A Meeting with the Mayor and grand tour of the Gender Unit (cupboard) at Chalchuapa Council

The focus of our volunteering experience in El Salvador has been gender and we have been working closely with the Salvadorian NGO IMU (Institute for Women - Investigation and Empowerment of Women's Rights), a national women’s organisation which serves to facilitate the establishment of local women’s groups across the country with the aim of empowering women with the knowledge that they should be treated as equal citizens and have a right to a life free of violence.

We are entering the last 5 weeks of our time in El Salvador and have just started our second placement in Chalchupa, in the western part of El Salvador. IMU have been brilliant to work with and have pushed for us to get the most out of our placement and in return give the most we can.

Today, we were invited to visit the Mayor of Chalchaupa, Professor Mario Ramos Sandoval, we asked him questions about the representation of women in the council and what he is doing to support the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), in particular number 3 promoting gender equality. As a member of the socialist FMLN party he was keen to emphasise his party’s commitment to including women and told us that 35% of their representatives in Chalchuapa were women. Aside from this, Mario was keen to emphasise that although he supports the MDGs his council lacks support and fund from the national level to implement their vision and that the “1^st world,” as he referred to the UK, should be doing far more to support their realisation. In terms of gender, he said he would prefer the Council’s Gender Unit to answer our more specific question.

As a result we were introduced to Norma who runs the Gender Unit and shown to its office. All 7 of us had fitted quite comfortably in the Mayor’s office, however, for our tour of the Gender Office some of us had to wait in the corridor! It was quite literally a room the size of a cupboard, no more than 2 metres squared, situated at the back of the council building. Norma told us about the difficulties the Gender Unit has faced, for instance only recently has it been allocated its own budget and prior to this it had to make do with resources surplus to the requirements of other projects. The women have certainly faced an uphill struggle with members of the Council putting every obstacle in their way to ensure the Gender Unit fails. It is a testament to the local women’s organisations determination that the Gender Unit has the prospect of moving to new larger offices later this year.

Norma accompanied us in the afternoon to meet the leaders of the two local women’s organisations: ADCMAIG and ASMUCHEG. These organisations were set up with the help of IMU and continue to receive funding, support and advice from IMU. This was a fascinating meeting which gave us a real insight into the specific issues facing women in El Salvador. From the opposition faced to the suggestion of enforcing sexual education in schools, to the problem of men emigrating to the US to find new families, living their pregnant wives behind to raise their children alone without financial support. Perhaps the most shocking story we heard was that of a local Doctor who had been carrying out health check on women in a local community to check for cancer. A husband had heard that this man had examined his wife and seen her in the flesh and took it upon himself to attempt to kill the Doctor with a machete. If this the sort of obstacle a woman here faces to protect her health, it shows the huge distance this country needs to travel to overcome the gender divide and protect all its citizens equally. Another initiative the women’s organisations had initiated was to teach local women a skill to empower them financially; however, this resulted in Norma having stones thrown at her by the husband’s as she was chased from the area. It came to light that the President of the Community had spread a rumour that Norma was teaching women how to poison their husbands.

The fact that these women’s organisations exist and that the Gender Unit still exists shows some progress has been made. However, the struggles they face to enforce even the most basic of rights show that there is a long way to go. This is why IMU is so important to supporting women in this country by helping them to organise themselves and showing them that they have rights which their government should be protecting. Prior to coming to El Salvador it was beyond my comprehension that women could still be facing such an uphill struggle, in a country which is of medium income. We still have a long way to go!

Links

IMU - http://imuelsalvador.org/

FMLN - http://www.fmln.org.sv/

MDGs - http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/