As in every good story, there is suddenly an element of evil. At the sound of a growl, Little Red Riding Hood freezes. The wolf has been lying in wait behind her:
"Ah, little girl, where are you going?” asks the wolf.
"I'm on my way to my grandma's house,” she innocently replies.
"And why are you all alone?” persists the wolf, gnashing his teeth as if savoring his innocent prey.
"Because my mommy and daddy have taught me to take care of myself,” says Little Red Riding Hood.
Fairytales reflect reality
The performance is part of the “Ruta del Arte,” an innovative program designed to teach young people about gender-based violence and how to prevent it. It was created by the Escena X theatre troupe, which is working with the Salvadoran Women’s Association, with funds from Oxfam America. All are part of the Campaign for the Prevention of Gender Violence, initiated by Oxfam America and several other civil society organizations in El Salvador in 2005.
This innocent fairytale is not so magical for many children who are bullied, or are victims of gender-based violence in El Salvador. María Enma Landaverde from the Santa Tecla Women's Association is convinced that social violence is rooted in domestic and other forms of violence in Salvadoran society, and that it is important to teach children to stand up for themselves and understand when they are being abused.
The fairytale continues with Little Red Riding Hood being harassed by the wolf and a woodcutter, who are offering gifts to try to persuade her to go with them.
"If you come with me I'll give you a cell phone,” the wolf says to her.
"I'll give you a DVD,” promises the woodcutter.
But Little Red Riding Hood refuses their offers. The entire audience backs her up, telling her not to let them touch her.
Leaning against one of the pillars of the school building is Juana Silvia Flores de Domínguez, vice principal of El Progresso School. She is already familiar with the nationwide Campaign for the Prevention of Gender-Based Violence, its motto: "Between you and me...a different life."
"Here, gangs are less of a problem than domestic violence, and families neglecting their children. Some of the kids come to school unwashed, wearing dirty clothes, and hungry...” she says of the kindergarten and first grade children. "We also have cases of girls who come in with bruises on them, and when the teacher asks how they got them, they say that their fathers hit them."
With the help of the students, Little Red Riding Hood resists the wolf and woodcutter’s advances and discusses some issues raised with her audience.
"What sort of violence are we talking about?” Little Red Riding Hood asks a boy, about 10-years-old.
"Physical violence,” he answers.
"If someone touches our private parts, what sort of violence are we talking about?” she asks. "Sexual violence!" her audience replies in unison, demonstrating that the children are learning the lessons.
The Art Route will continue its awareness-raising program over the next six months and reach more than 50,000 children and adolescents in 57 schools.
]]>With prices going up, she has had a hard time keeping her business running. “When I started, I didn’t have to invest much… But everything is so expensive now and I didn’t know where to get the money. The interest rates at a bank are so high. I couldn’t afford it," she says.
“And then we started this [savings] group. Now I’m happy because I took a loan to buy paraffin. I’m able to make my candles again, and I’m selling again.”
Ten years ago, leaders of 189 countries met at the UN and promised to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by 2015. They agreed to a roadmap setting out eight time-bound and measurable goals for 2015 -- the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). One of these goals is to promote gender equality and empower women. One measure of progress towards this goal is to look at the number of women working and earning money.
With paying jobs scarce in many poor countries, earning wages is particularly challenging for women. While many would like to start their own businesses, they lack capital and it is hard to find money to borrow. Without credit, they are unable to take advantage of economic opportunities and stay close to home and take care of their children.
Oxfam’s ‘Saving for Change’ program helps women organize themselves and pool their savings to form a small fund. From this fund, the members can take out loans, which they normally use to start small-scale businesses, deal with emergencies, or improve their quality of life. The program serves poor women in rural and semi-urban areas who do not have access to conventional micro-credit institutions. Savings can be as little as $1 a week and loans as small as $25, or less.
Sandra, like Rocío, also lives in Guatemala and recently joined a Saving for Change group. “Before, I had to go elsewhere to get a loan, and that was so difficult. But now we have our savings and can get our loans. And it’s our own money,” she says. Sandra took a 50 quetzales ($6) loan to buy wool for making Guatemalan cloth. She hasn’t sold it yet, but when she does she expects to make 200 quetzales ($25).
These amounts sound small, but they make a substantial difference in the women’s lives. Take Elena Miranda, who now owns a bakery in Chalatenango, El Salvador. “I took a loan to buy a machine to make bread and pastries… at only one percent interest. Within two months I could pay half of it back… With this business, I cover all the daily household expenses,” she explains.
Saving for Change is based on the group members’ own savings. They borrow no external capital. It teaches women how to manage their fund, and within a year the groups are able to continue their activities on their own. By the end of 2010, Saving for Change aims to reach 10,000 people in El Salvador and Guatemala. That is 10,000 empowered women who are one step closer to lifting their families out of poverty.
]]>Amid the clatter of sewing machines and the swish of scissors, those words—“yes we can”-- have been inspiring a team of Salvadoran seamstresses to ignore the naysayers, set aside their fears, and prove that with hard work and a bit of organization they can change their lives.
The women are members of a small workshop in the community of Cantón Los Potrerillos, one of five such workshops scattered across the Department of Chalatenango, El Salvador, that formed recently to take advantage of a sudden opportunity: the need for thousands of school uniforms in a plan announced by the government.
Oxfam and its local partner, the Association for the Entrepreneurial Development of Producers and Traders, known by its Spanish acronym ADEPROCCA, knew just who should be tapped: people hungry for work--sewers from the savings groups established a couple of years before. Oxfam helped initiate the groups through its Saving for Change program. Offering people guidance on how to save small amounts of their own money and make loans to each other, Saving for Change can serve as a launching pad for small businesses and individual independence.
All told, 49 women and one man from Chalatenango answered the government call. Their participation in some of the 360 savings groups in the area prepared them, in part, for the challenges ahead. With the help of Oxfam and ADERPROCCA, the sewers organized themselves into five workshops and bid on the national project, securing work in their communities and neighboring ones.
In just six months, the workshops cranked out 5,000 uniforms.
But it took some daring for the women to imagine themselves as competitive seamstresses, going after projects that demanded careful resource management and the production of large volumes of high-quality goods. One of the first steps was to master their fear.
“They will put you in jail if you ruin the fabric,” warned the naysayers.
“You will get fined,” said others.
“There is not much fabric. There will not be enough.”
Listening to all of that, Orbelina Alberto faced the yardage before her with trepidation. But confidence soon flowed.
“When we started, we were a bit scared to cut the fabric,” she said. “But when we delivered (an order) to the first school, then we realized everything went fine.”
Alberto is one of the seamstresses in the Cantón Los Potrerillos workshop. Its leader is 33-year-old Javier Sosa, the sole man who started with the project and who has been working as a tailor for more than half his life.
Until now, Sosa had never had a chance to work on an order of this size—and the challenges were daunting at times. Being the most experienced in the workshop, Sosa had to guide the others and correct them repeatedly, all of which led, inevitably, to some tension. But gradually, the sewers learned each other’s ways of working and all of them stayed focused on their objective: to meet their deadline and deliver uniforms of high quality.
But Sosa doesn’t deny the pressure he felt.
“We had to make trips to measure them all (the students). It gives you a headache,” he said.
Alberto, it turned out, had a knack for calming everyone’s nerves—and found herself stepping into the role of production organizer and cost controller. And when the group ran out of money for materials—they needed thread and zippers to finish the job—they turned to their local savings group for a loan of $100, which they have since paid back.
“It’s not only people in San Salvador who can do it, we can to,” said Sosa of all that his workshop has accomplished. “We can, too.”
For the sewers, the opportunity to participate in these workshops, to earn a regular income, and to boost their self-esteem has been life-changing.
The name of the workshop to which Maria Hemindia Zelaya belongs says it all: New Hope. Zelaya is a 41-year-old mother who won the bid for manufacturing uniforms at six schools around Caserio Los Alas. Another seamstress in the workshop secured the bid for two more schools and since January, the 10 women in the group have made 542 uniforms and plan to double that number.
Different tasks rotate among members of the group and on average, each woman has been earning between $200 and $250 a month.
For Zelaya, that means she now has the resources to pay for her son to go to college, which costs $45 a month plus $5 in transportation.
“New Hope means that we have today, with this program, the hope of not going back to unemployment,” says Zelaya
And with the income that Élida Cerros is earning, it means her family can stay together. Her husband, who has seasonal employment only, working in a corn field, had been mulling the necessity of emigrating to find more work. Now, the family can stay where their roots are—and that has brought Cerros great peace of mind.
“I’m happy for having a job because I have him (her husband) at home and he helps me with the child,” said Cerros. “He provides the corn and the beans and I am working. We pass it well now.”
Income isn’t all that the women have gained through this initiative. As important is what they have learned about how to stand up for their rights—especially when dealing with the directors of the schools.
Factories in the cities of Chalatenango and San Salvador were also bidding on the uniforms with prices that made it hard for others to compete against. But the seamstresses knew that price wasn’t the only consideration schools had to weigh—locally-based operations and the capacity to produce a high volume of goods were also part of the criteria for a successful bid. And the women made that case—successfully.
“They learned to demand their rights as being members of the community,” says Evelyn Salvo, program coordinator for ADEPROCCA. And today, the seamstresses of Chalatenango are not the same women they were a year ago.
“Now they have a voice,” says Salvo. “Today, each of them has something to say. They have delivered uniforms and got paid for it. They have discovered that they are capable.”
]]>In the department of Baja Verapaz the situation is critical. Guatemala's so-called dry corridor runs through this department, where a severe drought precipitated a food emergency last September.
"They lost last year's harvest because of the drought" explains Gloria Gonzalez of the Association of Community Health Services (ASECSA), referring to the small-scale farmers in the communities of Cubulco, Rabinal, and Salamá. "This winter started well. They planted new crops and were confident that they would do well. But now they've lost those crops as well. We estimate that six in ten farmers have lost their harvests."
ASECSA, with the support of Oxfam, is helping those affected with free clinics and food supplies, especially in Cubulco, where the population is still cut off. The only way of reaching this community is via a 300-metre hanging bridge which collapsed in the rains. Help is arriving by motorboat, but the population is afraid to go outside because of the risks posed by the Chixoy River, which has swollen considerably.
In the municipality of Champerico in the south-east of the department of Retalhuleu, the situation is also worrying. This coastal area was flooded when the Samala River basin overflowed, destroying harvests, killing livestock, and contaminating water sources. The Community Coordinating Association for Health Services (ACCSS) has been working in this region since the flooding caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998, and in May, just weeks before the rains began, it completed a project to train 20 water, sanitation, and hygiene-promotion leaders. They soon had an opportunity to put their newly-acquired knowledge into practice.
" The leaders were able to get to work and take immediate action,” says Lisa Donado of the ACCSS. “They performed evacuations, asked us for chlorine and aluminum sulfate to treat water, contacted the Ministry of Health about fumigation, and they dug channels to drain off the floodwater."
However, a great deal of rehabilitation work still needs to be done. ACSS estimates that just in the communities where they are working there are at least 500 contaminated wells and flooded latrines. "We're currently putting together a rehabilitation plan for the 10 worst-affected communities", she adds. "The most urgent tasks are to drain and clean the wells and latrines, repair communal water tanks, and promote hygiene."
In El Salvador, Oxfam has a warehouse holding pre-positioned supplies, which enables a rapid response. Within 24 hours of the declaration of national emergency, Oxfam and its partners were assisting the affected communities, providing water and sanitation, installing water tanks, and distributing buckets, diapers, and mattresses.
Oxfam has raised US$415,000 for the immediate response and rehabilitation work.
]]>Lawyers for the National Roundtable on Metalic Mining in El Salvador reacted to the initial hearing, saying that the proceedings ignored the essential role of local communities in determining whether mining projects can or should go forward, and the environmental risks associated with such projects.
Pacific Rim applied for the operating license in 2005 to open a mining project in the department of Cabañas, in the north of the country. It is suing for losses incurred on investments made during exploration work. Pacific Rim filed the suit based on the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), specifically chapter 10 on investments and chapter 12 on dispute resolution.
The economic and investment focus of the dispute was heavily criticized by Luis López, a lawyer for the National Roundtable on Metalic Mining in El Salvador. "Environmental issues and the rights of the local communities are not being discussed," he says. "This operating license is being treated as just another permit, without taking into account the fact that this country is very small and densely populated, and those issues [the environment and people’s rights] will only be addressed as secondary issues."
That is why the Roundtable, with the support of Oxfam America and the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) will be sending an 'amicus curiae'-- a friend of the court brief-- to the ICSID. This is a way for organizations and people directly affected to get involved in a case of this kind, between a transnational company and a government. "With the 'amicus curiae' we're going to introduce new elements that will have to be taken into account, such as the environmental issue" says López. "We want all aspects of the dispute to be discussed."
A second hearing is scheduled for August, when both parties will produce further evidence to support their positions. The dispute is expected to be settled in August or September of this year.
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“The water rose above the windows. That was around one or two o’clock in the morning. It rose very quickly. I left my house swimming through the window and we went to the house of a neighbor who has a wide wall. We all climbed onto that wall, even some dogs. There we stayed until five or six o’clock, when the rain began to stop. Then, with the light of day, we all helped each other to get out. By then, the bridge had already collapsed and they had to get us to the other side of the river with a rope, one by one. On the other side, a pick-up truck waited for us, ready to bring us here, to the shelter.”
Mayra’s little house of cement blocks remained intact, but she lost all of her belongings. In the mud and rubbish, she found a picture of her two children, 7 and 8 years old. At the sight of it, Mayra burst in tears. The loss of these irreplaceable things is what most hurts.
“We were the last ones in the neighborhood to get out. But not via the streets. We had to go through the houses of other people. We didn’t know what to do! My brother came and we put my mother in a big bucket to get her out. I walked behind them, hanging on to the ropes they provided us with. And when the car went over the bridge, it came down.”
“Eight months ago, my husband died and I was very lonely. So, I came here (El Achiotal), where my sisters live. But after a while I decided to go back, because my sisters gave me everything and I felt like I had to earn my own living. And after only two weeks of being back in my own village, this happened. I stayed in my house. When the water came up to here (chest high), I climbed into my hammock, which I had tied up as high as I could. But when I saw that the water rose even more, I decided to get out. I reached for a chair. I almost fell! Many had gone to the school, but I decided to go back to my sisters. I thought that maybe the water hadn’t entered there. I left on Sunday morning and when I got here, I saw that they were also evacuating people. It’s pure luck that I found my sisters! And now, where they are, I’ll be. Because I have nowhere to go. I’m all alone, without my husband, without my home, without my house.”
“We had gone to dig up turtle eggs. We were on our way back and we saw the water coming. First a little bit, and then it rose to our knees. We were seven all together, riding our bikes. When the water rose up to our chests, we had to throw our bikes on our shoulders. After one hour we could barely go on, our legs hurt too much! The bike is the only thing that I could save; I left it in a house where almost no water entered. But apart from that, I’ve lost everything, my little shack, the metal sheets, everything is gone. Just a pool of muddy water is left behind.”
“I called 911 and they said ‘Have patience. We’ll get there.’ In the mean time, we climbed onto a beam. The water was already chest high. At five o’clock a brother from the church came and he took one of my boys. I carried the other one. The water was already above their heads. We can’t live here anymore. The mud came above the windows, everything is destroyed. And we have no income. Normally we live from working in the sugar cane fields, but now, the harvest is ruined too.”
]]>While the team was at the mayor’s office, news arrived that two more bodies had been found—one of them, a 5-year old girl--which brought the number of dead to 16. Ten people remain missing.
“Seeing the devastation to the town caused by the enormous boulders, rivers of mud, and rubble that swept through I was surprised—and grateful—that the human cost wasn’t higher,” said one team member.
Living through the disaster was clearly a nightmare—the story of Emerita Rivas, 26, made that clear. The Oxfam team met her that day at the mayor’s office where she had been working for just two months when the disaster struck. Smiling and intelligent, she seemed already to be a crucial part of the local administration. She was meeting delegations, coordinating with the mayor and the secretary, and keeping tabs on where to send humanitarian aid.
Here is her account of the early morning hours of November 8 when the landslide hit:
“It was one in the morning and we heard a noise that sounded like heavy machinery that was getting close to us. But it was the mud and the rocks that were coming. We left quickly to knock on doors so that people would leave. Soon, we also heard the whistles, the sign that everyone had to get out. Ever since the earthquakes in 2001, people have been organized into eight sectors, and every sector has a leader.
“At around two in the morning, police cars and private cars started to arrive in order to bring people to the shelters, but there wasn’t anything there—the mats didn’t come until Monday. Thank God, the area where we live was not affected and we could help out during the emergency. We spent all day Sunday evacuating people. There were many injured people. People had to go up on the roofs or hang onto the walls, and those walls have broken glass in order to prevent robberies.
“Even though our neighborhood wasn’t affected, I am also sleeping in the shelter, because I am still afraid. Many people have suffered nervous breakdowns. One neighborhood and the town center ended up completely destroyed and the authorities have said that it’s not a good idea to rebuild the town.”
]]>Torrential rains the previous weekend triggered the landslide and spread devastation across El Salvador. The disaster has left 184 people dead, and in Verapaz alone, more than 800 people have sought refuge in shelters.
Oxfam has been responding to the disaster by providing hygiene kits, water tanks, stoves, and kitchen utensils. The organization is now helping about 4,200 people and assessing the damage to determine how best to provide support as communities work to recover.
]]>Cars lie twisted and half-buried in the mud.
White-capped waves appear in the torrent of water that sweeps past a gas station.
The scenes from the floods and landslides that struck El Salvador last weekend reflect a storm of almost unbelievable intensity.
“In San Vincente, more than a foot of rain fell in just four hours,” says Carolina Castrillo, regional director for Oxfam America.
These have been the deadliest rains since Central America’s storm of the century—Hurricane Mitch—struck El Salvador in 1998. More than 200 people are dead or missing, more than 2,000 houses have been damaged or destroyed, and crops that the rural population depends on for food have been obliterated.
“Where are we going to live, now that we have lost everything?” asked a woman in Verapaz, a town nearly destroyed by a landslide. “Where are we going to plant, what is going to happen to our lives?”
In the wake of Hurricane Mitch, many Salvadoran communities have joined forces with aid providers to reduce the deadly outcomes of violent storms and earthquakes. Over the past four years, Oxfam has supported local organizations to help form and train committees within the villages to operate early warning systems, develop evacuation plans, and administer first aid. This week, more than 70 Oxfam-supported community-protection committees were mobilized to help survivors reach the safety of shelters.
“Although this week’s storm was destructive, the partnership between aid providers and communities has made people less vulnerable than they were eleven years ago,” says Castrillo.
“Hurricanes, earthquakes, and landslides are all hazards in El Salvador, but the risks they pose to communities can be reduced,” she says. “That’s what we’re aiming for."
In the meantime, the needs on the ground are real and urgent, as survivors struggle to recover. Among their countless losses is peace of mind, as they live and relive the disaster. Days after the landslide, a boy from Verapaz describes his gripping fear: “I can’t speak because I feel my heart beating.”
Oxfam has built a warehouse stocked with emergency provisions in a disaster-prone area of El Salvador. In the November flood emergency, we were able to rush food, clean water, shelter materials, mattresses, first aid kits, and other essentials to shelters for displaced people, while making plans to help ensure longer-term food security when people return to their homes.
Donate now to Oxfam’s Global Emergency Response.
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The heavy rains that pummeled El Salvador on November 7 triggered deadly floods and landslides that have buried homes, collapsed bridges, and destroyed crops. By November 9, 130 people had died—many in a single devastating landslide—and more than 13,000 had fled to emergency shelters.
But it could have been worse. Oxfam and our local partners began helping communities prepare for this emergency long before it ever came to pass. Working in areas that are vulnerable to floods, landslides, and other hazards, our partners have helped villages form community-protection committees that they then provided with equipment and trainings in first aid, early-warning systems, shelter management, and evacuation planning. When the downpour began to signal danger, 71 Oxfam-supported community-protection committees swung into action and helped guide their people to safety.
Once in the shelter of schools and community buildings, many felt the impact of another Oxfam preparedness measure: a nearby warehouse stocked with essentials. Events like hurricanes and earthquakes that put communities at risk often damage and destroy the roads and bridges that connect them with outside help. The Oxfam warehouse, which is located in a hazardous region of the country, helped ensure that we could move emergency equipment to the shelters quickly and safely.
So when disaster struck, Oxfam aid reached three shelters in the hard-hit areas of Zacatecoluca, Melara, and Puerto La Libertad within hours of the arrival of displaced families. Industrial kitchen equipment and utensils and tanks of clean water helped ensure that there was food to eat and water to drink, and mattresses provided a measure of comfort.
Oxfam also quickly purchased materials for distribution, so other shelters in Zacatecoluca and San Salvador soon received deliveries of first aid kits, hygiene materials, and food, as well as pickaxes, wheelbarrows, and shovels to facilitate the clean-up effort around shelters.
Meanwhile, teams of staff and partners were fanning out across the affected areas to determine how best to meet the longer-term needs of those who have suffered the loss of homes and the means to make a living.
“Disaster preparedness can save lives and help alleviate suffering and economic losses,” says Oxfam America humanitarian response director Michael Delaney. “We hope our supporters will help us sustain and expand this program so we can continue to help communities and partners plan ahead.”
Read more about Oxfam’s preparedness work in El Salvador.
Donate now to Oxfam’s Global Emergency Response.
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