Dear Reader,
Today I got back to normal or at least the normal that I had before I went to Guatemala. The disillusionment has warn off and I'm ready to go back to work as it was before I left. I started looking through pictures today of what we can and can't use in our final presentation. Turns out we didn't take that many pictures at all. We have some pictures from excursions and the ones that A Broader View took, but otherwise there aren't that many to go off of. In fact one could say, "Where are the pictures? Did you even go?" and be completely justified, but I'm justified too in saying that we had a very good reason.
Safety was a large concern in Guatemala and we were often advised not to take out our phones or any expensive looking cameras while out on the streets for fear of being robbed. Being tourists and clearly not from Guatemala made Kit and I targets, something I desperately wanted to avoid. This unfortunately reduced our photography, but I hope that won't make our project look bad. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but Kit and I definitely have more than a thousand words to explain about this experience both good and bad. Also we each had to do an exit video for A Broader View where we explained our project (with A Broader View not our Lovett one), what it meant to us, what we learned and gave a general overview of our entire experience. Later in the week I'm going to edit and piece together Kit and I's respective videos and add in some pictures to use possibly in our presentation for the board and/or for the presentation in front of the school.
Besides presentation work I also did some more Spanish studying today. I'm still working on Past Tense, specifically the preterite. Honestly when teaching yourself a language it's hard to know how fast to pace yourself. In my french class we worked on Passe compose for maybe two weeks, but it seems odd to think I could be working on the preterite for two weeks when it seems to be a concept that I'm (or at least I think I am) grasping pretty well. I think my previous escapades in language (most notably french) has really been helping with my understanding of Spanish and expediting my process. Now the true problem comes with testing myself. What if I'm learning all of this wrong? I would never know. It was much easier with a teacher there to keep me focussed and make sure that I learned the concepts correctly. Jaime may have given me a lot of homework, but ultimately I knew it was beneficial to me and my learning process. I don't know how to test myself on this information! I guess I could go to one of Lovett's Spanish teachers for help, but I'm not entirely sure. I've been seriously thinking about taking some Spanish and French classes over the summer and definitely in college so if anything these self-taught lessons will definitely help with that.
I also did a little bit more research today. I had an earlier post dedicated to Rape Culture in Guatemala, but that was just an on-the-surface look. I wanted to dig a little deeper so I started reading about violence against women and I was shocked at what I found. In 2014, 5,100 girls under the age of 15 got pregnant in Guatemala. That statistic alone accounts for at at least a third of the girls in the shelter that I worked at in Guatemala. All of them were 18 and younger and a few of them were 16 year olds with children 2 or 3 years old, meaning that two years ago they were a part of that statistic. Furthermore the statistic continues to grow. Between 2012 and 2013 the amount of underage pregnancies in Guatemala increased by 25% and it's projected to increase even further. What's even more disturbing is that most of these pregnancies are caused by a family member, most notably the father. In Guatemala 1 in 4 rape cases note the rapist as the girl's father and 89% of rape cases involve a family member or someone known to the family. Lastly there is a limited amount of sexual education afforded to young boys and girls in Guatemala as it is a Catholic county and the Catholicism advocates for reduced sexual education for fear that it might encourage young people to have sex. Thus many teenagers in Guatemala have sex without even knowing the risks or issues that come along with it.
This information explained a lot for me, but it also really frightened me. Many of the girls in the shelter were very reluctant to share their story or talk about their problems with us volunteers, especially Kit and I as we weren't there that long and they didn't trust us very much. Seely probably had the best relationship with the girls as she'd been at the shelter for over a month when Kit and I had arrived, but even then I remember her telling me that the girls had just gotten comfortable with her. This information tells us why. It's really scary knowing all of this and that these kinds of experiences might be what happened to the girls at the shelter. More than anything it angered me. I was unnerved by simple cat-calling and disrespect in the streets but these young girls have to deal with so much more. I'm so grateful that the shelter has opened up and provided a place for battered girls to live, learn and recuperate from their tragedies. Slowly, but surely that are making progress. Not only do their classes consist of basic learning like math, english, writing etc. but they also had classes about basic relationship education (no matter what has happened to the girls sexual education is still out of the question because of the religion in Guatemala). Kit told me about how she sat in on a class where they told the girls about what a good boyfriend was (and only a boyfriend, Guatemala is a pretty homophobic country), how he should treat them and even his age range (some of the girls took to dating men 2 or even 3 times their own age).
Reading all the information about Guatemalan Rape Culture has brought me back to one of my first experiences in Guatemala. When Kit and I first got off the plane and went over to customs, we saw a sign that said (in Spanish. Kit had to read it to me) if you don't want to be arrested in Guatemala, don't have sex with underage girls. At first we were shocked, but then we laughed at how ridiculous the sign was. Did they really need a sign to say that? My experiences at the shelter and the information I read today explains exactly why that sign was necessary. However, I do want to note that some statistics for rape and violence against women in the U.S. are just as bad. These only seem heightened for me because it's a foreign country, one that I am not used to living in. 44% of rape victims in the U.S. are under 18 and 80% are under 30, yet somehow I still feel relatively safe walking around in the streets on my own Native Atlanta, which also happens to have the largest industry for human sex-trafficking in America. I note this to say that these things happen everywhere. Under no circumstances am I saying that this information shouldn't be shocking or regarded harshly, but I'm noting how things outside of our own country can seem out of context considering we don't live there and we don't know what life like there is like.
I learned some really unnerving things today, but it went towards better understanding the culture I lived in for two weeks. I now understand even more so why in the dead of summer every girl on the street in Guatemala was either wearing long pants or a long skirt. I now understand so much more so than I did before and it's a little disturbing to think this was information I didn't know beforehand. It was an error in research on my part. Overall I think I had a very successful day and I look forward to doing more tomorrow.
Sincerely,
Journey
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