The Hold Up

So Christmas in site was nice, as I mentioned earlier. But by New Years we were ready for a little break. You see, things have been moving painfully slow. We don’t know what to do to get people excited or to inspire them to be proactive. In November at our last SPA project meeting before going home we told the leaders, “We can’t let another month go by without meeting or we’ll end up wasting too much time to be able to do a project.” We gave the women a job to do in our absence, and we gave the men their job and said we’d meet in early December. We were back in site on December 2, and athough we’ve gone to Manuel’s house every week, sometimes more than once a week trying to organize another meeting, the entire month and more went by without a meeting.

We’re frustrated. I realized after the third time that Manuel told us we’d have a meeting on such and such a day at such an hour and no one, including Manuel, showed up that he probably wasn’t talking to anyone about having a meeting. I bothered him one more time and he said in the a whiney, high pitched voice, “Si la gente no viene…” which translates to, “But no one comes…” Of course they don’t come to meetings if they don’t know they’re supposed to because no one ever told them. The thing about the women here is that they’ll show up when they know they’re supposed to. They do it for the health talks. They do it for the morrales meetings. They come when the men don’t come, if they’re told. So obviously Manuel wasn’t talking to anyone.

We also have a household breakdown in communication. You see, I feel like Nas Palas doesn’t really like to talk with me about work here. He appears much more comfortable talking to Fletch, so when someone needs to talk to Nas it falls to Fletch. But since Fletch has to ask Nas to get us firewood, and about our light bill, and a million other things, Fletch hesitates, understandably, because we don’t want to wear Nas out. He’s our most trusted ally in working here. It was mentioned to him that we needed to have a meeting, and he always goes directly to Don Ximon. The only problem is that in addition to Christmas festivities going on, the coffee harvest happens in November and December. Don Ximon has a sizeable plot of land in steamy, hot Barrillas about 3 hours away where he’s been spending most of his time cutting his coffee and cardomom (the latter having reached very favorable prices this year, which means he’s not coming home without everything harvested). So we’re stuck. Where do we go?

I’ve been meeting with the morrale making ladies, most of whom do double duty as both morrales artisans and leaders of the Women’s Health Committee. At one point, our neighbor Petrona, who’s invovled in both, asked me about the project. I told her we need to have a meeting and that for some reason I didn’t understand the male leaders weren’t getting together. Then I suggested that she get the ladies together and come to our house. She looked at me like I’d just grown another head, saying “But we can’t meet without the leaders.” I explained to her that, actually, we could meet without the male leaders. “If we wait for the guys to show up, and they just decide they don’t have time to meet or that it isn’t important enough for them to meet with us, then you women will lose out on house improvements.” She didn’t look comfortable with this at all. At first I thought she didn’t want to lose the opportunity to put a floor in her house. “Yes,” she reiterated, “but we have to wait for the men.” I finished up our meeting and went home.

This conversation took place 3 more times in the course of visiting her to check on how her morrales were coming along and discussing when to call all the artisans together for meetings. The only difference was that the last time we had this discussion she ended with the question, “But what if Manuel gets mad us for meeting without him?”

“What would he get mad at you for?” I asked. “Because he’s been too lazy to get a meeting together? We’ve talked to him several times and he says he’s going to get everyone together, then he doesn’t. So if you women want this project to happen we need to have a meeting.” She said ok, that she’d talk to the ladies on Sunday when she saw them. And though it felt like we’d maybe gained an inch, or maybe just a centimeter, I didn’t hear from her again. Then we left for New Years.

We came home and went to Manuel’s house and asked him when we were going to have a meeting. It’s more of a joke on us at this point. “Thursday at 4,” he said. We knew he had no intention of coming or of telling anyone else.

This past week Reyna came over. She’s on vacation from work and I’m teaching her how to knit a hat. While she was visiting, we somehow got on the topic of our frustrations as well as our hesitation to bug her father. She started asking questions. I told her about Petrona, and how if we didn’t do something very soon the community as a whole would lose out on the project. The frustrating thing is that we feel strung along. We explained to Reyna that we don’t have to do this project, that if the community doesn’t want to do it, that’s fine. It would make our jobs easier. However, if they do want it, then they’d better get a move on. I told her about the conversations with Petrona.

She brought up several points, and one was that the community thought that the meetings weren’t happening because we were being lazy and unwilling to work. I was immediately heartbroken. We’re dying to do some work, but no one will work with us! Where’d they get the idea that we’ve just been lazy? And in regards to Petrona she said, “If a woman here stands up and starts to take action to make this project happen, she won’t succeed. Everyone in the community will tear her town. They’ll tell her she doesn’t have any official place in the community leadership and therefore she’s unqualified to call meetings. People won’t come to the meetings.”

I know this is true. I’ve seen things like this happen before, and I suspected this was behind Petrona’s hesitation to act. “But do they realize that their behavior means everyone loses? Do they care?” Reyna shook her head, “Asi son la gente.” That’s just the way people are. They don’t think about things long term. They think about things in the moment, and their thoughts and actions are decided on these lifelong social and cultural strictures they’ve set up for themselves. I find it so disheartening that the women here are held down by more than just fear of the men. What actually happens is that there are established gender roles for women and men, and both sexes are in charge of policing the community to make sure no one steps out of bounds. Women haven’t had leadership positions here before. Why would they start today, just because a couple of gringos came to town saying they have the right and the ability to be leaders of their community?

How can we go up against this? The women won’t act without Manuel, and Manuel’s actions have made it pretty clear to us he’s not going to do anything. I asked Reyna for help. She said she’d talk to her father, so we were stuck waiting again. When would she talk to Nas? How long would we have to wait? Tomorrow night is Reyna’s birthday, so I’m making a double batch of cinnamon rolls, her favorite of the things we make, and we’re going over to the family’s house for a celebratory dinner. Sometimes, when everything else sucks (to sound like a pouty 13 year old again), hanging out with the family is the most fun we have all day.