Quinceañeras and Womanhood

In the past two weeks, we've been to two quinceañeras, or 15^th birthday parties. These parties, which compete with weddings in their level of importance and extravagance, are the Latino equivalent of the debutant balls that you see in Downton Abbey. They are a very public way for a community to acknowledge a girl's transition to womanhood.

At the quinceañera that we went to for our student Ninoska, there was a moment when Ninoska's aunt publicly presented her with a doll, announcing that it was the last gift she would receive as a girl. And then in the next instant, she handed Ninoska a pair of high heels and told her to put them on. When Ninoska stood up in her new gold high heels, her aunt announced to the crowd of 150-200 people that Ninoska was now a woman.

Putting aside the silly suggestion that high heels are equivalent with womanhood, that moment fascinated me. In a western culture like the US, a girl's transition to womanhood is a long, gradual process; you stop taking baths with your brother, you go through puberty, you do adult things like go to college or get a job. But the whole time, you lack a certainty in the back of your mind about whether you are a girl or a woman. I am 25 and people still sometimes call me a girl. But in that single instant when Ninoska strapped on those high heels, she knew for sure that she had become a woman.

Although I think that the gradual transition to womanhood probably reflects more accurately how it actually happens, there is something really appealing about a symbolic moment of label-changing. As a public celebration of this label-changing, a quinceañera could have the power to hold a community accountable for treating a woman as a woman and not as a girl.

But then, this begs the question: How is a woman treated differently from a girl? Here, the quinceañera is traditionally a patriarchal custom. So rather than urging the community to treat her with the respect that her new status demands, it seems to me that the quinceañera functions instead to put the woman on the dating market. This is why, in the quinceañera ceremony, the father gives his daughter away to her symbolic first dance with a man. The quinceañera is basically a way to let an entire community know that a woman is available for marriage and baby-making.

We saw this exact narrative play out quite literally with one of our students this year. We went to Etni's quinceañera in April. Four months later, she was “robbed,” as they call it here, by her boyfriend and disappeared for over a month. When she finally came back with her boyfriend, she was pregnant. Not long after, her boyfriend abandoned her, leaving her with all of the responsibility of giving birth to and raising a child, at the age of 15.

As I thought about the quinceañeras we've been to recently, I started to wonder why boys don't have them. Why isn't it as important to mark a boy's transition to manhood? Is it because in a way, a boy is always a man? My friend Maria has a 4-year-old son named Hansel, and he already acts like a man, bossing his older sister around and making fun of his older brother when he helps his mom cook. Maybe people assume that boys are born with the control that defines men, whereas girls have to be socialized to behave as women.

Or maybe a boy's transition to manhood is important, but it's just a much less public matter. Maybe it happens when he's helping his father harvest beans and his father chucks him on the shoulder and says, “Now you're a man.” Maybe instead of requiring an entire community to affirm him as a man, a boy only needs his father to give him that label.

I suppose it also comes back to the fact that in this culture, men pursue women, not vice versa. A quinceañera marking a man's entry into the dating pool would seem ludicrous, since traditionally women never make the first move romantically and therefore don't need to know which boys have become eligible young men. Women are like objects on a supermarket shelf, and men do all the choosing.

All that said, I don't think the quinceañera is an inherently sexist tradition. In fact, I quite like the elaborate princess dresses and the religious component and how the whole community comes together to celebrate a specific person and her transitioning life stages. It's not often in a poor community like San Nicolas that people have an excuse to celebrate so luxuriously, with table decorations and fancy dresses and a meal for almost everyone in town. It's a beautiful way for a community to share with each other.

It also has the potential to be a beautiful way to affirm women and to give young women confidence in themselves. If being a woman in this culture meant being strong and independent and deserving of respect, then the celebration that marks this transition into womanhood could be one of the happiest days of a woman's life.

Seeking Volunteers to Live Here:

Our two-year term with VMM working in San Nicolas, Nicaragua ends next September 2015, so we're starting to look for two volunteers to fill our position. This is a place for people with a spirit of adventure, who like living in rural areas and get excited about working on a variety of different projects while getting to know a small community really well.

The position lasts for two years, so it would be from August 2015 till August/September 2017. It's an ideal placement for a married couple, but could work just as well for two individuals. Please pass the following job description along to anyone who you think might be interested. To find out more about the job or to express interest, you can leave a comment below or email sarah.f.rich@gmail.com or davidjwiegner@gmail.com.

Description:

San Nicolas is a small town located in the northern highlands of Nicaragua, approximately three hours from Managua.  Volunteer Missionary Movement (VMM) is a small, ecumenical Catholic organization that, in its vision for accompanying marginalized people around the world, supports this position. Over the course of the volunteers' two-year commitment to VMM, the volunteers will live and work in San Nicolas.  There are many challenges to this work, but by being flexible and willing to experience life as rural Nicaraguans do, this can be a life-changing time.  The volunteers will share their talents and skills with the community and learn from the traditions, history, and lives of the people in this town.

Main Responsibilities:

- Participate in the local public high school, helping improve class dynamics
- Teach an after-school English class for high school students motivated to accelerate in English
- Assist the principal in administrative and organizational tasks
- Possibility of helping to create extra-curricular activities (examples: sports teams, music or theater groups, art club, book club, etc)
- Possibility of teaching a computer class for teachers and principal
- Possibility of helping teach daily English classes
- Work at La Garnacha, an ecoutourism destination and organic farming association close to San Nicolas
- Help the farm get ready for Friday market
- Help advise the association on how to attract more tourists – what do gringos like?
- Possibility of helping the association with communication/outreach materials: website, brochures, facebook page

Other Options:

- Assist the Catholic Church with catechism classes, youth groups, or adult Bible studies
- Work with the local library to improve their offerings
- Tutor local adults in English
- Pick coffee when needed
- Offer a weekly English class for elementary school kids
- Host cooking classes or gatherings for people in the community
- Visit, support, and pray with Catholic communities in rural villages

Desired Skills:

- The volunteers must be flexible, creative, and open to having new experiences.
- They should feel comfortable being in charge of their own time and possess the initiative to start new programs under their own direction.
- Training in education or a background in teaching is a plus.
- Experience with agriculture or business is a plus.
- Volunteers should speak at least basic Spanish.
- Experience living in Central America is a plus.
- Volunteers should approach this position through their faith and should adhere to VMM's vision of accompaniment towards a more just world. (Read more about VMM here).

Applicants Should:

- Be college graduates, ages 22 or older
- Be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident
- Be willing to live in two-person intentional community
- Be in good physical and psychological health
- Be single people or married couples with no dependents
- VMM welcomes women and men of all ethnic origins, gender, economic status, and sexual orientations.

Volunteer Provisions:

VMM provides volunteers with:

- Medical and life insurance, including three months of medical insurance after completion of service.

- Monthly stipend.

- Pre-departure orientation

- Visa expenses

- Spanish language training

- Annual retreats with other volunteers in Central America

- Re-entry stipend upon completion of service

How to Apply:

Send a letter of interest and your resume to sarah.f.rich@gmail.com or davidjwiegner@gmail.com. We will be receiving applications until February 28, 2015. Feel free to email us with any questions throughout the process!

After reviewing these documents, we'll send you an application. Follow-up skype or phone interviews will be conducted in English and Spanish with eligible candidates. We look forward to hearing from you!

VMM: An Amazing Mission in Cycles

Last week we had the amazing opportunity to help with a delegation of people who came down from the US to learn about Nicaragua and our work here. They were all in some way connected to Volunteer Missionary Movement, and as we heard their stories throughout the week, I became more and more impressed with VMM, the organization with whom we've been here all along.

One of the best parts of the delegation was getting to meet Edwina Gately, the woman who actually founded VMM in 1969. Up until Edwina started VMM, there were plenty of Catholic missions organizations in the world, but none of them were for lay people. At the young age of 24 (a year younger than us!), Edwina felt called to missions, but because she wasn't a nun, she had no outlet for her calling. As a young woman, which put her at a disadvantage right off the bat, she went around to all of the bishops and important Catholics in England, trying to convince them that normal lay people could do missions too.

Thus was Volunteer Missionary Movement begun. Since then, it has grown and separated into a VMM-Europe faction – in which 55-60 Europe-based volunteers serve in Africa, Asia, and Europe – and a VMM-USA faction – in which seven USA-based volunteers (including us) serve in Central America.

What strikes me as being unique about VMM, as mission organizations go, is its strong emphasis on humility and accompaniment. In a VMM position, volunteers live simply. Instead of being provided with a nice house and a car, VMM volunteers live in modest circumstances, just like those around whom they're living. Rather than bringing all of the means and the skills to their relationships with the people who they're serving, they share with the people; the relationship is made of give and take.

Of course, Edwina puts this all much better than I can, in VMM's Spirit and Lifestyle mission statement, so I'll let her demonstrate what VMM stands for:

“We believe that God calls all people to peace, unity and interdependence through justice, and a sharing of the world’s resources and goods. We wish to challenge and dissolve the barriers that divide People and Church and nations. We stand for oneness in the body of Christ. We commit ourselves to the service of our God to work among all people seeking to break down all forms of injustice and oppression and all inequalities of sex, status, color, creed or nationality.”

“We live with the people. We work with the people. We rejoice with the people. We become part of the people. Our sharing becomes a journey we walk together towards liberation, community, and a reaching out together for growth and fulfillment. But we do not impose ourselves or our way of doing things. We are at the service of those to whom we go.”

“We are aware that through our service, we receive far more than we are able to give. We realize that we are enriched by our encounter with people of other cultures and beliefs . . . We see, therefore, that mission is not a one-way process, and the monopoly of one church or religion. But it is a cyclical process, going from one church to another church in continuous, mutual sharing. This is the dynamic of mission.”

Throughout the delegation, we enjoyed sharing with people who have lived out these words in their own lives, in many different ways. We got so excited about VMM and its mission, in fact, that we are already starting to think about recruiting some new volunteers to fill our shoes when we leave in September 2015. We'll post a job description soon.

A Day at the Doctor

For the 14 months that we've been in Nicaragua, today was the first day that we had to go to the doctor. We've had the occasional food poisoning, but up until now we've both been pretty healthy. Having heard horror stories about the local health center in town, we always dreaded the day when we would have to see the inside of those brick walls. But when Davie woke up last night with a fever, vomiting, and a bad headache, we conceded that that day had finally come.

So it was that we trudged two blocks through town this morning to the health center, a small single-story brick building surrounded by a chain-link fence. As miserable as Davie felt, I was actually the tiniest bit glad for the chance to find out what the health care system in rural Nicaragua really looks like. But I tried to be in solidarity with Davie's misery while also taking mental notes on everything I saw.

By the time we got there at 9 a.m., the courtyard was already filled with around 30 people, waiting on hard wooden benches to see a doctor. I didn't recognize many of the people, and lots of them wore the worn faces, missing teeth, and pencil skirts of campesinos who live even further afield than San Nicolas. Many of these sick people, it seemed to me, had probably walked miles and miles through the hills to arrive at this clinic.

We were confused about whether we should just plop down on the benches or if we had to check in, and since there were no signs, we asked a man whose face bore the scars of a serious burn. He directed us to a cluttered office, full of manila file folders. While we waited there, a nurse sorted through about a hundred of those folders. Then she finally looked up and said, “Yes?” “He's sick,” I explained succinctly, pointing at Davie. She asked what Davie's name was and wrote it down on a piece of scrap paper, and that was it. There were no medical history forms to fill in; apparently, all they needed was Davie's name.

We went to sit down on the benches outside in the courtyard. There were maybe three doctors and five nurses attending to all these people, running around from room to room. Some of them wore scrubs, but some of them just wore a kind of medical-looking shirt with jeans.

We probably would have waited a couple of hours to be seen if Davie hadn't had a sudden urge to throw up. The only toilets in the health center, we quickly discovered, were locked and reserved for employees. So instead, we dashed outside and Davie leaned over the grass on the side of the road. He didn't actually end up vomiting, but he must have looked so awful to all the other patients and doctors that they took pity on him and called him in to see the doctor next.

The doctor was a young, casual-seeming man. He took Davie's temperature and blood pressure and listened to his symptoms. Then he sent Davie in to get a blood test and a urine sample. From what I've heard, this is fairly standard procedure when you go to a public doctor in Nicaragua; most doctors want to see a blood test right off the bat. Since the latrines smelled awful, Davie hid out in a nearby old latrine, now filled with trash, to give his urine sample.

After that, the blood test lady told us to go find a nurse who would stick an IV in Davie to rehydrate him. I was surprised by the number of needles everyone was sticking in Davie, but he handled it well. After she finally found his vein and hooked him up to the IV, the nurse led us into a small room with three beds. There was an older woman from a nearby community on one bed and a mother and baby with a mini cast on her wrist on another bed. Davie took up residence on the third bed and lay down on the plastic mattress without a sheet. The nurse told us to come find her when 500 milliliters of liquid had dripped into Davie's veins.

But when the IV had reached 500 milliliters, the nurse was nowhere to be found. I searched all over the clinic for her, and finally found her in the reception office, acting as a secretary of course. Later, I saw the same nurse functioning as a janitor, taking out the trash. Anyway, she turned off the IV drip without explaining what she was doing and disappeared again.

Things proceeded in this same manor for the next couple of hours, with Davie curled up in a miserable ball on the plastic mattress and me hunting down nurses and doctors to make sure they hadn't forgotten us. But in the end, it actually worked out. We walked past the doctor's office several times, hoping he would see us, and before long, he did. He called us into his office and told us that the test results indicated that Davie's infection was probably bacterial, not Dengue, which is what we were worried about. He helpfully wrote down some antidotes on more pieces of scrap paper, scheduled a check-up test, and sent us on our way.

As we were stepping out of his office, I had a feeling that we were forgetting something. “Do we need to pay?” I asked. The doctor shook his head and laughed at me like I was crazy. “No, no,” he said. “Of course you don't pay!”

It's true that this rural public clinic was not nearly as sterile as any American clinic. The nurses didn't smooth-talk you as they stuck needles in your veins, and they didn't role out a sheet of crinkly new paper for every patient to sit on the examining table. Patients sat out in the open air with no jazzy elevator music or inspirational posters, and there were random cardboard boxes of discarded needles plainly visible in the check-up rooms. But we did, in the end, receive solid medical advice from a certified doctor, and even as foreigners we didn't have to pay a cent. The success of this public clinic is still up in the air, but the next time, I don't think we'll dread going there quite as much.