes or learning English. The center in Baltimore was opened in 2002, 17 years after Casa de Maryland was first established in Silver Spring.
Neither man would talk about his immigration status, and Talarico said the center makes a policy of not asking their clients about that and not answering questions about it. Neither would the men talk about how they got to the United States, only that they came to find work.
Loja said he when he left Ecuador for the United States he did not know what to expect, but lately he said the job situation seems "paralyzed." When he's working, he said through Talarico, "he feels good."
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