Homo-sapiens

So, when I found out I was going to Ecuador, my mom ventured most delicately, wouldn´t it end up being hard for me living in a Catholic country? Wouldn´t it be kind of homophobic there? I sort of discounted the concern though, I figured that it would be fine, and really it has been. Because I work with a bunch of people who do sexual health and HIV prevention it hasn´t ever been difficult to find the sexual diversity here. So although everyone in Ecuador thinks of Cuenca as a conservative and rigid place, I managed to find and make friends in the gay community without any difficulty. Maybe its the extranjera or foreigner dynamic or that fact that Cuence is really very small, but its been easier to make gay and lesbian friends here than it was in New York.

All this is leading up to the fact that on Friday, I found myself in a training with a group of wealthy women who are going to be volunteers with new mothers from this hospital for low-income women. And we did the homophobia section of the training. And some of the stuff that the women said was pretty intense. Now, I always catch myself when I find myself marveling at how racist or homophobic people are here, because I know in all honesty that for everyone open-minded forward thinking person in the US, there is someone making the very same jokes about black people or gay people at home that they make here. The difference being that folks from the US, even if they are racist, have a self consciousness or shame about it that I have yet to encounter here. The most racist jokes that I have ever heard, I have heard here, and people never preface them with the evasive disclaimer, "well I´m not racist, but..."

So whatever might have heard from some of las señoras, I know I could probably just as well have heard in Greensboro, North Carolina where I grew up, but leaving that aside, I do have to say that it was striking how ignorant a portion of these women were. Most of them were only a few years older than me, aggressively skinny, with exhaustively straightened hair, and all wearing one incarnation or another of the same black stiletto dress boots and designer jeans. What was interesting was that they were dying to talk about gay people. They had stuff they wanted to get off their chest. The comments ran along the line of: It´s a disease. Anal sex is what caused AIDS. If its not genetic and its not an illness, then what is it? Gay men and lesbians are half men or half women.

This was the first workshop I had been to with this group, so fortunately I was in the role of the observer and I kept my mouth studiously shut through the whole thing. The woman who was facilitating the group was remarkable, and did a great job of responding to and debunking a whole host of myths that would have rendered me speechless in english, much less in spanish. After I awhile I came to the uncomfortable realization that I was deriving a perverse pleasure from the situation. I had the unsettling sense that listening to these women, who by all accounts might feel superior to me given that I am not married, not skinny, without kids, living by myself in a foreign country on a shoestring budget, I was enjoying the feeling of moral superiority over them a little too much. I caught myself eagerly craning my neck to hear the next comment of the most backwards of the bunch. I´m not proud of that, but that´s what happened sitting there in that room, walking through that parking lot and realizing that the fifteen monstrous SUV´s filling the parking lot belonged to these women. I was better than them. I´m a volunteer after all. I´m here to do something good.

And of course I have to admit that they are as well, giving up time with their families to learn how to be volunteers. They all sat in the room through the whole thing, they listened to the facilitator when she tried to challenge them. I can hardly fault them for being products of their culture. I still have the typical New York reaction when someone asks me for money, I freeze and mumble how I´m sorry and walk on by. And when I do give someone food or change, it´s more for me, to soothe my angst about how things are in the world, than for them. It´s all part and parcel of the same thing, more or less.