Today was our first day of the 4 week certificate program at the “U,” which is what everyone calls the University of San Carlos (USAC).  Lucia and Carlos Ibañez, a fantastically brilliant professional facilitator who specializes in HIV, immigration, human trafficking, gay and women’s issues, co-facilitated this first session for approximately 50 college students and community members who wanted to attend.  Everyone was able to contribute and there was a great male turnout.  The session was four hours long, so there was ample time for the pupils to think below the surface about why things are the way they are and how there are very different social expectations of women and men.  The students were very bright and the session was interactive, lively, and passionate.

Carlos Ibañez

A lively student

After this workshop we were invited to speak in for the class of Dr. Carlos Aldana Mendoza who is a big name in the Guatemala’s human rights movement of the 70’s/80’s and even eventually became the Vice Minister of Education at one point but ended up resigning.  Now he is the Jefe Division de Educacion at USAC and is teaching there as well.  Because Dr. Aldana Mendoza asked us to come to his class, we respectfully obliged and Lucia and Carlos facilitated an abridged workshop.

Lucia and Dr. Carlos Aldana Mendoza

The students

The gender dichotomy the class created

– Marina Wood is a recent graduate of the Women’s Studies program at Cal State University Long Beach. She has been volunteering with MIA since 2007 and is interning in Guatemala as a facilitator for the “Hombres Contra Feminicidio” campaign for 10 weeks. Marina has been involved in the struggle to end oppressions since her first protest in 2002 against the Afghanistan War and plans to continue learning, educating, and fighting for human rights until the violence stops. The issues closest to her heart are sexual assault and femicide prevention and amnesty for migrant persons in the U.S.

08.19.09. Wednesday

We began today by visiting la Escuela Oficial Rural Mixta Santa Barbara in Zone 18, a private school in the Colonia Santa Barbara which has been the pilot school for “Hombres Contra Feminicidio” since May 2008. We were happy to begin in Zone 18 because it is the “red zone.” Though it is named red to signify blood, for me it was hard not to make a mental connection to the red river that flowed right beneath the hill we stood on.

Polluted river

Lucia met Zully Soberalis, the director of the school in a march in Guatemala City for International Women’s Day in March 2008. When Zully heard about the campaign that MIA was launching, she said she wanted her school to be the first for “Hombres Contra Feminicidio” because she has personally experienced gender violence and knows that it is not uncommon in the households of her students. So MIA brought in seasoned activist and good friend Julio Revolorio to facilitate the campaign just two months later, and since May 2008 there have been weekly gender workshops. I was able to see Julio in action last July 2008 during a delegation with MIA and the kids just adored him. They had organized little skits to perform for us and their sense of gender inequality was developed for their ages.

The female students on “strike” last July 2008 during a skit

Now, a year later, there is a different male facilitator, Edgar Avalos, and Simon and I got to watch Edgar and Lucia co-facilitate 5 periods of classes.

It was a strange experience because the classes were full to capacity (about 30 per class, but the room was small) and there were no ceilings, just the four walls and the roof.

Lucia and Edgar co-facilitating

We could hear everything that was happening in the rooms around us and it was incredibly easy for the students to tune out or talk amongst themselves because of all the noise/chaos. Also, I noticed that on the walls there were some projects about values. They were poster boards which said what people should not do and had newspaper clippings as examples of murder, theft and even “the risks of oral sex.” Keep in mind, this is an elementary school. Under the article about oral sex the student wrote the “definition” of adultery: “married women don’t have to go off with various men.” This poster received 100%.

Adulterio "definition"

This is what we’re up against. Here we are trying to transform students in a school that gives an A-plus to woman-blaming, incorrect information in a town where violence is normalized. Add to that that we are in a country where the front page of every paper is plastered with a murder scene and every centerfold boasts a female model in a bikini. It reminds me of the idea of how horror films show a scantily clad woman doing something sexy, thus arousing the male audience, right before slashing her to bits, thus sexualizing the violence. However, in this case, the newspaper desensitizes the reader with horrific murder scenes and then shows scantily clad women, thus creating a correlation between the two-and desensitization to the women as well. And the papers say that the women who were killed somehow asked for it based on what they were doing, where they were going, or what they were wearing. This shameless victim-blaming and lack of respect for female life is feminicide.

Today’s Paper

In the classroom Lucia and Edgar were able to deal with these ingrained ideas about women-as-victims, and the public/private gender binary in an age-appropriate manner. The students were asked what safety precautions girls needed to take when walking on the street and there were several that were automatic: don’t dress “indecently”, don’t walk alone, don’t walk at night, don’t talk to strangers, ask God for safekeeping before leaving, and on and on. Next it was the boys turn. “We don’t need to take precautions” they proudly stated. This brought up a lively conversation about socially constructed gender roles, the fallacy of the idea of men-as-indestructible, and the inevitable “which gender is really stronger” debate, which all ended with expanded minds and hopefully, further thought on these matters.

Lucia Muñoz facilitating

Lucia Muñoz facilitating

It felt good to see the children learn and interact and I am hopeful that they will grow up thinking differently about gender and violence, but it was also sad to see how unprepared these same students will most likely be for future academics based on their chaotic learning environment and the impoverished colonia that they are currently in.

– Marina Wood is a recent graduate of the Women’s Studies program at Cal State University Long Beach. She has been volunteering with MIA since 2007 and is interning in Guatemala as a facilitator for the “Hombres Contra Feminicidio” campaign for 10 weeks. Marina has been involved in the struggle to end oppressions since her first protest in 2002 against the Afghanistan War and plans to continue learning, educating, and fighting for human rights until the violence stops. The issues closest to her heart are sexual assault and femicide prevention and amnesty for migrant persons in the U.S.

Today Lucia began her day by meeting with an official named Marlene Blanco at the National Police Department who she met on a previous delegation and managed to make a plan to begin facilitating the program for the whole police academy! Marlene used to be the head of the police department and was recently reassigned to head of community outreach. It’s not clear why this change happened, but we hope to continue our positive working relationship with her. In her new position she is still fighting to help us reach our goal of making the Hombres Contra Feminicidio program a requirement for the academy.

Lucia Muñoz and Marlene Blanco

Later, Lucia and I went to the Ministry of Education (Mineduc) which is in Zone 10 and spoke with their director in the hopes that we would be able to put the program in the national curriculum. Lucia had attempted to meet with them on previous delegations, but was given the run-around. However, she then met the first lady of Guatemala, Sandra Torres Casanova de Colom, who liked the program and was able to open that door for MIA. This time Mineduc was much more attentive to us, but basically said that the current school curriculum already has what we are trying to include. This put Lucia and me in a tight spot because in order to explain what we were really trying to do (which is promote equality and the empowerment of women, make clear the difference between sex and gender, and make men responsible for their actions as well as call for them to actively participate in the movement against gender violence) we might appear too radical. Instead Lucia opted to take home the current curriculum in order to identify how to frame what we have as something they are clearly lacking.

Ministry of Education

“Hombres Contra Feminicidio” as a campaign may sound like something that everyone can agree with, but the concepts that we are teaching are a threat to people who do not want women’s equality and do not agree with changing the “traditional” gendered spheres and roles. Feminicidio (feminicide), to my understanding is the same thing as femicidio (femicide) which is the killing of women for being women, but with the added element of impunity which also exists for gendered reasons. The program is an adaptation of the White Ribbon Campaign, a program which began in Canada in 1991 due to a massacre of women at the hands of a man at the École Polytechnique college in 1989. After speaking with the director of Mineduc and receiving the curriculum, she referred us to the director of a program for family education and community strengthening through education about things such as health, hygiene, and family values. The head of this program, Dirección General de Fortalecimiento de la Comunidad Educativa (DIGEFOCE), was much more receptive to our proposed program and agreed to meet again to discuss working together.

We spoke to the students in the computer lab so we could utilize the projector for the film

We left happily and were off to the night school that CalDH helped us get into, Instituto Central Para Varones. This school is important because its students played a huge role in the student movement during the 36 year internal conflict. Although we are going to this historic school, we are actually presenting to the students who come at night when the school is called Instituto Normal Mixto Nocturno. At night, the school is gender integrated and very diverse because many of the students who attend do so because they have to work in the daytime.

Lucia presenting MIA and MIA’s Campaign, “Hombres Contra Feminicidio”

Lucia and Simon introduced the program to the students and showed a short film about women’s vs. men’s work to make clear that women do a disproportionate amount of work. The students were very curious and interested in the ideas we were presenting. Their ages ranged from 15 to about 45, so there was a wide range of points of view and ideas about gender based on personal experience.

Tomorrow is an early day; we are meeting at 5:30am to head over to Zone 18 to do workshops for the students at la Escuela Oficial Rural Mixta Santa Barbara. For me, seeing the young kids “getting gender” is the most fun because I picture them growing up knowing that women and men are equally deserving of rights. What a beautiful thought.

– Marina Wood is a recent graduate of the Women’s Studies program at Cal State University Long Beach. She has been volunteering with MIA since 2007 and is interning in Guatemala as a facilitator for the “Hombres Contra Feminicidio” campaign for 10 weeks. Marina has been involved in the struggle to end oppressions since her first protest in 2002 against the Afghanistan War and plans to continue learning, educating, and fighting for human rights until the violence stops. The issues closest to her heart are sexual assault and femicide prevention and amnesty for migrant persons in the U.S.

MIA implementa la campaña Hombres Contra el Feminicidio en Guatemala.

Yesterday afternoon I flew into Guatemala City with Lucia Muñoz, founder and director of Mujeres Iniciando en las Americas (MIA), and this morning Lucia, myself, and Simon Pedroza, an amazing poet-friend and my co-facilitator for “Hombres Contra Feminicidio” (Men Against Feminicide) were off to meet with the women’s institute, Instituto Universitario de la Mujer (IUMUSAC) of the (only) public university in Guatemala, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala or USAC.

The university is in Zone 12 but the institute is all the way in zone 1 which is about an hour and a half away by bus. We spoke with Miriam Maldonado, the head of IUMUSAC, about the certificate program we are launching on Thursday at the college and then Lucia gave a short phone interview for the university radio station’s radio show “Voces de Mujeres” about the campaign. The program will be four 3-hour interactive workshops co-facilitated by an amazing activist/facilitator named Carlos Ibañez and Lucia while she is here and me when she flies back on August 29. The students who graduate the program will not only obtain a certificate, but can be recruited to work as facilitators for MIA. Since Lucia will only be here for two of the sessions, I will be keeping an eye out for students who seem like they are trustworthy, comprehend gender oppression, and demonstrate leadership abilities.

After meeting with IUMUSAC we ran all around and ended up at Centro de Acción Legal en Derechos Humanos or CALDH, a super cool human rights org that we were able to hook up with through Simon. (The above picture is a poster they gave us) We explained our program to them and expressed interest in facilitating for groups of young people and they suggested we go to a night school for kids who have to work in the day. This sounded amazing to us and we said we would love to. They said though they are a separate institution they would be happy to refer us. We were ecstatic and arranged to meet them the following evening.

– Marina Wood is a recent graduate of the Women’s Studies program at Cal State University Long Beach. She has been volunteering with MIA since 2007 and is interning in Guatemala as a facilitator for the “Hombres Contra Feminicidio” campaign for 10 weeks. Marina has been involved in the struggle to end oppressions since her first protest in 2002 against the Afghanistan War and plans to continue learning, educating, and fighting for human rights until the violence stops. The issues closest to her heart are sexual assault and femicide prevention and amnesty for migrant persons in the U.S.