July 4, 2007 - El Estor, Guatemala
When we volunteered to do the Women's Workshop we knew we wanted to learn more about their daily lives and to share about ours. We thought it would be an easy and fun project. We had expected it to be a lengthy process because of the need to translate into both Spanish and K'ekchi but doable. That was until we read our first email from Ellen Dozier, Guatemalan mission co-worker and women's facilitator, explaining how simple our workshop would need to be.
She recommended that we not use long Bible passages because of the women's limited life experiences. She also said that it would be hard for them to do anything that would require reading or writing since most of them are illiterate. She challenged us to think of other ways that we might be able to get the women more involved. She mentioned that one group previously had used drama very effectively. Since neither of us had ever used drama before, we decided we would have to find an alternative. Both of us had had previous experience using drawing as a means of communication so that seemed like a logical choice.
So off we went to Heine Brothers Coffee to plan our workshop. We quickly decided that it would be good for each of us to bring photos of how we spend our days in the United States. We thought that might open the door to the Guatemalan women sharing with us about their lives. We also came up with the idea of using a timeline form to help them recall each daily activity. Starting with sunrise, the paper had blocks of blank spaces leading toward sunset. We decided that we would ask the women to illustrate their day by drawing in each of those blocks one daily activity.
Fully prepared, we thought, we left for Guatemala armed with markers, crayons, paper, photos and excitement about our plan. We also asked the other women in our group to come prepared to share about their lives too. Once there, we quickly saw through a previous workshop with men and a session with the children that our workshop was going to be more difficult than we had thought. Contrary to most Americans, when art materials were placed in front of the people we met they seemed to question whether it was okay to touch them and did not seem to know what to do with them when they did. We found that we had to coach them in order to just get the exercise underway. We also found that the women were extremely shy and not easy to convince to share information about themselves. All of these observations began to make us nervous about our workshop.
But, Wednesday came and when we arrived at the church at 8:15 am there were women lined up outside already. We all went in and began setting up. We met our K'ekchi interpreter Paulina, who we immediately loved. She is in her 20s, unmarried and we were excited to find out she is a teacher. Our workshop was expected to be for four hours. At first, that seemed like a very long time, however, once we saw how long it took just to do introductions in three languages we realized that the time was perfect for the number of women there.
There were 14 women and we thought you might like to know some demographic information about them: Ages: 18-22 5
23-30 4
30s 1
40s 2
50s 2
Of these 14 women, one of them had nine children, three had seven each and two had six each. Only three were unmarried. Most of them said they worked only at home, but two said they also worked in stores in front of their homes. Five of them were officers in their church's women's group.
We focused our time together on finding God in our daily lives. We used Colossians 3:17. It says "And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him."
The second part of our workshop was to get the women engaged in our "Day in My Life" drawing project. As you will see from the photos, the women really got into this project. We are not sure why they seemed more at ease with the project than the men and children had earlier. Maybe it was because we seemed less strange to them by then since this was our fourth day in town. Sometimes it was even hard to get them to stop drawing because they wanted to finish their pages. This made our plan of sharing as a large group detour into just sharing at our small table groups. This actually turned out to be a wonderful change.
The women were very open about explaining what they had drawn and we were able to learn even more than we had expected about their lives. Even the K'ekchi women, who did not speak Spanish, were able to tell us through interpreters about their often more simple, almost symbol-like, drawings. We came to realize that some of them understood some Spanish but just were unable to speak it fluently. Once we got going, the conversations back and forth between women of all languages began to flow more normally. We all became less inhibited even about asking more personal questions about each others' lives with our husbands and families. As the questions went back and forth we talked about where we most experienced God as shown in the pictures of our days. At first it was hard for the women to think of their daily work as working for God so they only made references to praying in the morning. But, the more we talked, it became obvious that God was in every part of our days. One of the older women told us that in her morning prayer she always asked God for guidance in what she does that day.
At the end, success was ours! We felt like we had come full circle. We had felt confident at the beginning with our planning, but then began to have doubts the closer it came to our workshop. But then, once into our work with the women we began to see that our plan was working. Our idea of the timeline and drawing were a great way to address the challenges all of us had faced. As we debriefed later with each other and with Ellen, we realized that we had some amazing images from the lives of these hard-working, creative women.
We brought home the drawings made by our new-found sisters. They are a wonderful reminder of the incredible experiences we had together and the joy we saw in their simple, very productive lives. There were no goodbyes but until we see each other again. We are still thinking about how we want to use the drawings that have become inspirational for many of us.
By Soni Castleberry and Sandra Duverge
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