Technicians Women
 


Hi! We are Seidy and Teresa. Two Maya women who have been working for several years with women in our region and in other places. Seidy has been working at COMADEP for 13 years. She started working with the women at the time that they were exiled in Mexico.The needs of the women at that time were different from those encountered in the current social and political setting.

Seidy continued working with the refugees that came back from Mexico and she supported the womens organization Ixmucané, that was started in Mexico.

    
Teresa has been working for five years with COMADEP and has also been working with Ixmucané. Since two years she is working with San Franciscanas, and helps to create a new structure of women in the municipality of San Francisco. She feels this is a totally different process and a new experience in the local work.

We work with COMADEP because we consider it most important to stimulate the participation of the women in various social areas. In this manner we hope to contribute to stop the exclusion of women for being poor and indigenous. 		 
  COMADEP has been supporting women for 13 years
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By working together and by a broader participation
the women fight for their basic rights
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Our work is fundamentally based on the training of women who often can't read or write. We give speaches, courses and trainings on different themes relating to women like:

  • Family violence
  • Civil participation
  • The participation of the women in the realization of the peace agreements.
  • Women and gender
  • Valorization of the womens work
Seidy is giving technical support to a credit project
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Furthermore we have also been encouraging the creation of micro enterprises in various villages. Some examples are: little stores, bakery shops, egg production, bee hiving activities, peanut butter production, cattle raising, production and marketing of traditional crops such as beans, peanuts, citric fruits and cardamom.

There are also some service projects like the maize mills that have contributed to the strengthening of the groups, and many of these projects have served as a means to organize the women.
¨Women, Weavers of Peace¨, it says on the t-shirt.
On the background, the president of Ixmucané
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The process of change with the women is slow and very hard to define. Without any doubt for us the changes have been mainly qualitative. Many women within the organization have become aware of their rights and make them count. Like I mentioned before, the women traditionally were not uses to give their opinion on things and did not participate. Traditionally they are expected to serve their husband and their sons, who represent the leaders of the family, but through the participation in the organizations they have gradually been changing these roles that they were assigned to. Now they are not afraid anymore of talking openly and of giving their opinions.

For instance: Vicenta Matias is a woman of the Mam ethnicity, inhabitant of the village of Nueva Guatemala and member of the organization Ixmucané. She started working with women in her village without assuming a particular function. Soon she was asked to assume the function of social promoter for COMADEP to help the women of the organization to give courses and trainings. Now she is very active and even participating in the Land Commission (a group that comprises different organizations and focuses on land tenure and co property). Besides, she represents her organization in various events at local, national and international level. She has traveled to Burma and to the Philippines for a meeting of returned refugee women to tell about her own experiences and to help her companions in the village.
    
Now the women aren´t afraid
anymore of talking in public
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IIn the villages of El Arbolito and La Libertad the women started a project for the sale of clothes. The women sell their projects to persons of their own villages but also to persons from surrounding villages. The women work separate shifts of one week.

This activity was started in 1999 with an amount of Q. 5,000.00 (US $ 625.00) of merchandise. They all put in own capital to build the local construction. Right now their capital has increased to an amount of Q. 16.000 (US $ 2,000.00) and the project has contributed to a higher income for the women. At the end of each year they calculate the work that each woman invested and pay them accordingly. This payment includes the costs that women had to make to go to town for different reasons related to the project.

Taking this project as an example a group of ten women also started working together in a chicken project as a means to earn an income. Currently they offer fresh and cheap meat to the people in their village and to surrounding villages. They also sell fried chicken to visitors who stop by in their town, taking advantage of the strategic position of their village along the main road.


Read about the experiences of these women
 
COMADEP is working with Indigenous women
from different ethnic groups, among which Q´eqchis´
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The future women of Guatemala    
 
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www.comadep.org
Constructed by:
Cinemotion Rising Art
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