Revolutionizing Guatemala, one sexual education workshop at a time

As a new intern development officer with WINGS, I was very excited to make my first trip into ‘the field’ where much of WINGS’ work takes place. I was to tag along with our team of youth educators to a small town called Tecpan located about two hours away from our Antigua office, where they planned to give a sexual education workshop to about 30 youths. This was my chance to see WINGS’ team of educators in action first hand.

I met Eli, WINGS’ Youth Program coordinator and, for that day, my cultural guide and chauffer, at 6am to beat the morning traffic. While I was feeling groggy and slightly unimpressed to be awake so early, Eli was wide awake and in excellent spirits; through osmosis her energy and enthusiasm flowed into me and pretty soon I was alert and anticipative of the day ahead. The excitement further mounted when I met the youths. They were so charged, so full of energy and so happy to be there to learn, that I thought back to my days at high school and felt guilty for my apathy when I was their age. After setting up, ensuring that everyone had a name tag and making introductions, Eli set in on the task at hand: to explain the social construction of gender and try to underline its importance, as well as bestow essential information regarding contraception and its various forms. My job was to observe, take pictures and report back.

While the youths had a lot of fun learning about different modes of contraception, earning sweet prizes for correct answers at a bunch of small games set up throughout the yard, the activity which affected me the most was when Eli started to explain gender. On the wall, Eli put a picture of a man on the left, a picture of a couple in the middle and a picture of a woman on the right. She then passed out illustrations of different kinds of work, one to each participant. As the group stood in a half circle around the wall, each was asked, one by one, to enter the circle and identify who, in their home, was responsible for doing the task that their illustration depicted. As I studied gender at university, I knew what was to come, but it was still very powerful to see more than three-fourths of all the students paste their illustrations around, under and beside the lone woman. The woman was swamped with work. Eli went on to ask why this was the case – why do women do so much more work than men? – laying the way for a discussion about gender, gender roles and how to challenge them. While the youths were very interested and attentive, the real reward came after the workshop when a young man came to Eli and thanked her, apparently he did not know women were equal to men before that day.

As we cleaned up at the end of the day the significance of what had happened during the workshop started to sink in. There we were, in a small town where stray dogs and shoeless children wander the streets, where birthrates are high and women have few rights in both their private relationships and in society at large, but thanks to the skill, knowledge and hard work of Eli and her team of educators, 30 youth just learned how to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, and, in standing hand-in-hand the young women and men learned that they both deserve respect and have the right to control their bodies. As Eli explained to the class, change is possible if each one of the participants makes changes to their own behavior. This, I thought, is what revolution looks like, one sexual education workshop at a time.