My 12-VIII volunteer visa was approved today. I picked it up from the Ecuadorian consulate in San Francisco today, with it's shiny holographic stickers and stamped seals indicating I have a legal pass to live the next two years of my life in Ecuador. I doubt I'll stay two years, because reality, student loans, and the job market wait for me on the homefront, but I am rapidly preparing myself for perhaps the biggest and most significant moves of my life. I've always gone to Ecuador, it's kind of become "what I do," but this time, I'm going on my own terms, totally on my own, and I will have to survive. This is both exhilirating and mortifying. I've always had the security deadline of coming back home to start school in the fall, but this time my life to come back to resides on the Equator.
It's been an interesting process trying to deal with student loans, navigating health insurance policy changes (and what type of coverage I will get down there), and trying to figure out how much money I will be living off of for the next year. Most of my expenses will be paid by the organization I'm working with, but everything else is coming out of my pocket (savings). It's a gamble. I'm taking this experience because I know it will ultimately provide me with the direction and experience I need to keep pursuing my passion for being a conscious and active human being in the fight for global health equality. I'm leaving in less than a week from now and I already feel that I am a completely different person from who I was the last time I was about to leave for a two month trip to Ecuador. Ecuador, it's people, and the many life-altering, beautiful, and intense experiences I've had over the years has left a permanent and lasting mark on who I am. I physically carry a little bit of Ecuador with me wherever I go, within my body and my heart. I am getting an overwhelming feeling that this trip will provide simultaneous senses of completion and beginning; helping me to come full circle on all of the ways it has shaped me in the past in order for me to make new and big things happen.
I feel as if I am placing life at home in the US and the Bay Area into a little box, tying it up, and putting it on a shelf for awhile. I might get to open it up and share its contents, but for the most part, it is on hold. There is another one waiting to be filled in Ecuador, so that I can bring it back home with me to share with others.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Machismo in Ecuador, Part I.
I have spent much time living on and off in Ecuador over the past four years. If there’s one thing that I am constantly reminded of when I am here is my existence as a woman. I’m not just talking about the common cat calls and intensely inappropriate things said to women walking down the street on a daily basis, but I am also highly aware of my status as a gringa foreigner and how my experience of machismo in Ecuador, while uncomfortable, is quite different and (yes) privileged compared to what Ecuadorian women face in their daily lives. Earlier in the year, I wrote a blog entry about my experiences of machismo, which at that point, only really consisted of cat calls and the fact that it is unsafe to walk around alone at night. This blog entry turns away from my own personal encounters with machismo and more directly focuses on the machismo that is experienced regularly by Ecuadorian women and how my position as a gringa in a machismo society presents several ironies and inequalities for women living in Ecuador. I will discuss this issue over a series of entries, as it would be hard to digest in one sitting. Bare with me, as these are relatively rough thoughts and rants. By no means am I claiming to be an expert on this issue, but living in a social climate where it is so prevalent forces me to think about it constantly. Please feel free to comment, disagree, or add something.
To give some back ground as from where I am making my claims. I have worked in the Kichwa community of Esperanza and surrounding communities in the province of Chimborazo with the NGOs, Ayuda Directa and CEMOPLAF (Center for Medical Orientation and Family Planning). Over the past several years, I have also worked and interned with doctors and public health workers in the areas of family planning and agronomy. I have learned quite a bit about the different alternatives to family planning, especially since we work in an area with highly religious populations. Hence, in order to maintain cultural competence in medicine, healthcare providers have had to recommend various types of birth control to accommodate their patients religious beliefs while simultaneously serving as a useful form of family planning. Sounds great, right? Covering cultural competence in healing practices. You would think that this would seriously help families who want to have less children (the average family size is about 5-7, though some number up to 12) and potentially help those who are living in poverty. The problem, however, is a bigger cultural phenomenon. In order for CEMOPLAF to provide a family planning program that is efficacious, both partners must be willing to engage. Enter machismo. A generalized family situation usually consists of the men and fathers working out of the community in cities (rural-urban migration) during the day or for parts of the week, while the women and children work the land (currently, almost all farming done in agricultural communities is done by women), raise their children, cook, and maintain the house. Trying to do this when you have six children of different ages to take care of without the help of a spouse gets tiring. I’m not saying that men don’t help their wives take care of children, but it is typical for the women to do all the work (‘la casa es su hogar’).
I can’t begin to count how many women have come up to me in the communities I have been working in asking me if I could provide them with some form of pill that would keep them from having children. These questions come in secrecy and usually start out with “I am tired of having so many children. It’s just that my husband wants to keep having children. He doesn’t want to use control. I am so tired. Can you help me?” If a woman wants to use a condom, or receive a depo provera shot and her partner/spouse does not agree with it, birth control is typically out of the question.
This brings up a difficult issue for public health workers and their female patients. How do you work towards changing this culture of machismo, that doesn’t give space for womens voices over their bodies? Not to mention the ethical issues and questions of power that would be brought up if an organization or institution attempted to change the culture. It’s difficult and highly problematic to mandate birth control in families (look at China, for example, in source list below), so how do you get men to become more open to listening to their wives when they say they are tired of giving birth to so many children? If you have any ideas, please comment below. Seriously, I’m quite interested. The best thing solution I can think of, which CEMOPLAF is currently working on, is to educate upcoming generations about sex and family planning. CEMOPLAF is working with a group of adolescents (PROGRAMA Adolescentes Indigenas) weekly to dispense information and to get youth more comfortable talking about sex. These youth then move out to other communities and teach other adolescents about family planning and sex. The point is to get people more comfortable open to discussing relationships, which could potentially effect the future of machismo.
My next entry will cover machismo in the domestic environment, the various ironies and inequalities experienced by young women and men growing up in the same house, and how it is complicated when a gringa is thrown in the mix.
Interesting factoid: 63.1% of indigenous women in Chimborazo experience their first pregnancy between the ages of 15-19. (CEMOPLAF 2008).
Additional sources if you are interested in healthcare, power, politics, and where women and their bodies are placed among these three topics:
Davis-Floyd, Robbie E. Birth as an American Rite of Passage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Greenhalgh, Susan. “Controlling Births and Bodies in Village China”. American Ethnologist 21.1 (1994): 3-30.
To give some back ground as from where I am making my claims. I have worked in the Kichwa community of Esperanza and surrounding communities in the province of Chimborazo with the NGOs, Ayuda Directa and CEMOPLAF (Center for Medical Orientation and Family Planning). Over the past several years, I have also worked and interned with doctors and public health workers in the areas of family planning and agronomy. I have learned quite a bit about the different alternatives to family planning, especially since we work in an area with highly religious populations. Hence, in order to maintain cultural competence in medicine, healthcare providers have had to recommend various types of birth control to accommodate their patients religious beliefs while simultaneously serving as a useful form of family planning. Sounds great, right? Covering cultural competence in healing practices. You would think that this would seriously help families who want to have less children (the average family size is about 5-7, though some number up to 12) and potentially help those who are living in poverty. The problem, however, is a bigger cultural phenomenon. In order for CEMOPLAF to provide a family planning program that is efficacious, both partners must be willing to engage. Enter machismo. A generalized family situation usually consists of the men and fathers working out of the community in cities (rural-urban migration) during the day or for parts of the week, while the women and children work the land (currently, almost all farming done in agricultural communities is done by women), raise their children, cook, and maintain the house. Trying to do this when you have six children of different ages to take care of without the help of a spouse gets tiring. I’m not saying that men don’t help their wives take care of children, but it is typical for the women to do all the work (‘la casa es su hogar’).
I can’t begin to count how many women have come up to me in the communities I have been working in asking me if I could provide them with some form of pill that would keep them from having children. These questions come in secrecy and usually start out with “I am tired of having so many children. It’s just that my husband wants to keep having children. He doesn’t want to use control. I am so tired. Can you help me?” If a woman wants to use a condom, or receive a depo provera shot and her partner/spouse does not agree with it, birth control is typically out of the question.
This brings up a difficult issue for public health workers and their female patients. How do you work towards changing this culture of machismo, that doesn’t give space for womens voices over their bodies? Not to mention the ethical issues and questions of power that would be brought up if an organization or institution attempted to change the culture. It’s difficult and highly problematic to mandate birth control in families (look at China, for example, in source list below), so how do you get men to become more open to listening to their wives when they say they are tired of giving birth to so many children? If you have any ideas, please comment below. Seriously, I’m quite interested. The best thing solution I can think of, which CEMOPLAF is currently working on, is to educate upcoming generations about sex and family planning. CEMOPLAF is working with a group of adolescents (PROGRAMA Adolescentes Indigenas) weekly to dispense information and to get youth more comfortable talking about sex. These youth then move out to other communities and teach other adolescents about family planning and sex. The point is to get people more comfortable open to discussing relationships, which could potentially effect the future of machismo.
My next entry will cover machismo in the domestic environment, the various ironies and inequalities experienced by young women and men growing up in the same house, and how it is complicated when a gringa is thrown in the mix.
Interesting factoid: 63.1% of indigenous women in Chimborazo experience their first pregnancy between the ages of 15-19. (CEMOPLAF 2008).
Additional sources if you are interested in healthcare, power, politics, and where women and their bodies are placed among these three topics:
Davis-Floyd, Robbie E. Birth as an American Rite of Passage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Greenhalgh, Susan. “Controlling Births and Bodies in Village China”. American Ethnologist 21.1 (1994): 3-30.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Thesis Reveries
I'm going to take a risk today. While I think the blogosphere often serves as a space for annoying rants and discussions that go nowhere, I remain somewhat in awe of the ability to create an accessible space for sharing information, engaging in productive discussions, and pushing the limits. I sit here as a recent college graduate who, for the past three weeks, has been thinking about the ways in which I can continue putting the fruits of my education into [some/good] use. Having emerged from a liberal arts education into the midst of an economic recession has a tendency to produce much anxiety within me and many of my peers. I have spent numerous hours searching job postings on and extending the feelers through personal networking and the interweb.
While all of this is to be expected, I can't help but reminisce over the conference-style settings of my college classroom experience, where the success of the class and intellectual pursuit is contingent upon everyone bringing something (be it a question, a critique, or in some cases, a hands on experience) to the table. That, and the fact that I spent an entire year (more than that actually), researching and writing a thesis that is currently bound and collecting dust in a brick tower in Portland, Oregon (all allusions toward an ivory tower intended). While there is hope in the future that I will chop it up into pamphlets and essays that are accessible to diverse communities, I am feeling like I would like to revisit it and put it into the web 2.0 context.
As I will be going back down to Ecuador early July, I think it might serve as a way to put some of this material to use and up for discussion. While travel writing is often successful at describing a place, people and is easily accessible, yet much of the time, it tends to lack direction and a focus. Writing a thesis (we hope) has direction, but is often inaccessible. What I'd like to do here is to continue exploring themes that came up in my thesis, while simultaneously making some of that information accessible. I realize that this exercise might just be a shot in the dark as a way of resisting post-college stagnance, but if there's a small chance that people read it and do learn something, then it's worth it to me.
I'm going to get the ball rolling by posting the title and abstract to my thesis:
Title:
Fuera de la Oscuridad: Shifting Subjectivities among Evangelical and Catholic Kichwa through Discourses of Illness and Modernity
Abstract:
While all of this is to be expected, I can't help but reminisce over the conference-style settings of my college classroom experience, where the success of the class and intellectual pursuit is contingent upon everyone bringing something (be it a question, a critique, or in some cases, a hands on experience) to the table. That, and the fact that I spent an entire year (more than that actually), researching and writing a thesis that is currently bound and collecting dust in a brick tower in Portland, Oregon (all allusions toward an ivory tower intended). While there is hope in the future that I will chop it up into pamphlets and essays that are accessible to diverse communities, I am feeling like I would like to revisit it and put it into the web 2.0 context.
As I will be going back down to Ecuador early July, I think it might serve as a way to put some of this material to use and up for discussion. While travel writing is often successful at describing a place, people and is easily accessible, yet much of the time, it tends to lack direction and a focus. Writing a thesis (we hope) has direction, but is often inaccessible. What I'd like to do here is to continue exploring themes that came up in my thesis, while simultaneously making some of that information accessible. I realize that this exercise might just be a shot in the dark as a way of resisting post-college stagnance, but if there's a small chance that people read it and do learn something, then it's worth it to me.
I'm going to get the ball rolling by posting the title and abstract to my thesis:
Title:
Fuera de la Oscuridad: Shifting Subjectivities among Evangelical and Catholic Kichwa through Discourses of Illness and Modernity
Abstract:
In this study, I argue that indigenous Kichwa in Ecuador use both illness and conversion narratives as practices and ways of understanding a new type of subjectivity that emerges from discourses of modernity and medical pluralism. Drawn from fieldwork and library research over the course of two and a half years in the Highland community of La Esperanza, this project explores how social change is largely understood in terms of religious transformation, and how the resulting conversion to Evangelical Christianity has produced a shift in the ways in which people conceptualize and approach healing alternatives as a medically plural system of values. This thesis examines the ways in which structural inequalities and power asymmetries are inscribed onto and experienced within Kichwa bodies through illness, and how these experiences are influenced by and rearticulated through religious language and metaphors of social and self-transformation.
New Beginnings
Having recently become a part of the ever-increasing pool of [f]unemployed college graduates, I have decided to put some time and energy into blogging again. This time, it won't just be about travels and working with NGOs, but ponderings, rants, and things generally pertaining to Ecuador and its many social movements. This might even become a space for further exploring concepts I didn't get to address in my thesis.I'll keep you posted!
Thursday, January 1, 2009
New Years in Quito
New Years is arguably one of the most celebrated holidays in Ecuador. And of course, as a person who studies a discipline fascinated with rituals, I felt like a little kid in a candy store. Those who don't immediately take off for a 4 day vacation to the beach in Las Esmeraldas (Northern coast of Ecuador) have plenty of things to keep themselves busy with in preparation for the New Year. Most things either shut or slow down during the days leading up to the holiday, so that people can work on preparing their viejos: life-sized dummies that serve as representations of themselves and the aspects they dislike about their lives. People usually put them outside of their houses or businesses, in clothes they typically wear. Sometimes you see them sitting in cars, lying in the street, or tied up to the hood of the vehicle. As soon as the clock strikes midnight, they then light the viejos on fire and stuff them with firecrackers. As the fire diminishes slightly in size, people jump through the fire (I've seen this before for Saint days throughout the year) as an action that brings good luck.
If you want to have a good New Year, there are a few things you should do. If you wish for wealth, you must wear yellow underwear. If you wish for love, you should wear red underwear. If you want to travel, you need to run around your house (or jump up and down) while carrying suitcases. Eating 12 grapes at midnight is also a must. All throughout the day, people were selling imense quantities of grapes, masks, and viejos at nearly every street corner.
My personal favorite was seeing men dress up as viudas, widows. It's long been a tradition for men and boys to dress up like women and to go out begging in the streets for money from people walking down the street or driving in their cars. They're supposed to be raising money to support their families because their husbands just died, but often its to raise funds for the night's portion of booze. I visited a friend of mine in Cumbaya, a suburb in the valley just outside Quito, who was hosting a viuda-fest. He told me to meet him on a street corner by a store called "Rose". When I arrived via taxi, I could see about 50 young people hanging out on the corner of a busy, traffic-congested street (picture a drag race kind of gathering only with reggaeton blasting from all cars...all puns intended). There were about 10 young guys dressed up as promiscuous girls running between oncoming traffic to knock on drivers windows and ask for change. Usually they did a little dance and blew kisses at the drivers, saying something like "Happy New Years, precious." Usually the women and girls stand on the sidelines and cackle hysterically as the viudas put on their hilarious act. The best men dressed in drag are usually the ones who get more money. You don't usually see the women going from car to car asking for money, because it's supposed to be a moment for the unordinary (i.e men dressed in drag), not that women routinely go from car to car, but it's supposed to be absurd. My friend grabbed me and said that I should ask for money with him (of course! How absurd! A white woman from the United States in Ecuador asking for loose change from strangers!!). I certainly felt ridiculous running from car to car asking for change, recognizing the hilarity/awkwardness of my position, but it was ultimately very fun, especially running and grabbing onto an 18-wheeler with 10 guys dressed in drag. Priceless. In a country where homophobia runs especially high, it was really interesting to witness such a ritual where gender-bending is legitimized. Of course, there is the possibility that they're only performing for the sake of being absurd, but I'd like to leave a little more room for ambiguity.
After I get over this bug (hopefully it's not altitude sickness), I'll finally be off to Esperanza. I'm aiming to leave Quito by Sunday.
Happy New Years!
If you want to have a good New Year, there are a few things you should do. If you wish for wealth, you must wear yellow underwear. If you wish for love, you should wear red underwear. If you want to travel, you need to run around your house (or jump up and down) while carrying suitcases. Eating 12 grapes at midnight is also a must. All throughout the day, people were selling imense quantities of grapes, masks, and viejos at nearly every street corner.
My personal favorite was seeing men dress up as viudas, widows. It's long been a tradition for men and boys to dress up like women and to go out begging in the streets for money from people walking down the street or driving in their cars. They're supposed to be raising money to support their families because their husbands just died, but often its to raise funds for the night's portion of booze. I visited a friend of mine in Cumbaya, a suburb in the valley just outside Quito, who was hosting a viuda-fest. He told me to meet him on a street corner by a store called "Rose". When I arrived via taxi, I could see about 50 young people hanging out on the corner of a busy, traffic-congested street (picture a drag race kind of gathering only with reggaeton blasting from all cars...all puns intended). There were about 10 young guys dressed up as promiscuous girls running between oncoming traffic to knock on drivers windows and ask for change. Usually they did a little dance and blew kisses at the drivers, saying something like "Happy New Years, precious." Usually the women and girls stand on the sidelines and cackle hysterically as the viudas put on their hilarious act. The best men dressed in drag are usually the ones who get more money. You don't usually see the women going from car to car asking for money, because it's supposed to be a moment for the unordinary (i.e men dressed in drag), not that women routinely go from car to car, but it's supposed to be absurd. My friend grabbed me and said that I should ask for money with him (of course! How absurd! A white woman from the United States in Ecuador asking for loose change from strangers!!). I certainly felt ridiculous running from car to car asking for change, recognizing the hilarity/awkwardness of my position, but it was ultimately very fun, especially running and grabbing onto an 18-wheeler with 10 guys dressed in drag. Priceless. In a country where homophobia runs especially high, it was really interesting to witness such a ritual where gender-bending is legitimized. Of course, there is the possibility that they're only performing for the sake of being absurd, but I'd like to leave a little more room for ambiguity.
After I get over this bug (hopefully it's not altitude sickness), I'll finally be off to Esperanza. I'm aiming to leave Quito by Sunday.
Happy New Years!
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