Women of Teosinte
Diana Hammer
October 31, 2003
The Women´s Commission of the CCR had its monthly meeting on October 1 st. Ana Luz, Dora Elena, María Eva, Esperanza, and Sonia are the representatives from the 5 subregions of Chalatenango where the CCR works. Ana Luz from Nombre de Jesus gets up before 4 am to walk 1 hour to the town where she can take a bus for about 2 hours into Chalatenango. Dora Elena from Teosinte is 20, and comes to the meetings in place of her mom, Marta, who is not traveling while she is pregnant. This morning, I saw Sonia, from Las Vueltas on my same bus. When we got to the office, Juvelina, the elected coordinator of the Women’s Commission was already there, and Chita , who works with all of the women´s groups from the national CRIPDES office came soon from San Salvador .
This is a fun group, and I have been easily welcomed into their activities and planning. Juvelina and I made a tentative agenda the day before which was approved by the group at the beginning. They also chose two people to facilitate the meeting and take the minutes.
First on the agenda were reports from each of the five regional representatives. I was amazed by the variety: family violence workshops, literacy circles, workshops on genetically-modified seeds, campaigns to eliminate mosquitos, leadership trainings, updates on the installation of corn mills, and meetings to form election committees to go door to door promoting the FMLN presidential candidate. Each woman also reported where the activity took place and the number of people who came. Juvelina made sure that everyone knew that the 3 workshops that each region must do before the end of the year are Conflict Resolution, the Rights of a Child, and Family Violence.
We also brainstormed ideas for the Day Against Violence on November 25 th, and did a few other odds and ends before taking an hour and a half break for lunch.
When we started the meeting again after lunch, the first item discussed was a SHARE delegation. Women from St. Sebastian parish in Milwaukee were coming to Teosinte, and we were going to plan an exchange with them. The women decided that I should go to Teosinte to work with Dora Elena´s mom on it. I was excited, and in the U.S. , the conversation in the meeting would have ended there. I started writing questions I would ask later outside of the meeting: how would I get to Teosinte, when would I go, what kind of agenda would we have for the exchange, who would come, …. But in El Salvador , the conversation was just beginning.
The next 20 minutes were taken up with EVERYONE at the table discussing how I would go to Teosinte.
María Eva offered, “A bunch of us are going on Saturday for a meeting. You could come with us in the car. Or what about the 16 th? I´m going that day too for another meeting.”
Neither of those dates worked for me, so the planning continued.
“She can´t go by bus, it´s too confusing. Elena, why don´t you come and meet her here in Chalatenango?”
“Wait a minute, yes I can go on the bus.”
“Sure you can, but the bus doesn´t leave Teosinte until 6am the next morning. Write this down….”
Three buses and three towns later, I had the directions to her house, and an invitation to spend the night with her family. Elena gave me a cell phone number to call if I got lost, but she said the signal didn´t always reach their house very well. “Just ask for the house of Marta Alas. We live right on the main road.”
They even started planning the agenda when I asked for ideas. “What will we talk about in a meeting like this? What kind of questions will the Salvadoran women have for the American women, and vice-versa?”
Sonia and Ana Luz said they would want to know how the American woman are organized, how they raise money for projects, and what is the work they do.
So with all the logistics taken care of and the start to an agenda, the rest of the meeting continued until about 3pm . Before leaving Dora Elena said she and her family would be expect me on the 7 th on the 1pm bus. I was a little nervous about this next big adventure, but also excited to see what life was like in another community with another family.
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The day before I went to Teosinte, Juvelina and I had talked about what kind of activity this exchange with the sister parish would be. She thought that with the language difference, acting out skits would be fun. She suggested that they be about why the women are organized, tell something about the micro-projects in which the women are involved, or about general life for women. We also decided on two fun activities to open and close the meeting. Juvelina thought it would be good to invite not only the women from Teosinte, but the leaders of the other women`s committees in that region, which would make about 20 people including the 5 Americans. Juvelina was planning another meeting at the same time we were talking, and it was fun to see how thoughtful and purposeful she is as she plans activities for different groups. This is her second term on the Directiva of the CCR, and it is clear that she understands and cares greatly for the women she works with.
I have a feeling it was Juvelina who changed some plans so that the CCR car was available on October 7 th. Instead of taking the 3 busses, I drove about an hour and a half with Miguelito, the CCR driver to Elena`s house. I met Marta for the first time, who gave me a hug and sat me down in front of hot tortillas and fresh chicken soup with vegetables before it got cold. As is usual here, Marta did not sit down with us. Elena and I talked while we ate, and her mom kept busy in the background. After resting and chatting for awhile in hammocks after lunch, Elena took me on a walk through the town.
The Guardado Alas family lives on the main road where everyone who is coming or going passes by. The cinder block house has big rooms and a porch that looks out toward the road on a flower garden, where large lavender and blue morning glories are climbing the fence. From there we walked up to the main part of the group of houses that is Teosinte. My American eyes, even after about 2 months here in El Salvador , found it hard to find beauty here. Teosinte is small, but the tiny houses are crowded very close together. The road is not much more than a gravel path. Elena explained that the school only has half the number of classrooms they could use. The church, like others I have seen in towns here, is in construction. There are walls and spaces for windows, but no roof and grass inside for the floor. Above Teosinte, the green mountains rose to the north into a sky that was getting cloudy. Elena walked with me past their house to the other end of the village where there was a basketball court. Kids were playing soccer there, so we watched for a little bit until the rain came.
Back at the house, I learned more about the family as I talked with Fidel, whose eyes were red and puffy from conjunctivitis. He was interested in finding out what I thought about privatization and the change from the colon to the dollar. He was also very concerned about the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and what it is going to do to agriculture in El Salvador . “Every year seeds and fertilizer are more expensive for us here, and there in the U.S. , farmers get subsidies for what they grow, even though there it is easier for one man to work much more land.”
After this conversation of politics and current events, I never would have guessed that he did not have a high school education. I learned that as we talked more that Fidel only attended formal school until second grade. During the war, he went to the Mesa Grande refugee camp in Honduras , and there he became a Popular Teacher for adults. He explained that a professional teacher would give the group of Popular Teachers a lesson in the morning, and Fidel and the others would give lessons to other people in the afternoon. With this system of sharing knowledge, Fidel learned both academic and other practical skills like laying tile (he did the tile floor in his family´s house when they moved back), learned how to make clothing and hammocks (like the one in Elena´s room), learned about music (he can play the accordion!), how to build wooden furniture (which he says he´s still learning), and how to drive.
I continued talking and visiting with the family while Elena and Marta made refried beans and scrambled eggs for dinner. We talked about Marta´s baby which will be born in December. She has had 5 children before, but she is nervous about this last one since she is 40 and hasn´t had a child for 11 years. It was fun to joke with them about naming the baby “Diana” if it is a girl. Everyone else gradually left to go to bed, and I was pretty tired by this point, but Marta was ready to talk business.
There at the kitchen table at 9pm we started planning the women`s meeting. She liked the ideas Juvelina had suggested, but thought that it would be good to add a question and answer session in the middle for people to talk more openly in the big group. She explained also that many women would be traveling pretty far to come to Teosinte, even within the sub-region, so she thought that we should have coffee and roles for breakfast when people arrived, and end with lunch before people had to leave. She wanted me to make sure we had the CCR car that day also to pick up some of the women who lived on the way.
After the business was settled, Marta began to tell me more about what her experience growing up during the war had been. She is originally from a place near where I am staying now in El Amatillo called Talchelulla where people don´t live anymore. At age 15, she was elected president of the community Directiva, and helped plan some of the demonstrations and marches to protest the high cost of agriculture necessities like seeds and fertilizer. One night before the war, she remembers very clearly, that she was coming home from a meeting with the plans for a strike in her pocket. She didn´t know it at the time, but there were soldiers near a church where she was going to pass by. At a fork in the road, a little boy with a calf came by and she decided to go with them a different way home. She is convinced that she would have been killed if the soldiers had seen her coming home alone, especially if they found the plans she was carrying.
I asked how she got involved in organizing, and Marta said, “This is my vocation, to work like this organizing the community. I have had a consciousness of these things since I was little. The war passed like a dream, but it was very real. Now the war with bullets has ended, but we are in a new war – a war of words.” She continued talking and telling me stories of their family´s experiences well into the night. I was exhausted, but could not want to ask her to stop when it was so fascinating. At one point, she mentioned how difficult it is to do her job coordinating the women´s activities for the whole region without any stipend for travel or food. “There isn´t money for this anymore, but we keep going. It doesn`t make a difference. I am tireless.” Is that ever true! She showed me my bed at about 11pm that night, and I collapsed. It had been a long few days, but what an amazing place!
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On October 21, Juvelina and I met Miguelito at the CCR office at 7am and left for Teosinte. At the intersection of the north-south road to San Salvador , we picked up one woman and her little girl. 20 minutes later in Tejutla, 4 other women joined us, and we stopped to eat pupusas in the market. We got to Teosinte about 9am , and the women began practicing their skits while we waited for the St. Sebastian women to arrive.
When the whole group was there, Juvelina started the first introduction game. She and I had made a ball of paper questions that we passed around like musical chairs. When the music stopped, whoever was holding the ball answered the question that was on top. Some of the questions were silly like, “tell a joke.” Others were more serious, such as “what is your role in the organization.” Each person introduced herself before answering the question. At one point the ball landed with a woman who couldn`t read. She was really shy, but the woman next to her read the question for her, and then she answered it. I could tell it took a lot of effort to talk in front of the whole group, and she studied the floor carefully while she spoke, but she did it! At the end Marta gave an official welcome, and the St. Sebastian women expressed their appreciation for the invitation to join in this meeting.
Then the skits started. The first group enacted a typical meeting of the women`s group: getting the word out about the meeting (door to door), sometimes asking permission from a husband before they go (this time the husband had a painted mustache!), and what they talk about (CAFTA and how it will affect the subsistence farming that many of their families do). Next the St. Sebastian group went to the front and acted out the different roles that women have in the U.S. (mother, professional, teacher, nurse, wife…), and even pantomimed the Glass Ceiling which exists in some professions. Each skit was met with laughter and clapping – it was a great atmosphere.
The Salvadoran women did another skit, and then there was time for questions and answers. Juvelina talked about how the CCR works, and the Salvadorans asked how the Americans are organized and how they raise money for projects. Almost every single woman participated in this conversation, either with a question or an answer, or acknowledging how much they had learned from each other in such a short time. One woman even said that at the beginning she had felt inferior to the Americans, but now she saw that we are all just people in the same struggle. This was the moment when Teosinte presented the American delegation with a framed picture thanking them for their support and asking God`s blessing on St. Sebastian church for all the support they give to their Sister Community in El Salvador. There was clapping and tears of emotion on from both groups.
To end the meeting, Marta invited me up explain the last game we had planned. All of us stood up and began to throw a ball of string around the circle. As each person caught the string, she said something she had learned that morning or a hope she had for the future. It was clear that everyone felt closer as a result of the few hours we had spent together, but the different way that each person expressed what she was feeling as we threw the string around the circle was amazing.
I barely knew what to say when it was my turn. It was nice for me to be with other Americans for awhile, to hear the English translation of everything we were doing, and to walk with them as they learned about the culture I have been living in for awhile. It was also fun to be with the Salvadoran women and to see their surprise and amazement as they got to know the Americans. I felt like a bridge. I could understand the perspectives of both cultures, but I was seeing new sides to each one and to myself the more we interacted.
At the end, each person was holding a piece of the string, and in the middle of the circle was a giant spider web that we had made as we talked about our hopes and our desire for unity. This weaving of ours is frozen in the pictures we took, but it continues to grow in the hearts of everyone who was in the community house that morning in the tiny town of Teosinte , San Francisco Morazan, Chalatenango , El Salvador .
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