One day a few weeks ago, I was walking with Davie and two other gringas in a rich but vacant Managua neighborhood just after dark, on our way to visit a friend. Behind us we heard the engine of a car accelerating, and the next second, I felt a tremendous blow that left me stumbling off the side of the road. At first I thought I had been hit by the car, but that didn't explain why no one else had been hit or why, when I glanced at the car whizzing off into the night at 40 miles per hour, the man in the passenger seat had his hand extended out of the window. “WHOOP WHOOOOOP!” he whooped.
Davie was the first to understand. “Hijo de puta!” he screamed at the men before the car disappeared. Clutching the burning pain on my bottom, I slowly put it together. The men had sped by within a foot of me, just close enough for the man to extend his hand out the window and slap my bottom.
Thoughts rushed into my mind and out my mouth in a high-pitched voice that I wished were deeper. “They could have hit me!” I gasped. “If I had stepped just a foot to the left, or if they had swerved a tiny bit, they could have killed me.” But they were gone. They were already gone, flying off whooping stupidly into the night, and I couldn't tell them that they could have killed me. I couldn't tell them how helpless I felt or how the lingering pain in my bottom would make me sick and sad for the next days, bringing on sudden streams of tears that I didn't even know were there. Like an inanimate object, I had received their action, and there was nothing I could do in that moment to act back.
Unfortunately, this kind of sexual harassment is fairly normal in Nicaragua. Like so many other of its Latin American counterparts, Nicaragua is a machista culture, where men are king. This machismo takes all different shapes and forms, subtle and overt, annoying and traumatic, and affects every single Nicaraguan woman.
When I walk by myself the thirty minutes from the bus station in Esteli to the market downtown, I count the number of times I am catcalled. (It's usually between five and ten). The nice thing about living in a small town like San Nicolas is that the catcalls are much fewer. Maybe because anonymity just doesn't exist, catcalling women is far less a part of the campo culture. (Until, of course, men get drunk.)
In the campo, men have other devices to show women who wields the power. Here in San Nicolas, perhaps the most popular technique is making sure that women basically never leave their houses. One technological development that mysteriously still hasn't made it to the Nicaraguan campo (although cell phones and facebook both have) is locks. Because most people keep all of the money they own in their houses, and because for some reason most houses don't have lockable front doors, someone has to stay home at all times to guard the family possessions. Hint: it is not the men.
No, it is universally known that men must spend their days working in the fields, so the women gracefully take their places in the home, cooking, doing laundry, and most importantly, not interacting with other people. In the Nicaraguan campo, pre-1960s gender roles still reign. We do have some female friends who work outside the home, as teachers or in the ministry of education, but don't think for a minute that their husbands do the cooking or the laundry. What often happens in these situations is, seeing as the wife is at work and the husband – whether or not he has a job – is incapable of domestic labor, their oldest daughter will quit school so she can take care of the housework. And so the cycle continues.
The other day we were visiting a friend of ours, teaching her how to make peanut butter cookies. When her husband came in from the fields, she dutifully served him his plate of rice and beans for lunch and got back to making cookies. When he was done with his first plate, he asked her to get him some more. By this time she already had cookie dough up to her elbows, and she told him so. “You are worthless,” he said. “I might as well get a robot.” Frankly, I wish he would.
Concurrent with ensuring that your wife never leaves the house is the machista statute that requires that you're never seen in public with your wife or children. It took Davie and I a while to realize that our almost constant companionship around town is an anomaly in San Nicolas. A man seen attending church with his wife or taking his daughter to school is a demonstration of masculine weakness. Instead, men congregate with each other for weekly bro bashes at the baseball stadium. One Sunday I went to a baseball game with Davie and after a quick survey of the stands, realized that of the 80 or so spectators, I was the only woman there.
Machista law dictates that men use these weekly boy club reunions to get staggeringly drunk. What remains behind closed doors is what happens when these men return, completely sloshed, to their wife and children at home. This is a very private matter, not often spoken of, but our sources tell us that physical abuse of women and children is not uncommon in this part of Nicaragua.
All of this adds up to a sexist existence that is so depressing, it has taken us a while to know what to do with it. It hurts to see our female friends working so hard, being cheated on by husbands who run off with younger woman, and ultimately embracing the harmful gender role that is the only woman they've ever learned how to be.
We know the impact of our two years in San Nicolas has serious limitations, but we do what we can to change these gender stereotypes. We present ourselves proudly as a couple in public and we invite boys to join our cooking classes and we try to empower our female students. And every once in a while we see a spark of hope in this community – a kind, humble man like our student Bayardo, or the existence of one entire other man in Davie's cooking class, or the fact that the mayor is a woman.
Or the time, the other day, when I was talking to two kids in our elementary school English class, Andy and Jaraely, who were admiring my glasses. “Did Davie buy you these glasses?” Andy asked me. Jaraely scrunched up her face in disgust, and with a sarcasm that could bend gender, said to Andy, “Oh what, so Davie has to buy Sarah stuff? You think because she's a girl she doesn't have her own money?” That's what gives me hope.
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