big plans vs. REAL life--what difference does wording make?

Yesterday I spent my day in a nice hotel conference room at planning meetings. CONAMU is working on their new insitutional plan that will last for the next five years or so, and so the debates are around restructuring and whatnot. It's been interesting seeing how a government body goes about changing things to better achieve their ends.

Sitting in on the group regarding the promotion and observation women's rights, I found myself more frustrated than usual by the debates going on over how to describe the function of that particular set of departments. In JSA I always got frustrated in planning meetings like this because it seemed ridiculous. Yesterday was even more so.

They were talking about unifying the language, and needing to choose between saying "gender equity" and "equality of rights for women" throughout the plan. And while I understand how that's an issue on a paper level, I was just astounded by how much time they spent discussing it.

I thought back to my time in La Rinconada, and the women who I spent my mornings with in the kitchen cooking the government-provided lunch for the kids. I don't think a single mother had less than 3 children, and the majority had at least 5 and on top of that they were all extremely poor--96% in that area alone have basic needs unmet, and 81% live in conditions of extreme poverty.

I thought about Oscar's mom, raising her six young children on the very meager salary of her husband (she's lucky that he's even around). Her 4-year old daughter is paralyzed from the neck down because she received a bad vaccination when she was two. Oscar's mom struggles to make ends meet, and her family can't afford therapy for their daughter. Oscar, muddied by a fall in soccer, told me once that he was upset because his mom was going to hit him. Their situation is probably mild in comparison to that of other rural women.

She probably doesn't know CONAMU exists, and she probably doesn't care if she has "equal rights" or there is "gender equity"--it doesn't matter, her government is absent in her life, regardless of how many or how few rights she has. She just worries that her children are fed and are staying in school.

So I felt like saying "Maybe you all should worry not about the wording of things, but about your projects and programs. Talk about what you need to DO, not about how you should talk about it."