July 10, 2003
Awakened Woman's Circle is working for peace
We have a great deal in common. . .
Angela Cuevas has created a fruitful women's venue
by Stephanie Hiller
Angela Cuevas is a small woman with a body that resembles the Minoan snake goddess. She has a friendly, expressive face, with dark brown eyes often couched under the arc of a deep frown. She is baffled that so many men desert their pregnant girlfriends after having sex with them. In Colombia where she lives, 40 percent of the women are single mothers. Men, says Angela, have to become responsible for the results of their own fun. How could they ignore their own children? "It's your genes!" she would have them recognize. Children without fathers are always searching for their fathers. Why don't men get it?
Luckily, her own husband has not behaved that way. Angela, an attorney, is married to a French photographer. She met and married Francois Dolmetsch after attending boarding school in England. "I met François in England when I was working as a waitress in a Cambridge restaurant while taking entrance exams for Cambridge University. I was standing on top of a table giving a speech in the most execrable French about how to achieve the Colombian revolution. He shouted from outside 'who is that who speaks French like a Spanish cow'?. When he finished his History undergraduate degree the year after, we went to Colombia." Angela and Francois live in her native city, Cali, where they raised their two children, now grown. Their son is a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University; their daughter is a doctor.
Angela became a feminist activist in 1990, when she was the president of the International Federation of Women Lawyers. "One of the main issues was what could we do to get women to participate more actively in the politics of the world." A new constitution had been drafted for Colombia, and "we were trying to lobby for a women's quota in Colombian government." They lobbied for 50 percent; they got 30. "In the euphoria of this new constitution we started a political party, Women for Democracy, and I ran as a candidate for the Senate. I didn't get elected. I got 5,000 votes, and the minimum was 28,000." But they made coalitions with different people to get seats in the local councils." Later she ran for council, and for Mayor of Cali. Running for office put her into contact with unemployed people who wanted jobs in her administration. "If you don't win, they still want jobs. You get to know them. We started to see, how can we get them some sort of income." With a group of women attorneys, she started a program for unmarried mothers, to teach them to make paper. She got the idea from a children's paper making kit she picked up at the British museum. It's very easy, she told me, and it doesn't cost much. You can get used paper from a bank or a school -- they would just throw it away -- and mix it with water and so on. It's something they can do at home, with their children. Soon her group began buying the paper the women created, and reinvesting the money in more programs. Three thousand women have participated so far.
Then they taught the women how to do do recycling and also to create wormeries, where worms turn garbage into compost. Now they offer a training program for women to become facilitators. They go out into the community and show other women how to make paper, how to separate waste and maintain wormeries. Last year they got the British government to fund 40 recycling units in 40 schools. They recycle everything, and create compost for their organic gardens inside the school grounds. Their dream project is to build an ecovillage where houses will be built out of bamboo and mud. "Now if you have a family business the government will subsidize 80 percent for building the houses." Another 10 percent can be earned by labor, tilling the land, looking after the goats. So they only have to pay 10 percent of the cost of the house. About 80 people are working on this project.
But Angela's work for women does not stop there.
In 1995, she took the Peace Train from Helsinki to Beijing, for the fourth international United Nations Conference on Women. During the three week journey, 240 women participated in workshops on the train. There Angela met Harriet Otterloo, a Swedish doctor. "We had the same birthday, though not the same year, and it came out of our discussions that both of us were very worried that we would be there in Beijing to speak for a whole lot of women -- 40,000 activitists going to speak for everyone. The Platform of Action was already drafted when we got there. How could we get the voices of women to be heard somehow?" They got the idea of holding a series of international seminars. They chose a method called scintegration. "I went to a workshop where they used it and I thought that was great for women, it is totally nonhierarchical and it allowed people to interact no matter what background they came from." They adopted the method, which they tweaked over the years, for a series of ten anticipated events in different countries -- Colombia, Sweden, South Africa among them. Called Women Looking at the World, these seminars bring together 15 to 30 women, inviting them to state whatever concerns they have about any subject and then discuss them in smaller groups. At the end of the seminar, the groups bring their conclusions to a "plenary". Angela facilitates, and keeps records of all the groups.
This month, the eighth meeting was held in Palo Alto, CA, the first one in North America. It took three years to put together, Angela told me, because various obstacles arose and "you Americans work all the time". Next year's will be in Japan, and the tenth is envisioned as some sort of rap-up session, perhaps including all the women who have attended previous seminars, in order to decide what to do with the data.
The meetings, which began on the evening of July 3rd and ran through the early afternoon of the 5th, were lively and fun. We had several Colombian women, including Dora and Erika, a mother and daughter who now live with their family in nearby San Jose, and Christina, a professional translator who lives in Oxnard, California. Also with us were Asha's grandmother, Edna, originally from the Midwest, who lives now in Florida; Asha's mother, Kippy, who has lived for the last 33 years in Chiapas; Asha's close friend Zeyneb, now completing her Master's degree in International Public Health; Ana, an American woman who lived for 25 years in Italy; and a French woman lawyer, Christine, who lives in Palo Alto. An interesting group!
It's amazing how much energy a small group of women can generate!
In our very first discussion group, all agreed that underlying all our concerns is a fundamental issue: power.
Some women had trouble with the word power. All wanted power that was "collaborative." Everyone was looking for equality with men, and a few said they did not want to be a threat to men, take power away from men, or in any way upset the applecart of men's delicate egos. Christina said, "I think in this 'collaboration' women are going backward. We are still treated as sexual objects."
Is women's desire to collaborate due to our inherently nicer nature -- or are we just afraid of losing the company, the sexual pleasures, and the security of being in relationship with men?
Actually stating that we might have to take something away from men -- their privilege -- if we are ever to get anywhere close to the happy land of equality seemed implicitly censured by a sort of unspoken feminine consensus. Treading delicate waters here. No one wanted to look like the castrating bitch who dared to say men are responsible for war and violence. Besides, not only men are violent, someone said, in what I have begun to think of as the Margaret Thatcher Argument. The fact that some (a few) women are as tough and aggressive as men apparently annuls the possibility that women's leadership could produce a world without war. Some studies have shown that violence is more linked with power than with gender, said Zayneb, suggesting that when women get into positions of power they may be expected to become more violent. (Although, contradictorily, violence by men seems to correlate with being unemployed or a member of an oppressed race or class.) And what about the mothers who actively send their sons off to war. What about that?
We agreed that women are in many ways complicit with the prevailing male based system, and that it might be a useful practice to examine how we unconsciously support male privilege in our families and in the world. Then we might begin the work of withdrawing that steady supply of energy on which the whole edifice relies. Without our support, patriarchy might collapse in upon itself, and then we could begin, collaboratively, to create an alternative.
Other sessions discussed family and education, women's health, and values. As always, it was deeply rewarding to participate in a diverse women's group discussion of the issues concerning us. And as always, it turns out that we have a lot more in common than the men who divide us!
The seminar made me feel braver about speaking Spanish, and more drawn than ever to the powerful women of Latin America. Angela's work with single mothers in Colombia demonstrates once again that a simple approach to a pressing problem can result in a string of solutions, all of them leading to a more ecological world while solving the urgent need of mothers to find home based employment.
And it's significant that these strides are being made in a country under tremendous political pressure and warfare, all sustained by the drug trade and competing military interests, both Colombian and American, that benefit from the coca crop while here at home stricter regulations on the use of all drugs are enforced.
Increasing pressure seems to produce a more determined response. It's worth noting that Brazil has had, until recently, the longest standing military dictatorship of all Latin American countries. And during the same period, Brazilian women came forward and built one of the strongest women's movements on the continent.
What conclusions are we to draw from this?
When the going gets tough, the women get going?
Then there is still hope for the world.
For more information about Women Looking at the World, please go to <http://www.e-coaches.co.uk/wlw/default.asp>