Working with the Women

The greatest joy as well as the greatest challenge of my Peace Corps service is working with women’s groups, specifically the group here in our home community. I’m in a strange spot these days, reflecting on all the things we’ve done and how they’ve gone over, and at the same time trying to make a strong finish in our last four months. Thinking about the beginning of our service, some of my favorite song lyrics come to mind, “Dawn breaks like a bull through hall.” I think this aptly describes how our work began here. There was no shortage of things to do. We were in high demand both here and in many neighboring communities. For months we worked tirelessly to establish dedicated groups, which whittled themselves down to our current two. Then we focused on teaching them about what seemed like the most pressing health issues here. For a long while, this model worked. However, making a strong finish has been challenged by the fact that the group here in our community has sort of disintegrated through problems both internal and external.

As most of you know, our great wish was to do an infrastructure project in the homes of the women who participated so avidly in our weekly health talks. And you also know that the women’s group was led not by a woman, but by Manuel. In Spain I learned this saying, la bendicion de la bruja, which means the witch’s blessing. Manuel has been this for us, which is to say, not quite the kind of blessing we’d hoped for. Between him and the fact that our meeting center, the health post, was in total disarray for two months (and still is not quite fixed up), we had no human support, and no physical place for us to meet with the women.

With the beginning of February came the realization that we couldn’t do a project here. We’d given January 31st to the community as the due date for their part of the project paperwork. Nothing changed from where I left off in So Much Talk, So Little Walk. It appeared that everyone’s enthusiasm for the project was gone.

We were back to no work, no communication, and no support from Manuel as head of the health committee. Thus, the same day Don Basilio came for a visit, we also invited the local nurses over for lunch in order to discuss what had happened and where we should go from here. We talked about what we’ve done and where we’ve failed and where we should go in order to prepare the community for the next volunteer(s). It was a really productive luncheon at the clubhouse (and it’s not hard to get the nurses to show, up as we’ve convinced them that we only cook super delicious things ). We decided as a group that the best thing to do is to focus more on the women. In addition to doing health talks, we want to begin talks about self esteem, leadership, and women’s roles in the community. The goal of doing this is to prepare the women to take a more active, if not take over entirely, the direction of projects that might happen with the incoming PCV.

In our difficulties working with community leaders and the women’s health committee representatives, the people that have caused the most delay are the men. They themselves disbanded their health talk group after just a few months of weekly talks. They aren’t as invested in the projects. I don’t think they’ve ever quite seen the value of a home-improvement project, as noted by their opinion that 30,000 quetzales was too pitiful a quantity of money for them to bother with. The men are so used to running everything around here that the women feel like they aren’t supposed to do anything without their consent. I urged the women to act without the men, but since the structure was already set up, they ladies wouldn’t budge. It paralyzed the whole process. And the men always complain about how busy they are, and how difficult it is to attend meetings. Why should we require them to take part in administering a community project then? Aren’t we doing these men a favor by not giving them yet another thing to worry about it, another series of meetings to attend?

The women in the community are really in the community. They take care of their children, their homes, their fields. The men go to work for a week at a time in Barrillas taking care of their plots of coffee and cardamom, bananas and oranges–I don’t bedgrudge them this, it just slows things down a lot if we have to wait on them. The men go work at the coast when they feel short of money. The men decide they have no prospects here and slip off into the US to work illegally. Whereas men as community leaders might have worked twenty years ago, might have been effective in getting things done, it’s not anymore. When we arrived here we were greeted by the community mayor, and we were quickly informed that he was, more than anything, a warm body. His son, young and enthusiastic, had been elected for the position, but he literally handed his stick (auxilary mayors carry short wooden sticks with pom poms on them to denote their position, he literally handed over the stick) to his father and left for the US when the opportunity arrived. He was elected for the highest position in the community, and he abandoned it! I’m not proposing we make a woman the community mayor. That wouldn’t be possible in my wildest dreams, not for a very long time, but I am proposing we show them the value of their opinions, ideas and willingness to work for change. And the nurses were 100% behind me. So we scheduled our first meeting with the ladies for March 1.

Unfortunately, some times those with good intentions are not 100% reliable. I called the nurses on Sunday as I didn’t get the chance to talk to them at the end of the week, to ask about the meeting and they sheepishly admitted they’d forgotten all about it. Oops. But, unlike others we’ve worked with, the nurse Lucia showed up at the house at 8:30 Monday morning to apologize, again, and set up another meeting. There are so many women in the community that must come in for vaccinations and information that the nurses split them into four groups so as not to be completely overwhelmed and to make the women’s wait shorter (how thoughtful!). Lucia asked if I could come to the health post every morning from today through Friday to talk to all four groups.

Something that has bothered me about the “project” is that no one has taken on the responsibility of giving bad news to the community. Women keep asking me when we’re going to do the project, and I have to keep telling them we’re not. But it seems so wrong to just let gossip spread the word, and I don’t think the leaders, any of them, are willing to stand up in front of the community and give the news themselves. It looks like the task has fallen to me. I told Lucia yesterday that I didn’t want to plan any health talk today, rather I’d talk about where we’ve been and where we’re going. In this way I could include the information that they aren’t getting a project directed by myself and Jaime, but they’ve got another chance once the new volunteer(s) arrive(s).

This morning I walked into the health post a little before 8 and found the nurses finishing up their breakfast and about to start work. Manuel was with them, and instead of saying good morning, he walked out just after I walked in. Lucia said, “Emily, we were planning on looking for representatives from each of the four groups in the community to take part in these leadership classes, but Manuel says that the health committee is already formed and that next week they’re going to have a meeting to start the paperwork for the project, so I don’t think we can pick group leaders. Manuel says Jaime is just behind on his work for the project and that’s what they were all waiting on.”

I know I shouldn’t be surprised by this anymore, but it kills me that he keeps telling people we’re so lazy and always behind on our work. It makes me so angry every time, too. I think it was more a protective angry this time. If he’d said I was behind, well that’s one thing, but Jaime has been working like crazy, and Jaime is the one who was seriously saddened once we knew the project was a no-go.

Since Manuel had promptly left, I shut the door to the kitchen and took a seat. I explained to them that the project was not going to happen, and for some reason I neither know nor understand, Manuel apparently does not listen to the words that come out of our mouths. This morning the plan was to explain to the ladies they weren’t getting a project and why, but that they shouldn’t become angry or annoyed because they’ll get another chance when a new volunteer comes. Once the nurses understood what was going on, we went out to talk to the group of women assembled in the waiting room.

Manuel was taking attendance along with some of the women, and as he was about leave, Lucia asked him to stay. I don’t know why, maybe because I’m a people pleaser who hates to let anyone down, maybe because I had so many aspirations when we arrived –probably a mix of both– but I was really nervous and upset with having to make this announcement. My stomach was in knots, and I’m accustomed enough to public speaking this doesn’t usually happen. I tried to follow Guatemalan guidelines, which is to say, make the announcement sound as positive as possible without making any one sound particularly at fault. I tried to relay the events and sentiments of the leaders’ meetings to the general public without specifying exactly who said what.

The women had questions. Some of the women who were part of the leaders’ meetings said that they were annoyed with two other women, who they named specifically and who were not present to defend themselves. I probably talked with the group for an hour. There’s so much repetion in this job. I had to bring people back to the fact that our first job here is education, not construction, and education is what we’ve been working on and will continue to work on for as long as the women want to come to the talks. I talked about how Peace Corps isn’t an organization that comes in with money and gifts, so it’s not right for people in town to expect us to give them regalitos, or little gifts.

“What we do as Peace Corps volunteers,” I explained, “is collaborate and cooperate. This means that we do part of something, and the community does the other part. With this infrastructure project, Jaime and I couldn’t do all the work, only part of it. We were ready to do our part of it, but when it come to coordinating the leadership in the community and for people here to do their part, something went wrong. I don’t know if people didn’t understand us–we still don’t speak Q’anjob’al very well–or if people just decided that they weren’t excited enough about the project to work for it. I guess we’ll say that there was malentendimiento, a misunderstading, between us and the leadership. We’re not angry that the project isn’t happening, maybe a little sad, but not angry. I feel like you all need to know what happened though, because when the next volunteer(s) come(s) you will have another opportunity. I still have a lot of hope for this community, and I want you to be able to do better with the next volunteer. I want you to understand what your responsibilities are so you can use the next opportunity rather than lose it.”

Responsibility is very evasive in these parts. I often find myself wondering why that is. From what I’ve observed, it’s a mix of things. One, as Americans we’re taught responsibility through various methods starting at a very young age. From kindergarten on, we’re taught to take responsibility for certain things, from putting away the toys we took out to play, to doing our homework and turning it in on time. We’re given pets or chores in our home to teach “responsibility”. And in order to really drill the point home, we have accountability systems. If you don’t put your toys away, you sit in the corner instead of playing during the next break. If you don’t do your homework you get a detention. And these accountability systems exist at all levels of society, with positive reinforcement when things are done well (like a promotion) and consequences when we fail to live up to those responsibilities (like a judicial sentence). That’s not the case here. Families here are great at making sure their bases are covered, that things are taken care of to the extent they need to be to survive. But it’s a communal system where everyone covers for everyone else. While there is a beauty to this approach, I also think this system diminishes personal responsibility. That, and because of corruption and racism and poverty that has been the norm here for so long, there is little to no accountability. This means that there is little positive reinforcement when things are done right, or punishment when things are done poorly. Where are the incentives? Social accountability is, well, flexible. Police sometimes arrest people who break the law, but that hardly means criminal activity is punished. Sometimes a person is released in a day or two.

It took me months of being here to understand how responsibility wasn’t a common concept. Since then I’ve included it a lot in health talks. For example, we talk about “responsible parenting” and what that entails. Still, I’m never quite sure they understand what I’m talking about when I try to discuss responsibilidad in any situation. Today, I tried it again. “My responsibility as a volunteer is to plan health talks, and when a day and time is announced, I have a responsibility to be in the right place at the time I promised. When I say ‘let’s have a health fair with the nurses’, my responsibility is to come to the health center when I say I will and plan the activities. The nurses are responsible for working with me and helping carry out the activites. As a community with volunteers, should you choose to participate in the activities, your responsibility is to show up on time when meetings are announced and to participate. This is collaboration. When you collaborate, everyone has a responsibility. If you want to achieve a goal by collaborating, everyone has to do their part, they all have to take responsibility. This didn’t happen with the project we tried to do here. But now that you know what it takes you can do it right when the next volunteer is here.” In upcoming talks, I’ll figure out lots of ways to reframe this idea and illustrate it for the ladies.

I let the women know about Don Basilio’s visit of two weeks ago. I told them plainly that I recommended Temux get another volunteer because there’s still a lot of work to do here, and that I believe the women are capable and ready to work on health projects in the future. I was so annoyed with people accusing Jaime of being behind on his work or seen as lazy that I took the liberty of making a general announcement about the teacher’s school he’s been working. He’s pretty well known in town these days, but not everyone out here in the village is tied into what happens in town. Now they know he’s partially responsible for the school that will begin sprouting from the ground this week. Maybe that was immature of me? I just couldn’t resist, and I’m also pretty proud of Jaime and his school.

Manuel was in the the health post for the beginning of the talk. He began to look frustrated at one point and walked out. The nurses looked at me knowingly. I never incriminated him in any way, not once; I didn’t even mention his name. He never left entirely. I saw him pacing outside the door of the health center. And eventually he came back in to stand in his spot, front and center, to listen to the closing of the meeting. I just couldn’t stand that he continued to delude himself and everyone around him that this project was somehow magically going to happen. Now all I have to do is return 3 more times to the health center (Wed, Thur, Fri) and repeat the same 40 minute talk so that everyone understands. I did ask them if they want another gringo to come live with them, and if they’re willing to work with the gringo. For what it’s worth, they said yes and yes. I also asked them if they wanted me to continue giving health talks, and they also said yes. That last bit makes me happy.

I don’t think everyone walked away happy, though. Quite a few of the women who were in line to receive some sort of infrastructure were in the meeting, a lot of them were women who I like a lot, who were willing to do the physical labor of putting in a floor, building a latrine, or building a stove. Maybe we could have done the project here, if we’d held ten people’s hands and guided them step by step everyday for the last week before the deadline. But honestly, I don’t think that’s good development. I believe the people here are smarter than that. If they’re excited about something, they don’t need much to get them going. I’ve seen it before. We both refused to coddle them into doing a project just because we wanted to build stuff. And as I said before, I’m not angry about the project not happening, and maybe I’m not even sad about it anymore. The whole things has been quite the learning experience. And the craziest thing? I’m sure there’s a whole lot I still don’t understand.