I am teaching a class at the school
house of my community. I am teaching a class in geography. We are
going to be painting a map of the world with the students. I am
hoping to give them a notion of the reality of this crazy planet that
they share with 6 billion other people, a planet in which they
inhabit some forgotten corner. My idea is to help them understand
what the continents look like (none could even sketch a rough outline
of their own country). My idea is to show them how large the oceans
are (most have never, will never see such a thing). My idea is to
give them some perspective of the world (few have been so far as the
next pueblo or the nearest city and almost none have ever even been
to Asuncion, the capital, a mere 100 miles away).
In the front row is a girl, a young
girl in her mid-teens. She is petite, of slight build and skinny and
goofy in all her youth and proportion, and if it was based on size
alone, she would have still been a child. But she wears her years on
her face. Its not that she is unhappy or downtrodden or that 15-17 is
even that old, just that one can tell from looking at her eyes that
her strides in life have outpaced her bodily age. She has a dry wit
and doesn't seem to care much about the world I am trying to teach
the students about (the rest of the students seem quite
enthusiastic). In general, I have come to know her as a girl with a
rather humorless disposition, one who tends to show very little
patience for me, a white American boy almost 7 years older than her,
but with far fewer life experiences and, despite my colorful map and
my geographic vocabulary, a much more naïve understanding of the
world.
But perhaps I am biased. I know this
girl from outside the schoolhouse—she is my neighbor's
daughter-in-law. I visit their home often seeing as her father-in-law
is my main community counterpart and the president of the local
farmer's committee. I work with him on various projects in the
community or sometimes just sit with him for a while and sip tereré
and talk about the weather. Every time I visit the house, this young
girl treats me with the same sort of detached interest, almost
annoyance, that I have come to expect from her in the classroom. It
makes sense to me, or at least I have come to accept it and
understand it in a way that I will explain, but it still seems odd to
me because her 2 year old son, Ivan, seems to love me and he yells my
name from the house every time I pass by.
Sometimes
I sit and draw with Ivan in my little notebook, a notebook which I
originally carried at all times with the aim of taking notes for my
job, but which has been slowly converted into the community
childrens' sketchbook with the new aim of meticulously recording the
hieroglyphic ramblings of illiterate youngsters. Ivan and I are
friends and he can almost say my name without it sounding like there
are marbles in his mouth; he is a smart little kid and he will go to
school one day and who knows, maybe he will make it out of this
little rural village and change his fortunes. His mother however,
never will.
She
will be lucky to complete high-school (in campo Paraguay, high-school
might be more comparable to US grade-school in terms of academics),
but even with such a modest goal, the odds are against her. She must
raise a child and work the garden and cook and clean for a husband
who is not a bad man, not absent, but just as well certainly not
willing to step outside the patriarchal gender-roles that would allow
his wife (they are not technically married and they may never be) to
obtain even a nominal education. The scholastic enthusiasm of most
other students at the school plateaus at the limit of resources and
systemic educational shortcomings; her's is instead stopped even
before that point from having become pregnant at age 15 and from
loosing a year or more because she was breastfeeding and from having
to tend a household to fulfill her traditional role as child-bearing
nest-maker in an overtly machismo culture.
No
doubt, I am sure she is happy with her life in many ways. I am
positive that she loves her son more than anything in the world.
Indeed, she is a remarkable individual in her own right, if not from
notable accomplishments, then from shear resilience and perseverance.
But what strikes me about her, what has always struck me about her,
is how she seems to wear the condition of women in Paraguay (and
perhaps many women of the world in general) like a badge. Its not a
bid for pity or a subtle form of complaint, but a weight that she
carries in quiet defiance, a weight that she simply grits her teeth
and endures because, like so many women, there is perhaps nothing
else.
When
we talk about poverty it is always important to remember that, when
survival is your primary concern, options are limited. Impoverished
people are not as free to pick-up and move or simply change their way
of life; the costs, both physical and psychological, are prohibitive
and at times even life-threatening. For women living in poverty, this
issue is only compounded as gender-inequalities combine with
socio-economic conditions to aggravate exponentially every form of
entrenched dis-empowerment that exists. It is a well established fact
in development literature, be it of a feminist slant or otherwise,
that poverty effects women and children harder than it effects men.
In
Paraguay in particular (a context to which I believe I can speak with
slightly better authority), it seems that the lot of most women is
drawn early in life. In the cities, women are more free to pursue
their dreams and achieve more liberal life goals, although this is
still tempered by an immensely machismo culture (some say that
Paraguay is the most machismo country in the already seething
machismo hotbed of Latin America). But in a country that still
predominantly consists of small-scale farmers in far-flung rural
villages, the trend is much more conservative and therefore, much
less forgiving of women with 'non-traditional' aspirations.
It
is always inspiring to find a women in a campo community who do not
want to marry, who want to wait till they are older to have children,
or who engage in small-scale commercial enterprises so they may earn
some money and be just that much more in control of their fate. And
yet, for the majority of women, before they have the opportunity to
sense or understand this marginally better possibility, they have
already gotten pregnant by a man who may or may not bother to stick
around (monogamy is not a particularly well regarded virtue in
Paraguay despite its overwhelming Catholicism).
The
role of a woman in this society is one of submissiveness and often
servility. Their husbands go off to the fields every day to work the
land. At home, the women must care for the children, prepare all the
food, feed the animals, milk the cows, wash the clothes, sew the
clothes, iron the clothes, clean the house, clean the dishes, and
when the men return from the field for lunch or at the end of the
day, the women must serve them and clean up after them. They must do
this even if they are pregnant, or nursing, or if they have 1 child
or 10. It is a hard life.
Men as well engage in extremely-hard, physically-demanding work almost every day (except when it rains), but the inequality of genders is still evident in many ways. Domestic violence is common and the ability for women to be proactive and assertive is both culturally frowned upon and practically difficult when straddled with any number of children to care for (birth rates are usually quite high for farming families—the record I know for my community is 16 children). While male desertion of families is much more frequent and accepted, such a course of action is not available for women (as much from their motherly dedication and devotion as from cultural/social pressures).
Men as well engage in extremely-hard, physically-demanding work almost every day (except when it rains), but the inequality of genders is still evident in many ways. Domestic violence is common and the ability for women to be proactive and assertive is both culturally frowned upon and practically difficult when straddled with any number of children to care for (birth rates are usually quite high for farming families—the record I know for my community is 16 children). While male desertion of families is much more frequent and accepted, such a course of action is not available for women (as much from their motherly dedication and devotion as from cultural/social pressures).
The
incredible responsibility that women take-on in giving birth cannot
be understated, and in a country where woman are already extremely marginalized, they assume an even greater cost, a cost that
once assumed has ramifications for the rest of their lives. Just think
about it this way: if you are alone and hungry, you need only find
enough food to feed your own belly. If you are a woman with children,
your first priority will be to fill all of their bellies, and then if
you are capable and if there is food available and if you can muster
the energy, you can then begin to consider your own needs.
Still,
the inequality of women is not an issue strictly dependent on
child-bearing, but in a traditional and conservative society,
whatever limited options may be available to a childless-woman are just that
much more restricted once that individual becomes a mother. In the
scheme of understanding poverty and social-inequality as a whole, it
is essential to always consider gender dynamics. It is through
all forms of dis-empowerment that society continues to suffer. Pursuing non-gendered avenues toward development would be like struggling for personal rights while still supporting institutionalized segregation--it is inherently hypocritical and counterproductive.
For
me, as a young male Peace Corps volunteer serving in Paraguay, it is
a tricky line to walk in any attempt to work with women on such
issues. Inevitably, in the superimposition of assumed masculinity,
the men in my community view any such efforts on my part as a ploy to
steal their wives or sleep with other women. I have started working
with a women's group (which consists of all older señoras)
where those problems are less of an issue and so far, this work seems
to be going well. But it is the younger women, those girls in their
early teens on the cusp of getting wrangled into the mire of
predatory male sexuality, that would benefit the most from an
empowering message.
The
message I want to convey is that they have more options in their life
than just early pregnancy and a submissive role as a housewife, that
they are smart and capable and have the right to stand-up for
themselves. To accomplish this, I am relying on the help of some
fellow female Peace Corps volunteers (hopefully to lessen the stigma
of my dealing with young women), and utilizing the forum of an
HIV/AIDS educational workshop to discuss boarder issues of family
planning, life-choices and personal responsibility.
The
greater problems are much deeper than simply socio-economics; they
are systematic and cultural and to a large extent, inherent in even
the most progressive societies of our world. Yet it might just take
the right kind of individual with perhaps just the right opportunity
or motivation to make a small but significant difference in her
fortunes. And who knows, perhaps that one individual can serve as a
model for other women to follow in the future, or for men to learn
from and understand their own biases in whatever degree possible.
As
a final note, allow me to say: if there was ever a doubt in your mind
as to which gender was the stronger gender, dispense with any false
pretenses now—women are the bedrock upon which society has
continually built its foundations and piled its detritus and it
should be a daily miracle and blessing to men that they have agreed
to stick with us so far. For that, and for every other inspiration and strength, my hat is off.
From
Paraguay,
little
hupo