Then what are we fighting for?

To much of the world “Feminism” is a scary word. To much of the world, “Feminism” isn’t part of the vocabulary. I’ve always lived in that first part of the world. And now I do “research” in the second part. I don’t like it, but I expect an Uru woman to have to ask her husband before she can do almost anything. And for better or worse, I even make allowances for many of the seeming gender inequalities I see, because I know that my cultural concepts aren’t the base for which to measure all others against.

But like Gloria, there are some things that worry me - apart from research, in my modern urban life. The first day I met one of my now dearest Bolivian friends, she compared herself to the Bolivian miners who “worship God in the church, worship Pachamama in the campo, and worship the miner's devil in the mines.” I’ve continued to try to understand how she compartmentalizes her life.

I’ve known for a while that she’s involved in the women’s movement in La Paz, and I’ve known that she more or less has to keep it a secret from her job, despite working for a so-called women’s organization. I assumed it was because she preferred not to stir an ideological battle with her more conservative boss…that’s fine.

She also has a radio show with her husband, and for some reason his identity is known publicly, but hers isn’t. And despite having been a guest twice on the show, I still haven’t figured out why this is the case.

So when she started talking about how welcoming the women’s movement was, how accepted she felt whenever she went to their center, how it was the only place people accepted her as is, I was happy for her, but didn’t really get it. Was home and work that bad?

And then I got a more complete picture. My friend hasn’t been paid in 4 months. I knew about this but it wasn’t exactly the organization’s fault, it’s more the project’s financer. But I can definitely understand if she can’t afford to keep going in to work each day, considering I’ve watched her beg and borrow to pay her bills lately. Part of her project is to teach people about human and citizen’s rights, and isn’t being paid for your work in a timely or at least the agreed upon manner a basic right?

So when she expressed to her boss that she wouldn’t be coming in until the accounts were straightened out, I expected reason from her boss, an accomplished woman who has spent most of her life fighting for women and indigenous people’s rights.

But what my friend got instead was a four-page email, questioning her commitment, and worse, THREATENING TO CALL HER HUSBAND AND PARENTS TO TELL THEM OF HER “ACTIONS”. My friend is 38 years old, the mother of three, the eldest sister of 8 and has been married for 13 years. I’ve never heard her complain about her responsibilities.

If I were my friend, I would take the four pages, rip them to shreds, dump them on my boss’s desk, I would call her a hypocrite, I would tell her that her whole life’s work has served for nothing, and I would tell her that with these four pages, any good she’s ever done for women is rendered null and void, and any right she’s ever fought for was in vain.

Then I would go home and pray for forgiveness that I had now become part of that same ugly hatred, and ask one of those three deities to help me take the resentment out of my heart, to help me find coherency in my life and to help me pay my damn bills.