I have been taking private spanish lessons at one of the schools here, and while much of my time with my teacher, Carolina, is spent learning irregular verbs a large portion of the time is also spent just chatting. Over the past couple of weeks, we have talked about boyfriends and husbands, children, the weather, politics and the notion of volun-tourism (all in spanish, of course). After our usual obsessive discussions about the amount of rain, today our conversations turned to gender politics, sexuality and the church. Carolina is somewhat unusual by Guatemalan standards - she only has 2 children and talks very openly about sexuality, women´s rights and as a result she said many people look down on her for being so ´liberal´. Machismo is a big part of Guatemalan society, and the consequences of this extends far beyond the usual kissy sounds on the streets when women pass by. Of those children who get to go to school, men and women are educated equally, but the options available to women once they get married are far more limited. Domestic abuse is normalized, large families continue to be the norm and birth control methods are not widely used or discussed. Guatemala, like much of the rest of latin America, is very Catholic and she told me today about one of the Bishops on TV holding a gun in one hand and a box of birth control in the other, saying they were one and the same. Abortion is illegal, but she said doctors routinely perform them anyways (as happens around the world no matter what the law says). When she went to the doctors to see about getting her tubes tied after her children, the doctor told her she would need her husband´s written permission to have the surgery. I told her about domestic abuse in Canada, the lack of access to abortion in many parts of the country, and young women´s struggle to make sense of their sexuality and bodies in the midst of a culture that wants us to be both the virgin and the whore. Together we sat beneath the banana tree and through broken language skills and a massive cultural divide, we both understood and sunk into a silence looking into each other´s eyes with a mixture of laughter and sadness. I have read and analyzed and waxed poetically about global feminism, but today I think I actually really felt what it means for the first time. Despite the enormous differences in our lives, our stories as women shared many of the same threads. Neither of us have the solutions for the other but somehow sharing our experiences helped both us understand each other and ourselves a little bit more.
Time is up on my internet connection so I need to reboot, but part II of today will follow shortly.
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