pigs and ponderings

I showed her this photo, and she beamed with pride at "mis coches!" (my pigs!).  She couldn't get enough of it, kept looking at it and laughing with wrinkles that lit up her whole face.  "The pigs have grown since then," she tells me.

As we sat and talked, she tells me about her harvest of beans and chiles and tomatoes that she was selling in the market down the road just this morning. Shows me the peach tree in the yard that is hers, her very own, and the other that is her husband's.  Her daughter comes to whisper something in her ear, and she pulls her coin purse out of her belt and gives the six year old a quetzale.  "This is it," I kept thinking to myself, "this is exactly what microcredit should do."  Starting with a loan worth $62.50 about 6 years ago, this woman has pieced together enough crops and harvests and animals to provide an income that allows her to pull her own money from her skirt for her children, give to their schooling, and fill her day with creative energy that is valued now by her husband.

In a region where many of the women I talk to never hold money for themselves, much less bring any income into the home, she is an exception.  Why this worked for her, while in many cases the women who receive these loans hand it right to their husbands, is one of the questions I'm trying to answer through the interviews I've been conducting the past month.  Studies on microcredit programs say that when women have income, money is invested more in the family and her ability to contribute to household decisions increases, so it seems a worthwhile goal.  Yet promoting women's income here is complex, as the family is the safety net that replaces social security and savings and the role of the man as the jefe of the home is deeply rooted in how families function.

It is a complex web for a white girl to step into - a country with one of the highest femicide rates in the world, where domestic violence is rampant, where most of the women I talk to are illiterate and don't speak Spanish, where my privilege of education, waiting until I am older to have children, and having skills to get a job are unthinkable options.  Yet the language I learned of Western feminism is an ill-fitting shoe here; the language that will bring women into places where they raise their own pigs and sell their own peaches at the market must come from their own mouths, their own discoveries, their own dreams.  Here in the Ixil it is a language slow to develop, but it is there, an underpinning flow that is creating women's committees and banks and sending at least some daughters to school.  A long way to go, for me and for them, in learning this language that will bring women into themselves, the fullness of life they are made for...but yesterday I heard it, heard it in the joy at some pigs.