This is about gender roles/roles de género as I see it. My writing shares my opinion, experience and reflections. I can’t speak for the whole country of Guatemala, in fact I don’t speak for Guatemala at all. I am a foreigner here and I share this as a collection of moments and not a string of facts.  My friend shared this word with me today:

Nearly impossible to avoid, ethnocentrism is dangerous and should always be in check in development work and, well, period.

I feel very convicted as I write this post. It’s my 203rd post. Please read with an open heart and a thoughtful mind, as I write with open eyes and mindfulness.

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I live in a house of 3 women. Abuelita is 90, Mamá is 64 y Hermana tiene 38 años. My Host Grandmother and Host Sister have the same name. It’s also the name of our town. And two other girl cousins share the name.

We live on the corner. From my bedroom window I can see the chicken trucks (US school buses transformed into public transport) as they pass by headed to the capital. Live-streaming through my windows is the soundtrack of Calle Principal: I can hear the tuc tucs wiz by, babies crying and the roosters dress-rehearsal at 2am. All this without the windows cracked.

I asked my family for their birthdates at dinner one night and two of the three had to search out their IDs to confirm the date. A question like “When is your birthday?” can result in a search through wardrobes and apron pockets so you have to be careful what you ask at dinner.

When I ask neighbor kids their birthdays, or jóvenes/teens, they often pause before the date or simply tell me they don’t know. “I think it’s in December?” they might say. It makes me sad but then again, birthday parties with blow-up castles are firmly wedged between the tradition of consumerism and humanism. My culture as impacted by the philosophy of Steve Jobs and Friedrich Niethammer. I regret that comparison: I’m not enough of a philosophy major to be referencing anyone named Friedrich. In fact I’m not even a philosophy major. Or in college.

And with the three ladies lives one cat and a handful of chickens. Our cat’s name is Mish (meesh). Mish is gato in K’iche’. Yes, his name is Cat. They don’t like the cat but they aguanta/deal with him because he keeps the rats away. Figure that. I have a fat cat in the States and while he did eat a camel cricket once out of fascination, he immediately hid when he heard the metal spring vibrate inside a curtain rod. I have a cat for company, they have a cat for extermination.

Every morning I pat abuelita on the shoulder and almost yell: “Saqirik Nan! (Good Morning Ma’am in K’iche’). Trabajando Abuelita?” and she says “Sí Hombre!” followed by a laugh. The first time I heard it, I nearly died of amused delight. “Sí Hombre!” “Yeah Man!” she just said to me.

When I first arrived to site on December 6, 2016, I’d come down the stairs to find abuelita talking to the chickens, putting away clean dishes or wielding an ax at the firewood. Everything was to my surprise as I readjusted to the lighting of rural living. Imagine a really petite lady in super slow motion padding shoeless across the dirt floor pursuing a chicken. She speaks K’iche’ and a little Spanish the way I speak Spanish and a hint of K’iche’.

Our separate tongues limit our conversation, but laughter is universal and Abuelita loves to laugh. As I was saying, when I descend from my apartment I say: “Trabajando Abuelita?” accompanied with a pat on the shoulder. (I’ve had to perfect said pat over the months because Abuelita is rather independent and she probably comes in at a cool 85 pounds. It’s possible her traje (indigenous ropa) weighs as much as her when soaking wet. At first I went in for the traditional kiss-on-the-cheek greeting but she doesn’t reciprocate. If I were to ask why I’m sure my host sister would say “por su edad” pero sabeeeer dude (sabeeer means ‘who knooooows’). Maybe some ancianos/elderly go in for the kiss on the cheek, but my general impression is that people here over a certain age don’t want to be touched. Maybe this is a request for respect or maybe they just get tired of people leaning around them. I might never know.

I don’t know the history of the Mayan dialects, but I love listening to K’iche’. Wikipedia (who else) says that the K’iche’ people have lived here since 600 BCE. Wow! Tradition! Tradition! (Credits: Fiddler on the Roof). But I have imagined how the Mayan language has evolved. For example, Evangelicas and Católicas are like the jets and the sharks here: you’re firmly one or the other. Certainly Christianity was not the religious tradition of the Mayans in 600 BCE. But my host family always attends Catholic mass. My host mom says it’s her time to rest (because she’s sitting down and not working). Meanwhile my mind is doing somersaults waiting out the 2 hour service (should I go to Chichi this weekend? Should I bite the bullet and buy internet? Wonder what we will eat for lunch. Beans. Definitely beans).

Their use of K’iche’ has Spanish words interspersed throughout. There’s no K’iche’ word for “United States,” naturally, so they use “Estados Unidos.” Or camioneta. Or tuc tuc. Or pizza. Also blender in Spanish is ‘la licuadora’ which they don’t have a term for in K’iche’, so they use licuadora. So I catch words in Spanish amongst the K’iche’ and I can gather what they’re talking about. But do I know what they’re saying about what they’re talking about? Usually nope. Gestures are helpful and I do know just enough K’iche’ to greet people on the street, refer to vegetables, talk about the weather and, oddly, say the number 11: julajuj (pronounced like hulahoop without the p).

But this post is not about K’iche’! Believe Me!

I paint this backdrop because, besides the fact this is my reality, I want to mention a reality in the foreground: machismo. Sometimes Abuelita says “Sí Hombre!” and other times “He Hombre!” (and that’s Sí Hombre in K’iche’) and it makes me laugh because there are no men in this house. There is no Hombre to say Sí to. Save Mish.

When I first arrived, Host Mom would say: “Todo está tranquillo aquí. Nadie le va a molestar. Solo mujeres en la casa, sin hombre.” And I thought of how our Sin Hombre house uses “Sí Hombre” as a phrase. What hombre are we talking about? Surely not Meesh. And she includes the fact that there are only women here to emphasize the calm. This reflects her feelings of men.

Abuelita’s husband died sometime after she birthed her 5 kids. My Would-Be Host Father left for another woman just after my host sister was born 37 years ago. I’m told this is why she is an only child. It’s never a question I asked, but they explain it as if I did. “Yes, my husband left me for another woman. That’s why I only had one child.” She told me my second day in the house. I was so surprised at the voluntary admission. In the US that’s not a conversation you have with a quickness until you know a person.

During training, there was often mention of “gender roles in country.” We recognized of course that every country has gender roles. But I’d never thought so much on the subject in my life, not until age 30 after I joined Peace Corps. It’s never too late to learn. And I did learn. More than learn, I reflected. I turned over gender equality and gender roles tirelessly like a rubix cube in my mind as I learned a new language, too. I thought deep and hard about our discussions around gender mixed between my burgeoning vocabulary. I thought about my experience as a woman in my 30 years. I thought about the messages I heard as a child including what it meant to be a girl, about my body, about my personhood and how it was slanted by the projection of gender roles in my culture. And then I tried to remember the term for ‘shower drain’ in Spanish.

Universally gender roles are boggy realities. Perhaps they’re based in some biological concept but biology isn’t conceptual, it doesn’t draw many lines or boundaries. I have yet to meet a man who can have children or a woman who can impregnate someone and I’ve been told before that men are stronger and faster than women. Is this true or is it a matter of how we define strength?

The thing is, I didn’t used to pay much mind to gender roles. I thought most feminists were angry women with unkempt armpits. I didn’t identify as feminist for a long time, I thought it would make me appear redundant. But nothing will make you rethink gender roles more than being in a country with unfamiliar ones.

I never want to “throw Guatemala under the bus,” in fact, this country me cae bien/sits will with me in ways that my own does not. Culturally they prioritize people over technology, patience over pumping hormones in poultry and collectivism over individualism. I’m not saying Guatemala is better or worse than the States in fact that’s my exact point, no one culture is better than the other. It’s also true that my view of this country is flavored largely by pueblo life. Xela, Antigua and Guatemala City don’t breed the same lifestyle as a small town. But outside of the metropolis of Guatemala City and the tourist towns sprinkled throughout, the life here speaks of patience, hard work and pena over other people. I’ve heard Guatemalans mention their foibles, be it extortion or trafficking, but this could not be further from my experience here.

To me machismo is like a water ring on a wooden coffee table. The water glass that caused the rings is gone, maybe it shattered a long time before, but the effect is left. You look at the table and maybe it shapes your thinking to see the shape of the glass left on the surface. Or maybe it reminds you of the way things used to be. Or maybe you set your glass on the same spot, so it lines up with the old impression. Maybe you cover it up with a colorful coaster. But ‘machismo’ is a term a Guatemalan used to define an aspect of Guatemalan culture to me. Maybe if I’d never heard the word, I wouldn’t see it the same. I wouldn’t be aware of the phenomenon of the yellow car until I bought one. Suddenly I see yellow cars everywhere but they’ve been there all along.

Sin Hombre we say Sí Hombre. And life goes on with Three Ladies and Mish.