Building the New

As you all know, it has been a trying experience for me to deal with street harassment on a daily basis.

It varies - some days, I am confident enough to deflect these comments and keep my head held high. Other days, my confidence deflates and I begin to sink into a hole of anger and frustration, obsessing over ways I could have reacted, things I could have said that I didn't have the courage to.... I even began seriously considering carrying a rock with me and tossing it menacingly into the air as I walked to work, just to get those teenage boys to stop bothering me on my way to work. 

Fortunately, there's a better way to deal with this than carrying around rocks. After sharing my experiences with Ingrid at Mpowering People, we had the idea of doing a project with the communities to combat this issue. This definitely wasn't something unique to my experience - it is a problem local women have to deal with every single day too. 

During our meeting last Thursday, the mothers of Sutiaba shared their experiences of "acoso", or harassment. We talked about the problems women here face on a daily basis, everything from being inappropriately touched while riding the bus to hearing men harassing their daughters on the street. 

On Sunday, we had a meeting with the kids of Adiact and Sutiaba, where they divided into two groups and wrote down examples of harassment they have seen or experienced, the causes, and ways we can combat it through projects. Someone listed as one of the things they've been told is "Te voy a robar", or "I'm going to rob you" (As in, I am going to figurately steal you and make you my girlfriend...or something like that) Others listed things such as being told "clase melones" in the market ("nice melons") and "te ves rico" ("you look rich", but the word rico is usually used to describe rich food, so it might translate better to, "you look delicious"). Unfortunately, the kids also listed being touched inappropriately as something that happens when they are in public. Keep in mind that these experiences are coming from kids ages 10-17. It's horrible that girls so young must put up with this kind of harassment every day, and that boys feel pressured to "enamorar", or "flirt" (aka call out to girls walking by) because their friends are doing it or because men in their family do it. 

I even found out later that after our meeting, one of the girls came forward and told Ingrid about something that has been happening to her every day for months. An older boy has been following her and harassing her every day on her way home, and he had not told anyone, not even her mom, because she was too scared and uncertain about what to do. Ingrid spoke to the girl's mom, and they decided to go to the police station together the next morning to report it. However, even though they called ahead of time and scheduled a meeting with the police, they had to sit for three hours waiting for someone to show up, and in the end, nobody did. As you can see, the police are not very responsive here (it is an opinion I have heard from many locals, and after this experience as well as many other stories I've been told, I feel that I can say with some certainty that the police here aren't very effective). So if you can't even rely upon the police to protect you against sexual harassment and/or violence, what are you supposed to do? 

In the end, we decided upon three very exciting projects, all with the goal of promoting respect for women and denouncing harassment:

1. Painting a mural in the community 

2. Doing a talk program on the local radio where the kids/mothers can share their message and experiences 

3. Hosting "charlas", or chats, with the local community, as well as workshops on various topics like self confidence and "power posing", what is gender inequality/sexism, and how to react to harassment. 

4. A parade through the streets of Sutiaba, with music, banners with our message, and stilts walkers (Ingrid happens to have a friend that is the leader of a stilts performer's group!) 

We are aware that it takes a lot more than murals and a few workshops to change the attitude of an entire community. Our project may change the minds of many, or it may just change the minds of a few. Either way, the beauty of the community based initiative lies in the process itself more so than in the results: learning to plan as a team, finding local resources, being creative, exercising leadership skills, and coming out with new knowledge and finished projects to feel proud of....which brings me to my explanation of the quote's relevance to this story.

"The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new." - Socrates 

We have to focus on building the new, rather than engaging in a futile battle against things that won't change. Sexism will still exist, cultural ideas about gender will remain, and people with old ways of thinking will maintain those old ways of thinking. What matters is that we do not become disheartened when we find that we cannot change the old. We have to focus on creating the new - new opportunities to talk about issues that are often ignored, new methods of creating social change, inspiring people to become new leaders in their communities, and creating new relationships between people and ideas. 

I'm very excited to be working on a cause that I personally feel so passionate about. The project still needs to be approved by Amigos, so it may undergo changes and revisions. 

Nonetheless, this project is going to be, as Ingrid likes to say, "super bonito"!