Ever since I returned from my
mission in Guatemala, I’ve felt a responsibility to share the stories of those
that I met while I was there. When I
first arrived in Guatemala, I remember feeling so overwhelmed by the difference
of lifestyle I had to adapt to during my time there. In this twine game, I thought I could
replicate part of that experience of enveloping oneself completely in a new
world. This is especially important to
me, because I feel that once people can better understand their counterparts
all over the world, there would be less blind hate or blanket stereotyping of
other cultures.
To narrow the topic down to a
smaller concept that could be communicated in a simple game, I chose the issue
of the oppression of women in Guatemala, specifically in the home. A google search of “women in Guatemala” which
reveals them as victims of many sexual crimes, violence without consequences to
the offenders, and small charities raising money. The women of Guatemala are represented as
faceless victims without a second side of the story.
Like
Chimamanda Adichie discusses in her TED Talk, it’s not fair to only accept this
single story for a whole group of people we don’t know about. While many people are fed by the stories
about the starving children, genocide, violence, and “tribal music” that
characterizes the entire continent of Africa, Chimamanda proves that this is
only one part of life in Africa, and more specifically in her case,
Nigeria. The same thing is happening
here, with the women and people of Guatemala, though that is not to say that all
those stories are not true, the other side of the story is not told.
The documentary “A Dollar a Day,” is
another representation of a first time experience in Guatemala, where a bunch
of college students live there for about 6 weeks with the goal of gaining a
better understanding of what it’s like to live in poverty. Now what one of the
big lessons they learn on this exhibition is that in a life of poverty,
everything revolves around obtaining food.
While the men are expected to go out to work and bring home money to buy
food, the women are responsible for preparing the food for the men.
In my game, I represented the relationship
between a husband and a wife based on how well a woman does her work in the
house and if the food is ready for the husband in the evening when he
returns. It is this cycle that women are
usually stuck in that we, as Americans don’t often understand. A woman does her work to support her family,
which is the most important thing to her.
Though she is stuck in a cycle that usually keeps her in poverty, she is
not usually thinking about how she should be treated better, or that there’s
better life for her over the horizon, she’s thinking about keeping her family
alive.
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