Let's Talk

We had our midterm meeting in the town of Supia a couple of weeks back.  It was a great opportunity to hear and learn from the projects happening in the other IFP groups, as well as get some feedback on our progress thus far.  I also got a chance to visit the small community of La Playita, where the Supia team of students has been working.  After a morning run up a mountain overlooking the valley below, it was clear that Supia is a fairly large and well-populated town.  On the contrary, La Playita is a very small community of 64 households, and is only a 5 to 10 minute drive outside of the town center.  I was amazed at the close distance between these two places, after seeing the huge discrepancy that simultaneously exists between them.  It seemed illogical to be able to swim at the pool at the hotel in Supia, then take a 5-minute drive to this small neighborhood that was so obviously stricken by poverty.  La Playita’s isolation from the rest of the municipality was all too evident once we arrived. 

During our midterm meeting, we learned that the Supia team is trying to start a sexual education program in the community to address the problems of teen pregnancy that they have observed there.  I learned that a large part of their project focus overlaps with my individual research project about women’s rights and resources in rural Colombia.  The educational aspect of the project that they are planning for is indeed necessary in a community where talk of sex is nonexistent.  Someone at our meeting posed the question of why it is so shameful to talk about sex or use contraception, yet there’s no shame when a 16-year-old girl is pregnant with a baby?  We started discussing cultural differences within La Playita that lead to this seemingly double standard.  When someone buys contraception, or talks about sex, instead of being viewed as a smart and informed individual, he or she is seen as promiscuous or sinful.  Generally, girls aren’t protecting themselves because they are ashamed of going to the hospital getting birth control pills.  This made me think about the information that I have gathered here in La Merced about teen pregnancy.  Even though education is more readily available here than it is in La Playita, AND girls have free access to birth control, teen pregnancy is still an issue.  Perhaps it’s not more education that is necessary, but programs that address things that are even more basic than education, a form of social intervention.  Although it’s not socially acceptable for a girl to be using birth control, it is widely socially accepted for her to have a baby.  So if we truly want to find a solution to the problem, it would essentially mean changing the way that a community thinks about sex.  At first glance, this prospect seems overwhelming and almost impossible.  How can a person change the way anyone thinks about anything?  And who’s to say that one person’s way of thinking is better than the other?  These are questions that I have found to be widely applicable to rural development work…even within our work with tourism in La Merced for example.   The lack of partnership and community support between individuals and businesses here is deeply rooted in the conflict and violence of the past, to the point where there is no longer an active conflict here, yet it seems that the current “every man for himself” culture has simply been born from the past conflict and become the way of thinking.  How can we try and change that way of thinking in order to create a holistic and inclusive industry of tourism from which the whole community can benefit?

In many cases, I think that simply starting the conversation is the most effective strategy…which is probably why most of the work I did in Tanzania boiled down to simply that: having conversations with people.  Whether it’s sex or community cooperation, the only way to effectively lead people to think differently about these things is to start the conversations about them.  By offering sexual education courses in La Playita, it will not only get information about safe sex to young adults, but I think that its almost even more significant that it will also lead people to start talking openly about sex in a community that would have otherwise swept the subject under the rug.  It is the same with our capacity workshops here in La Merced with the Tourism Association.  By simply having conversations with people about different ways that they could be working together and mutually benefiting, it’s possible to open up their minds to a different way of thinking about tourism.  In any case, as people working in the field of rural development, I'm realizing more and more that no matter how informal, it's important to remember the significance of the conversations you have within the community you are working.