Editor’s Note: Stirring the Fire comes to you from Guatemala where our team is producing a documentary about how Population Council Guatemala is preventing violence against Mayan women.  STF team member Kara Marnell reports from the field below.

As I knelt down and searched the bright brown eyes of a little Mayan girl, I saw a future far different than what her eyes might see today.  I predict a future, filled with hope and opportunity, a girl who would know confidence and self-determination.

Young Mayan Girl

The town of Maya Kaqchikel is an indigenous community on the outskirts of the bustling city of Sololá.  Though it is a mere 20 minutes from Sololá, Maya Kaqchikel is free of tourists and shops.  Instead, its dirt roads wind between the ribbons of corn and working women with babies sashed to their backs decorate the landscape.

Maya Kaqchikel

The Stirring the Fire team had the pleasure of visiting this remote community on Saturday and meeting its warm and welcoming people.  The men and women stood side-by-side smiling as their young, excited children ran to greet us, some barefoot, others with clean but threadbare clothing.

In 2010, the community of Maya Kaqchikel became Population Council’s pilot community for its ‘Safescaping’ initiative, an effort to engage young female leaders to actively help determine what constitutes a “safe community” in answer to gender based violence and to help identify local paradigms that constitute various threats to girls’ safety.

Girls Who Participate in Safescaping Programing

As in many communities, the men here didn’t view themselves as the perpetrators of violence.  We’ve noticed time and time again that violence is so normal in these communities that it seems simply the way of life, the culture.  The community was reluctant to make changes fearing the admission that violence was a real problem.  Like so many issues, admitting there is a problem is the first step toward fixing it.  Ángel del Valle, the Monitoring and Evaluation Coordinator for Abriendo Oportunidades, explained how the community underwent 40+ hours of training and development to expose the common, everyday violence that women endure.  During the training, a powerful activity helped bring these issues to light and sparked an incredible change in the community.  First, the men and women were divided into two separate groups and given a tree.  Then, each group was asked to identify the “roots of violence.”  After completing their trees, the men and women came together and shared their differing perspectives.  The men saw violence (the little they perceived), as stemming from financial burdens and alcohol abuse.  The women, on the other hand, stood up for the first time, and declared that the females of the community worked twice as hard as the men and simply were not appreciated.  In response, a community leader, a man, rose and admitted that he had never realized that the women worked so hard.  Each day he returned home expecting dinner after a long day’s labor in the fields.  Yet, never before had he realized that the women were also working all day in and around the house, tending to the children and, even though they too were tired after a long day, they continued working to serve their husbands.
It was a breakthrough.

So simple, but so real.

All of this occurred a year ago.  Already, there has been a transformation and the community was proud to share their progress born of this understanding with our team. So, on this day, the community had prepared a series of reenactments to illustrate the violence that commonly occurred in the household and how the community had learned to tackle these tough issues.  How incredibly generous of this community to allow foreigners to see such a raw, open and rare view of itself.

Community Leaders in Traditional Dress for Reenactment

Violence against women is still a continuous battle here. Ángel thinks that domestic abuse still continues but an evolution, a revolution is beginning.  It’s not enough, he says, to simply create ‘noise among the girls’, but community focus and mobilization must occur for enduring change to take place.  This has been a community problem.   It takes a village to change the culture.

As we pulled away in the van, the men and women stood side-by-side thanking us earnestly for our visit.  It was then I realized that the men and women standing together was a symbol of their newfound sense of equality.  I waved goodbye to the little girl with bright brown eyes and thought that she now has a support group that many before her did not, the seed for a promising future.  A future taken for granted now in so many places far from here.  There’s hope for her.

Indigenous young women as change agents against violence in Guatemala

The high prevalence of gender-based violence in Guatemala leaves Mayan women and girls living in poor and isolated communities particularly exposed to risk. In a powerful approach to empower indigenous young women as agents of change in their communities, Population Council Guatemala, with support from the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, is pairing them with mentors from local organizations, to engage them in a range of prevention activities.

Among other things, the girls undertake GPS-based community mapping, plotting every household, building and route to produce maps that show where girls and women feel safe or at risk. The maps are making young women and their safety concerns visible for the first time, catalyzing community-wide discussion about violence against women and girls and ways the community could come together to prevent it. In addition, Population Council is training a cadre of girl leaders in participatory video to highlight issues of gender and violence in their communities.

The UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, administered by UN Women, is a leading source of support for efforts to end violence against women and girls across the world. You can join this vital work by donating to the UN Trust Fund and by taking action at Say No – UNiTE to End Violence against Women.