Nicaragua Day 7: intersection of state and us (updated)

(I wrote a lot more since I first posted earlier tonight)

The title of this post is a reference to Betsy's daughter Ursula's thesis on "the intersection of state and capital," which they always joke is "one block south from the intersection of State and Main." Today we met with some officials and would-be officials of the state, so, you know. It's supposed to be a joke.

Anyway, the "one block south" thing reminds me to tell you the interesting fact that there are no addresses in Nicaragua, and in fact, not always street names or numbers.

The hotel we're staying at, for example, has the following "address" in the phone book: "Hotel San Juan, San Juan district, 3 blocks north and 1 block east of Hercules Gym."

Similarly, in Estelí they told me the internet cafe was 1/2 block west of "the corner with the banks." Ann (our noble translator) says that the worst is when the landmark is "where the banks used to be," because then you really don't know unless you live there!

OK, so, let me try to say something semi-intelligent or at least descriptive before we leave for our night out on the town.

So, yesterday, Day 6, which of course seems like a billion years ago, in the morning we went to visit Fundación Entre Mujeres (Foundation Among Women), whose name is interesting both because it has the handy acronym FEM and because it is a foundation among women instead of for women.

Let me interject that Estelí is in the mountains, beautiful beautiful country--if I were going to come back here for any amount of time I'd rather like to stay in that mountainous area. Unlike much of the rest of the country we've driven through, not all of the beautiful rainforest vegetation has been stripped away--there are these ENORMOUS gorgeous trees, mostly along streambeds (perhaps because the shade keeps them from evaporating?) and on slopes that are too steep to be used (tho there are precious few degrees between "too steep to be used" and "too steep to support vegetation"--horses can graze on slopes too steep for cattle, apparently).

So anyway, FEM's offices are in a lovely building on the edge of a steep hill, overlooking the town. The bathroom, which presumably drops waste off the edge of the cliff (I didn't examine the situation too closely), has the best view in the complex. As is often the case there's a small interior courtyard with a fountain and roses and flowers, as well as (more unusual) a front garden and a backyard with lovely flowers (and a dog, whose "doghouse" consisted of a large piece of particle board leaning against the chainlink fence). The overall impression was airy and light and full of greenery and blossoms. The cherry on the sundae: during the break, in the backyard, I watched a parade of leaf-cutter ants carrying things. Many of them were carrying tiny flowers so it looked like a little ant parade...it was charming.

OK, but the actual content of the meeting... Like many of the orgs we're visiting, FEM was created in the 90's to try to address the needs created after the revolution ended and the state withdrew from its responsibilities for the health, education and general welfare of the people. The Sandinista veteran who started the introduction said that the road to gender and economic equality is long, and that the achievements of the 80s were just the first few steps; organizations like FEM tried to pick up and continue the unfinished tasks.

She described FEM as "not an NGO" but rather "a legal and political instrument to mobilize rural women." They "combine material and theoretical tools to create radical change in the situation of marginalized women." The centerpiece of their work is women's access to land... during the big land reforms of the 80s (that I talked about yesterday) only 6% of the land went to women.

Like many of the other orgs we've visited, they see personal empowerment as an essential component. "We understand empowerment as a process that's very individual--each woman discovering herself as an individual--but that ends up in the public arena," through changes in the relationship with her partner, changes in family dynamics, then changes in her role in the community and finally her participation in the civic sphere. (This is the ideal anyway!)

They have a mobile health clinic that provides healthcare as well as education in health, sexuality and reproductive health, which reaches 3000 women; adult education program which reaches 425; and a family garden & livestock program that involves 300 women. But the most interesting are the three collective farms of single mothers.

Several women from one of the collectives were there to talk with us about their experiences. One explained that single mothers are supposed to stay in their parents' home and take care of their children; if people even see them on the street they'll reproach them for not being home with their children. So when these women got land from FEM to begin working as a collective farm, and started being out in the fields all the time and with their animals, they got a lot of crap from the community.

One of the women had a boyfriend who got a lot of crap too, for "not being man enough" to provide for her. He in turn bugged her about being part of the collective and tried to get her to stop. But when she brought home two big bags of beans that, with what he brought home, were enough to feed the family for the year, he changed his tune!

This is the fascinating thing about many of the groups we're visiting: they have figured out how to create material experiences for women and their families that alter their relationships and perceptions of self and others, so much more effectively than a lecture or any kind of "education."

This was a recurring theme all week: a woman obtains land (or learns how to make her backyard fertile) and receives technical training in agricultural techniques as well as information and self-empowerment education on different levels. She begins working the small plot of land in her backyard, and initially encounters opposition from her family & community, but perseveres with the new information about her rights and personhood.

But, when she actually creates a material improvement in her family's situation, support begins to develop until, in many cases, the entire family reorganizes around her work and becomes a production unit focused on the woman's agricultural efforts. The change in material reality is what creates a real change in her relationships with family and community--although this probably wouldn't be possible without the various self-empowerment educational aspects. It's a fascinating process and I'm probably not really doing it justice since I'm pretty tired.

There are other themes that this week has brought out, which maybe I should turn to instead of giving a blow-by-blow about each meeting..... but for tonight I'll just try to finish up the overview of the meetings.

VERY briefly, the rest of the FEM meeting was concerned with promoting the produce of the coffee-growing collectives and finding markets for it in the US (such as Just Coffee in Madison). We also learned a lot about coffee production.

In the afternoon yesterday we met with representatives of a microfinance organization (FODEM) that makes loans almost exclusively to women. Then we went to visit three of the borrowers--two bakeries and a retail shop selling clothing and furniture. FODEM doesn't do a lot of the healthcare and empowerment training that the other orgs do, so there was less of a sense of transformation and more a sense of promoting small business.

But, it was interesting to get a behind-the-scenes look at the businesses. I haven't seen a lot of storefronts other than internet shops and bodega-type stores called "pulperias" (nobody knows why, since literally that means "octopus shop"). So, I learned that many businesses run out of private homes with unmarked fronts. The little retail shop was just a room in the woman's house that was crammed with household goods, many wrapped in plastic to keep them from getting dusty.

This morning, we got up early and drove back to Managua. It was a beautiful road, through the mountains with lots of big trees and gorgeous flowers (interspersed with the cattle pastures that we've seen throughout the country). In the mountainous region around Estelí I finally felt that I was seeing a few glimpses of the country depicted in the murals we saw the first day, the lush vegetation and sense of natural richness. The rest of the country just looks denuded, which it is.

In Managua we met with Ana Criquillon, another veteran feminist who had been in the Sandinista government in the 80s, and whose article about the Nicaraguan women's movement was a key reading for our trip. I didn't get to ask her nearly all my questions, but some interesting themes came up... we talked about all the great grass-roots organizing we'd been seeing all week, and while her organization (Puntos de Encuentro) is a foundation providing grants to grass-roots organization (with priorities placed on youth, women's rights, and rural areas), she also put all this in context with some sobering realities: women are about to lose the right to abortion in Nicaragua, which they've had for decades (if only under somewhat limited circumstances, i.e. if the life of the mother or fetus is in danger or if the pregnancy is the product of rape); the laws about material and other responsibilities of fathers to their children are no longer being enforced; and single women are about to lose the right to adopt children. So in the realm of public policy, the space created in the 80s is closing faster and faster.

Later in the afternoon we met with Patricia Hernandez, who unlike the rest of the women we'd met all week has chosen to stay in government after the end of the revolution in 1990. She has been fighting all this time for rural women's access to land and has been engaged in enormous government efforts to increase the titling of land in women's names. She's had a lot of frustrations and setbacks in the context of enormous bureaucracy, corruption, and political wrangling, but where she's succeeded, she's able to work on a much larger scale than the other groups and individuals we spoke with. An intersting contrast particularly given Ana's notes on the increasing erosion of women's rights on a state level.

Finally, we went to meet with four candidates for political office from a new party, the MRS (which I keep thinking is funny because of course it looks like the abbreviation "Mrs." in English), which stands for "Movimiento de Renovación Sandinista" (Sandinista Renovation Movement), which is supposed to be a hope for change in the country in the context of a hopelessly deadlocked political situation (which I hope to talk about another time, because it struck me today that recent developments that locals bemoan as "the end of democracy" are developments that take Nicaragua to exactly the same political situation as the US...)

Three of the four disappointed me as just the usual politicians, who try not to say anything, while sounding inspiring. The fourth was a very interesting woman who again reminded us that all the amazing grassroots work we've seen in the past week takes place in a national and international context that has a huge impact on the situation of the women involved--such as CAFTA and the WTO, the eroding separation of church and state, women's legal status and access to reproductive healthcare and family planning, the strength of state institutions and their ability to support women's rights. You can see why I titled the post as I did...

In the evening we went out to hear music and drink. It was funny, after some initial merriment, we all fell silent. I don't know if everyone was reflecting on the week we've had or listening to the music, but I had the impression that we were all missing someone far away, at least I was, I was missing my Loopygirl a lot... I called her when I got back to the hotel (this post has not felt like it was written to her, because there was so much reportage and data in it) and said, "When I'm bouncing over a rutted country road in the back of a pickup truck, it doesn't feel like you should be there because I know you wouldn't want to be, but when I'm in a nice restaurant listening to a hot woman sing romantic songs it does feel like you should be there."

I know I'll be home soon but I wish it was sooner. It's been an incredible week but I'm tired. I'm torn between trying to squeeze every last ounce out of my last two days (Sunday and Monday I'll be on my own here) and just relaxing, writing postcards, waiting for the plane to take off...... probably it will be a combo... certainly the time will pass more quickly if I make them active days, but I do feel pretty worn out.

Maybe that's because it's 12:30 at night. Time for bed!