Women's Office up and running!

SO! We have the Municipal Women’s and Youth Office!!! As of January 15th, 2009 we started the office, known as the OMMJ for Oficina Municipal de la Mujer y la Juventud. In May of 2008 the project was approved by the city council, in November 2008 we got permission to conduct the interview process (the only formal transparent interview process based on merit that has taken place in this municipality), and in January we hired our coordinator. She is an awesome woman, a Home Economics teacher, very smart, very petite, very punctual. At the same time a recent high school grad (one of my former students from last year) was hired as the Youth and Children’s technician.

We started out with the three of us crowded in the Planning Office, a small space which already had five people working in it with five chairs. Supposedly the Civil Registry was supposed to leave with the new privatized national registry, but that hasn’t happened yet so we were without an office space. After exploring about around the muni, we requested permission to clean out a storage area/garbage pile that was off of the library. This work took us a few days getting dirty removing all the trash that had been there for decades. Water gets in during the rainy season so everything was moist. There were tools, pipes, furniture, papers, a sack of moldy bean seeds, an old scale for weighing crops, rakes to prevent the spread of forest fires, old typewriters and computer equipment, and several unidentifiable objects. There were boxes of old books dating back to the 1930´s piled high that disintegrated when you pulled them down. All the books were wet and moldy and the boxes fell apart. There were registries from the treasury office with payments of 38 cents from the 1950´s. I’m sure historians would have cringed to see all the history being thrown away, but they were really unusable. There were cockroaches, spiders, evidence of rats, and a fossil of a toad that had met an unfortunate fate. Rumor has it that before being a storage/garbage room that is was the municipal jail when there was no presence of the national police force. Finally we got everything cleaned out, got the order for some of the muchachos that work for the muni to paint the space. We had to wait a few more days to get the wiring fixed so we could turn on the light. We salvaged a few rickety chairs from the trash to paint and they looked as good as new (as long as you sit carefully on them). We worked that way for a few weeks and then finally the municipal secretary gave us an old desk from who knows where so we finally had a place to write at least. We put the name of our office and mounted it on construction paper to tape to the door. Each little step we got more and more excited about the space. Even though it has no windows, there are doors on either side so at least there is air that gets in, once the smell of bleach and gasoline cleared out.

Our first task was to get the word out that we existed, to the communities and to the institutions working in the municipality. This included lots of meetings and explaining. In my time here I've accumulated a ton of materials about the laws, rights, citizen participation, etc. and since the two employees had lots to learn, they spent quite a bit of time familiarizing themselves with all that. The coordinator had never used a computer before, so training her on that has also been a big task. She knew how to type on a typewriter, but I've been training her on Windows, Word, and Excel and we’ve set her up with an email account to put her in direct contact with the institutions.

After working since January, in mid-March we finally got her contract finalized after many circles round and round the muni and then at the end of March she got her first pay check! I was so excited that day I was jumping up and down since the municipal employees only get paid once every few months, I had been holding my breath ever since she started working there, afraid somehow that she would never get paid. But she did! Success!

March 26th we had our first big event put on by our office…El Primer Encuentro Municipal de Lideresas (First Municipal Gathering of Women Leaders). We invited all the women who are part of the COCODES (Community Development Councils), as least written down as being part of them on paper at least, to an event in the town. We did workshops on self-esteem, the importance of women in development, and community organization. We facilitated the event and the workshops as the Women’s Office with the help of the Municipal Planning Office and invited facilitators from various NGO’s to participate. The goal of the invent was to promote boost women’s confidence in their participation in the Development Council and empower then to take part in decision making processes, such as prioritizing projects in their communities. The women were so excited to have been invited and that we were taking them into account, since there is so much machismo in this country that women are constantly being overlooked and not invited to things. In fact, we became aware that some of the male community leaders that we had sent the written invitations to didn’t distribute them, and lied to us and told them that they had. There are just so many barriers to including women in these processes it is very frustrating. These are the very women who are supposedly elected by their communities to represent them, and they tell us that they are constantly being excluded from the meeting of the very group that they are a part of. Anyway, so that’s why it was so cool that we did this. It was a great opportunity to debut the Women’s Office and get a start on organizing women’s groups in the rural communities. It was also just so nice for the women to be able to leave their houses for a time and play and laugh and learn and share with other women since they are just stuck in their houses all day long with household chores and taking care of their kids, there are so few opportunities for them to get out and have the spaces to enjoy and learn like that. We decorated the space with balloons and posters of inspirational messages and played lots of games and had all kinds of participatory activities. The municipality covered the costs of providing snacks and lunch for the women (and the inevitable children that are stuck to them). It was a big success and we are already planning the next event. I was so proud of my coordinator for putting so much work and planning into everything and she felt so good for the accomplishment.

So that’s how we’ve started out…little by little. I feel so proud to have accomplished starting this office, since it was one of my major goals in the Peace Corps. There is a good reason why Peace Corps is for two years. It really is in the second year when everything magically comes together and stuff gets done. I have tons of work now and am feeling very fulfilled in what I’m doing in the role of training the coordinator and the technician, guiding the planning process and long term goals, and helping execute special events and trainings. Woo hoo!