By Miks Guia-Padilla, Anthrowatch

It is March, and it is Women’s Month. I’m reminded of a memorable trip I took 20 years ago at around this time of the year, when I was hiking up in the beautiful mountains of Surigao del Sur in the southern Philippines to a community of the Manobo, an indigenous group. For a city person like me, the walk to the village of some 60 households took 8 hours, as we clambered over slippery river rocks and trudged through the muddy mountain trails. I was working for a donor agency at the time, and I was on my way to the village for a project monitoring visit, one of my regular tasks. For travel like this, it meant being away for a week or more from my home in Manila some 450 kilometers north of these mountains, where my two young children waited. On this trip, as in many other similar trips, the village women, and sometimes men, would ask me: “You mean you leave your young kids behind? Who will take care of them? How can you bear being parted from them?”

It was difficult to explain to them that I worked not only because I needed a salary but also because it afforded me a sense of fulfillment, that I enjoyed traveling for its own sake, that such fulfillment and enjoyment in no way detracted from my love for my family, and that I didn’t think I should feel guilty.

I had the opportunity to go back to this community ten years later. This time, my purpose was to find out how development projects had carried out a gender mainstreaming objective and what were the effects on the community. And so there it was: the G word. At that time, only a few years had passed since the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, where a Declaration and Platform for Action had been forged to pursue gender equality and women’s rights. “Gender” was then the buzzword of the development world. Resistance to the word “gender” was marked. Why? Here are some of the reasons the Manobo gave: Taking on gender-related projects was blamed for taking away precious resources from the more urgent and vital problems like hunger and armed conflicts. Accepting gender as a development concern signified acceptance of a value of foreign origin, indicating a grave disrespect for the integrity of indigenous cultures. Undertaking gender work sowed division in the community because it was seen to encourage women to defy their husband, father or brother, especially traumatic for indigenous communities where consensus-building was highly valued.

And most community members had certain ideas about what a gender advocate was like, and to them I didn’t seem like one because, as they said: “You’re still married.” “You don’t look like a tomboy.” “You don’t sound bitter and angry.” “You’re not pushy.” “You like flowery hairclips.”

So much so that when in rural communities I had visited, “gender” was frequently mispronounced as “denjer” almost sounding like “danger.” Sadly, it seemed rather fitting. They felt that becoming gender-responsive was not worth the trouble it caused. After all, indigenous peoples communities are said to be generally more egalitarian than mainstream societies. But ask the men to trace the participation of women and men in food preparation – from growing the food in the swidden farms to tidying up after the evening meal – they would start out with proudly relating how women were their partners throughout the planting to the harvesting seasons. As the tasks drew nearer to home, they would reluctantly start to realize that as the tasks shifted from productive (producing the food and other basic needs) to reproductive (preparing and serving the food and other basic needs), the men took on less tasks and the responsibilities rested more on the women. Further probe them as to who attended and spoke up in community assemblies, they would acknowledge that one could hear mainly men’s voices while women stayed in the fringes of the crowd carrying young children or were busy in the cooking area.

And then there was the matter of how the organisations providing support services to indigenous groups like the Manobo brought to the communities their own views on gender. Women said that they would have liked to hone their agricultural skills but that only the men were invited to the appropriate rural technology trainings. And among the men were skilled healers including traditional birth attendants, but only women were asked to go to the health workshops. When women were offered participation in socio-economic projects, which they greatly appreciated, their productive roles took on more of their time, though there was no corresponding lessening of time for the reproductive tasks. And yet men could not be seen taking on more reproductive roles.

But why care about all these? For me, the answers lie in talking with the village women. In public they would staunchly declare that they felt that they were equals, that they trusted the men to make the right decisions for the household in public assemblies, that they were content with their roles and their life. But in more intimate conversations, they would share their aspirations about being able to explore the world beyond their mountains and their forests, about wanting to completw formal education and acquiring a job if only they were not yet tied to the care of the children and the home, about their own ideas for a better community which were never taken into consideration because these differed from the ideas of their men.

Even the men of indigenous communities had less opportunities – when compared with mainstream societies – to explore the world, to go school, to get a regular job, to have a voice in public, and the like. But it was very evident that the indigenous women had much, much less opportunities. If we say that we are engaging in development work to help bring about a better society, then the opportunities should be made available for both the women and the men – it should be a better society for both the men and the women. Many months and many treks later to other rural communities, I was to realize that the situation in this Manobo community in relation to gender was not unique.

Gender isn’t and shouldn’t be about the battle of the sexes. Becoming “equal” does not mean becoming “the same,” a frequently pointed out fear. Being gender-responsive should be about helping both women and men to shape their personhood and to develop their full human potential, without being constrained by societal expectations of what a man or a woman should be and can only be.

But I hope for another chance to go back to this particular community. I hope that when I do, I will find that the women’s secret dreams are no longer secret. More than that, I hope that these dreams are on their way to being realized. For if we want to hear the voices from the forests, the united chorus of both women and men will certainly be heard more than the lonelier sound of only half the community, if only the men or only the women were allowed to have a voice.

Miks Guia-Padilla, Anthrowatch

46-C Mahusay St.,UP Village, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines

Tel/Fax: +63 2 4360992

Email: miksgp@anthrowatch.org

Blog: http://anthropologywatch.blogspot.com