women – katherine stanley obando

Women who put my 2020 in perspective

Posted on November 1, 2020 by stanleyobando

We’ve all got a lot on our minds on this particular Sunday. If you’ve even had the mental energy to click “open” on this email, I salute you. But I’m writing this post to share an experience that, while very connected to the difficulties of life today, really helped me take a breath and put some of the challenges of 2020 in perspective.

Earlier this year, I won a Creative Grant from Costa Rica’s Ministry of Culture to carry out interviews with women in San Josés comunidades urbanomarginales. These low-income communities can range from neighborhoods that look fairly standard for San José, to tin-roofed shantytowns, often built along riverbanks or other unsafe terrain. I wanted to ask women about their experiences during the pandemic, how they’ve gotten through it, and how they think these crises could be better handled.

Our conversations reminded me that, while certain moments in history can have a huge impact for years to come, there is also a continuum of injustice and justice, weariness and energy, selfishness and generosity that began long before any of us were born, and will continue on. The resilience of these women shows us how we can tip the scales towards goodness from wherever we are.

I hope to continue these interviews next year through El Colectivo 506, because I know I’ve only scratched the surface of the deep reserves of wisdom and knowledge that exists in these communities. I also hope that, today or at some point over the coming weeks, you’ll find a moment or two to skim these short reflections from Verónica, Corina, Elizabeth, Sara, Yamileth, and Berlín. You can see them all at https://medium.com/five-questions-2020/.

Wishing all these women, and all of us, fortitude during the days ahead.

Scientists, artists, athletes… and badasses

Posted on September 8, 2020 by stanleyobando

Six days left to go, and today I want to celebrate what yesterday’s post was supposed to be about (until current events took things in a slightly deeper, darker direction). Really, it’s just a sunnier side of the same street: the power of Costa Rica’s women.

The bras in this house were already getting a little nervous at the start of this past year. As I’ve written about quite a bit, recent events had driven my feminism to a new level. The election of a president who boasted about sexual assault. Facing conundrums in my work as a journalist that unveiled a fiery core I hadn’t known I had. My first experience having men talk around me in a meeting I was running, for an organization I directed, as if I wasn’t there.

But what really fired me up was, during this past year, seeing the stories of brilliance and bravery all around me. I barely had to look outside my field of vision to be gobsmacked by excellence. Women’s soccer players stepping up during the pandemic. Environmental advocates Christiana Figueres and Melania Guerra. Tomorrow’s leaders on the rise at Soy Niña. A brave doctor and a whole bookful of other rebel girls. The list goes on and on.

I think my epilogue to yesterday’s post on the horrible murders of women in Costa Rica is this: when those deep waters and currents of sexism are too much, one way we can rise into the air above and take a long breath of fresh air is simply to fix our sights on these endless sources of inspiration. They aren’t just a demonstration of why we must curb this violence: they are the pathway out of it. Whether not they’re directly engaged in women’s rights, they’re showing women, girls, boys and men what womanhood really means. From a lab or a stage or a running track, they’re making us safer.

Investing in their talents is perhaps the surest solution we have.

Featured image from Soy Niña.

Our daughters and the poisoned apple

Posted on September 7, 2020 by stanleyobando

“I want to disappear,” my daughter said.

“What?” My hand, resting on her shoulder, tightened its grip instinctively to match the squeeze of my heart.

“It’s not fair, Mom. I want to disappear, too.”

We had just turned around on one of our quarantine walks on a dirt road near the top of Volcán Irazú to find that my husband, about a hundred feet back, had been completely subsumed in a sudden fog. Cartago is known for las brumas that sweep through its hills, and this one had made him disappear completely. My daughter, her pink sweatpants half-tucked into unicorn-patterned rubber boots, had made to run off into the mist herself, but I’d stopped her. He was crossing a rickety bridge over a deep gorge, and a car might pass, and we couldn’t see him, and I was afraid. I was afraid in ways that had nothing to do with anything around us at that moment. I was more afraid than I could ever express.

“I don’t want you to disappear,” I said, just as my husband’s faint form finally became visible. I tried to say something more, but I couldn’t.

The only word on my lips was Allison.

Allison Bonilla. The girl who did disappear on March 5^th of this year, walking through the cool night just a short drive from where we were standing, heading home from class in one of the most beautiful valleys of the most beautiful country. The girl whose mother left their house to meet her daughter halfway as she walked home from the bus stop.

Allison never arrived. She was just 18. She just wanted to go to class, and to come home again.

Their neighbor confessed to her rape and murder this past week.

Allison has become a name on millions of lips. She has become a chill in the blood of all her country’s mothers, all mothers of girls. When we read that her mother had been waiting for her, patiently, in the dark, just feet from the place where their neighbor snatched her away forever, the chill ran through us from head to toe. When we saw her mother’s face in the paper, her eyes over her mask as she stood, arms crossed, watching the killer as he was escorted through the halls of the Judicial Branch, we felt it again. This whole, small country has a knot in its stomach, a nausea.

I am sorry to say that I didn’t know the word “intersectional” until after the 2016 election. That’s when I started to learn about the times when white feminism failed to connect to other struggles for justice. I started to learn about the idea that while each struggle is different, that while you can’t compare Costa Rican femicide to the ruthless murders of Black citizens of the United States at the hands of the very law enforcement officers who should protect them, you also can’t care about one without caring about the other. I learned that, in our brains, we must make room for all these movements, rising, to converge.

If you are reading this, you probably live in the consciousness of both those realities, the U.S. context and the violence against women in Costa Rica. You understand this intersection between Allison and Breonna. Between María Luisa and George. Between those chains of victims’ names – awful, relentless, ever-expanding – and the worlds they represent. Between the discussions these deaths have started, over and over, and of which we are so profoundly tired.

There is a recipe for it, a dance that’s pre-choreographed. In Costa Rica, when it comes to femicide – feminicidio, the murder of a woman because she is a woman – the recipe looks like this. The victim’s name becomes a hashtag; women put filters on the profile pictures with heartbreakingly simple assertions like “We want to live”; some men put up posts like “nací para cuidar a la mujer” – I was born to take care of women; women try to explain that we don’t want to be taken care of, thanks – just not murdered; other women criticized those women for never being satisfied, for trampling on those nice men’s nice gesture, for being so hard to please; and still other men publish, “We get murdered, too.” Women aren’t the owners of pain. All lives matter.

These are currents that push back and forth against each other, washing back and forth, sad and angry, wise and foolish. They are the same kinds of currents that wash back and forth in my own country surrounding racial injustice. All the while the victims lie beneath, among the smooth stones on the riverbed, unknowing, unseeing.

It is all so foolish, and it goes nowhere. We keep on losing. The stones keep dropping through the water, the next name, the next hashtag. The next life snatched away from a mother standing watch. At times, we just want to sink down there with them: not for death, but just for silence.

How do we rise out of the water altogether? Into the air, gasping for breath? Breath. A loaded word – and doesn’t that say it all, the fact that breath is a loaded word? The breath that has been denied, so ferociously, to Black women and men in my country, who are required to live in fear not only of random strangers but also of those who are supposed to protect them. The breath that a different kind of blind hatred and contempt choked from María Luisa in Manuel Antonio earlier this year.

What pulls us out of the water is love. I think I first fell for the sensations of this country: its sounds, its sights, the way its air felt on my skin. Later, I fell in love with the way it talks, its culture that spooled out in front of me along endlessly twisting and interesting tunnels and curves. But my latest love affair, developed over the past year of writing daily posts about this country, has been with the women who live here. The artists and scientists, the activists and authors. A group in which I include myself, through presence if not citizenship. I pour the past 16 years and my deep admiration for the women of this country into a proud, tentative “we.”

We, the women who live their lives in this land, are extraordinary. And we are being murdered in such quantities. We march, we post, we mourn, and, somehow, with Allison, we reached the end of our breath. The wind has been knocked out of us. We ask, what else can we do?

The answer, perhaps, is: nothing. Just as the burden of anti-racism should fall on white shoulders, and the burden of ending homophobia should fall on those who are straight, it is up to the men of this country to figure this out.

Not to take care of us. To take care of yourselves, in the toughest sense of that phrase. The sisterhood is in place. It’s time for the brotherhood: a brotherhood of self-questioning, of raising the bar, of pushing back against each other as Vinicio Chanto outlines here.

As you do the work, your sisters will continue to disappear. Disappear. Just hearing my daughter say that word made my heart contract.

What hurts the most, I think, is the knowledge that while, for now, I can keep that fear within myself, a sort of poisoned apple in my heart, I will have to share it with my daughter as she grows. I will have to hand it to her for her to try, nibble by nibble, taking that poison into herself so she can protect herself.

When I was in seventh grade in Dunbarton, New Hampshire, I’d sometimes be dropped off before anyone else was home. I’d put on some boots and take our dog, Max, into the woods behind our house. We’d walk around, muck about, sometimes go as far as the dike that stretched high above the wetlands. I don’t remember anything too specific from those walks: I wasn’t learning the names of all the trees and plants, or building forts. I don’t remember any fear or worry about wandering on my own with a dog who wouldn’t hurt a fly. I just remember the space, the cold inhale in winter, the slushy mud in early spring, the look of the wetlands glinting through the trees.

My daughter won’t have afternoons like that. I hope she won’t walk alone late at night as I did during university, either. I don’t think she’ll travel alone quite as widely and freely as I did. She will be robbed of something I once enjoyed through my privilege as a white person and my ignorance about the dangers facing women. What’s more, I will be the person who robs her of it, by instilling in her a necessary caution.

I will take it from her bit by bit in the talks that will fall to me to lead, the precautions it will fall to me to teach her. I will steal from her what has been stolen from me. I will rob her of her innocent aloneness, her privacy, her ability to feel free and safe all by herself, to walk where she likes without a thought, to stroll the woods without a care, to go home from a night class on the town bus without stepping into a heavy legacy. I will rob her of certain chances to nurture that space between her ears, the unencumbered breath in her lungs.

I will be the thief, but I will not be at fault. I will teach that to her, too. I will teach her the power of boundaries, of analysis, of assigning blame where it belongs and deflecting it where it doesn’t, deflecting it along with the blows of an assailant. At her side, I’ll learn how to throw a punch and gouge out someone’s eyes. I will have to raise her powerful, confident, strong, and angry. Because if she looks at this world as it is and doesn’t feel anger amidst all the other emotions – all the love, gratitude, excitement that I hope she’ll also feel – then I won’t have prepared her well. Anger on her own behalf. Anger on behalf of others.

What do I have to offer her in exchange for all this taking? A voice she can raise at a moment’s notice. She will have the possibility to connect to other women anywhere in the world. When we got home after our walk in the mists, I watched Alexandria Ocasio Cortez show us her morning makeup routine. I was right there with her, in her bathroom, learning how she creates her signature red lip. This YouTube mix of color corrector and commentary on the patriarchy dropped into the jangling chords of my mood in a strange way.

I thought: it is a consolation prize, I suppose. This community. This sisterhood. Perhaps it is not something we can touch, women we can see in the flesh, but they are out there, and we can hear from them.

Is it enough, these virtual connections in the face of all that we lose in terms of physical safety? Is it enough, being able to scream any way we want, scream and rail and testify?

Will it get us through while our brothers fix what’s ailing them?

It will need to be. Our daughters will have to make it so.

Featured image from Facebook via Andrea Terán.

Generosity that will blow your mind

Posted on August 24, 2020 by stanleyobando

My husband was watching Channel 7’s midday news on Saturday when he shouted to me, “Come see this!”

I was glad he did. The show was covering a story that took me some time to wrap my head around, thanks in no small part to the biases and preconceptions messing around in my brain. The headline said that indigenous communities in Talamanca, in southeastern Costa Rica, had donated huge amounts of food to professional female soccer players. I kept thinking, “Isn’t it the other way around?”

No. No, it’s not. A group of Talamanca women spent 10 weeks going door to door in their communities, on foot and by boat, to collect more than 10 tons of yuca, plátano, chayote, ayote, chile dulce, culantro coyote, pejibaye, limón, malanga, caña de azúcar, mamón chino, fruta de pan, naranja, toronja, carambola and cacao. And others. But you get the idea.

They donated the food to women soccer players who are having trouble making ends meet during the COVID-19 crisis and who, in many cases, have themselves been voices for solidarity and philanthropy during this difficult time. (Check out this Boost from July.)

“We don’t have much moey, but that’s no reason not to show solidarity and share the little we have with people having a hard time,” community Edith Villanueva told Channel 7. “This country has helped us during our toughest times – during floods and earthquakes and now during the pandemic… so we thought we could show our thanks to Costa Rica by donating part of our harvests.”

Why soccer players? She said they know that these women practice all day long, holding down jobs and studying in many cases, and have been affected economically just like others in Costa Rica.

This isn’t the first time Talamanca’s indigenous communities have taken my breath away with their philanthropic efforts. When Hurricane Otto devastated northern Costa Rica, they gathered food and sent it all the way across the country to help those in need.

Once again, this region is giving us a master class in what it means to stand with others.

All images from Vice President Epsy Campbell’s public Facebook profile.

By mothers, for mothers: a gift from a land between volcanoes

Posted on August 11, 2020 by stanleyobando

Miriam, Lilliam, Karina, María Luisa, Jessica, Kathia, Nelsy, Maryuri.

These are the eight women whose handcrafted baked goods, sweets and arts have gone into a special Mother’s Day box being sold in the northern Costa Rica community of Bijagua. Donations of $15 via PayPal (through close of business on Wednesday) can be used to provide a box for a local mother in this hardworking ecotourism hub, and support the women who have joined forces to produce the handmade gift boxes.

Here’s what local Costa Rican-Australian entrepreneur Pip Kelly (also a mom) has to say about how she’s connecting international donors with this effort from local business Entre Volcanes through a “pay it forward” scheme where you can sponsor a box for a local mother:

Please consider joining this lovely effort. Costa Rica is bursting with artisans and ingenious mothers, but it’s particularly nice to see how eight moms have come together to produce something bigger and better than they could have on their own – and how Casitas Tenorio B&B thought of a clever way that international supporters who can’t sample the treats themselves can create a Mother’s Day surprise for someone else.

An accidental discovery

Posted on August 3, 2020 by stanleyobando

For better and, quite often, for worse, I belong to some “expat” groups on Facebook. Expat is not a word I like, since it’s so often used to differentiate white or rich people from others foreign groups. However, the groups are often sources of useful information.

And then there are the nights that they’re sources of comments like the one some man put up yesterday expounding upon the virtues of “ticas.” Yes, their housekeeping skills were among the skills touted. No, the astonishing frequency with which this group of humans tends to break records, blaze new trails and defy expectations was not among the traits he praised.

This gem of a man was swiftly removed from the group by a watchful admin, but before that took place, I angrily opened another tab and typed “Ticas Poderosas” into the search bar. Powerful Ticas. It was a mistake – I was thinking of the “Ticas Sin Miedo” book from which I’ve published translated excerpts this year – but lo and behold, there’s a site for that.

Ticaspoderosas.com features interviews, op-eds and more that shine a light on the incredible women of this country. Bravo to them; because of a Googling mistake, I’ve found myself a great new resource. Please join me in following their work. And if you come across an appallingly sexist comment directed at the women of Costa Rica, you’ll have the perfect retort right in your back pocket.

What I want men to know about women’s safety

Posted on July 24, 2020 by stanleyobando

Yesterday, I shared a photo of myself from when I was seven years old, leaping on a beach in Costa Rica for the very first time. Here it is again.

Thirty-four years and one short drive away from that shining moment, a Costa Rican woman was brutally murdered in her hotel room. The news has had my heart in my shoes all week. I think that, for better or for worse, we are affected most by crimes in which we can see ourselves clearly. The fact that María Luisa Cedeño Quesada was in her 40s and lived in San José, that she escaped for a weekend alone from the stress of working hard during a pandemic, that she chose a weekend destination I have visited many times and would choose again in a heartbeat, made me envision myself in her place with particular clarity.

All she wanted was a little peace and quiet.

Whenever these crimes occur, I always see tourism leaders and business owners from the affected area expressing concern about these stories being publicized. This time was no different. There’s pushback against people who were sharing the news on social media (“Why would you share that news and damage our reputation?”). Pushback against the harm to the country’s international standing. Pushback, sometimes, against the woman for whatever she was doing: in this case, staying in a hotel by herself.

Pushback against anything that will make women afraid.

I would like to say the following. Save your energy. We are afraid anyway.

A certain layer of fear lies on us all the time when we move through the world. We might not all call it “fear,” exactly. Some of us might call it “alertness” or “awareness,” rather than fear; and it may or may not stop us from doing things; but we are always afraid/alert/aware when we walk alone, or do anything alone, or lock ourselves into our hotel room at night the way María Luisa did. When I read the news about her murder, I was instantly transported to the hundreds of times I have tested and retested a hotel door’s lock from the inside when I am there all alone. What María Luisa experienced was a nightmare we all sense, lurking on the other side of those doors.

The fact that a crime takes place is not showing us something that we’d never thought possible before. We are not shocked. We are saddened. Unless you have a rash of killings in your town, we are no less likely to visit. The horror of each new headline simply reaffirms a burden of fear so constant that we might not even notice it’s there. A white, privileged woman like me cannot compare her burden to that of the burden carried by Black people in the United States, for example, except that it is like a garment we put on when we are very young. We put it on as soon as we become aware of our physical characteristics, the first time we are followed or cat-called or something worse, and we only take off on special occasions if we are very lucky. (This is why it is so strange when any white woman fails to understand Black Lives Matter, by the way; we should be able to imagine, at least, that much greater pain, based on the small piece of it that we do know; but I digress.)

The crime does not reveal. It reminds. It reminds us of the fear we feel as we close our doors or go for a walk or a run, even in our own neighborhood. I was followed on a quiet road just a week or so ago by a man in a car, a man who pursued me so obviously and creepily that two women driving past in a truck stopped to warn and advise me until he finally hit the gas and screeched away. None of the three of us were surprised. We were just reminded of how close we are, at any time, to the abyss. The watchfulness of strangers is often the only thing that can protect us.

So to the tourism leaders of the world, especially the men among them, I would like to say that there is nothing to stuff under the carpet. The cat is out of the bag. You might as well just go all in for your guests’ safety, especially women, people of color, LGBTQ+ visitors and, in particular, people who inhabit more than one of those categories. Trust us: it’s on our minds already. When I walk into a hotel anywhere in the world and received tips or support to make my stay a safer one, or see a hotel in a place I love posting about what steps it’s taking for guest and community safety, or any business leader sharing proactive actions to lobby for new partnerships and policies to protect women, I am not put off; quite the contrary. I don’t think, “Oh my lord, this is a place where I could be in danger.” Because every place is a place where I could be in danger.

My daughter is seven, just as I was when that picture I shared was taken on a Costa Rican beach near Manuel Antonio. In the photo, I am jumping with glee as I look at the ocean. My daughter jumps up and down whenever she is excited, or whenever she’s watching a TV show where something exciting is happening: she’ll just hop out of her seat and jump up and down as she watches the screen, over and over again, her natural response to emotion. I always watch with a smile on my face. Needless to say, I no longer jump for joy myself. I am too heavy for that, in every way. It makes me think about that weight we carry, everywhere we go.

The girl in that picture had lots of solo travel ahead of her. While the photo was being taken by her beloved father or aunt and she was safe under their eyes on the beach that day, she would go on to make her way alone through towns in Greece and China and Mexico. She would run alone on any number of beaches, and walk on any number of far-off streets, and confidently flag down any number of taxis, and lock herself into any number of hotel rooms alone. She would even go to bars alone and meet her husband in one of them; she could so easily have met with a horrible fate there. It was pure luck. It should not be luck to not be murdered, but it is.

When I look back on my life since my first visit to Costa Rica at age seven, I see that many of my most important memories – the ones that would flash through my mind before dying – are of the moments when I traveled alone, when I truly met myself. The view from the UK’s Southwest Coastal Path, where I hiked alone for days. The feel of sand under my bare feet as they traced a lonely line along a beach at night. The sore feet I’d get from walking on and on through a city or town, no companion, no destination.

María Luisa had memories like that, too, as well as memories of people, of family and friends. She probably didn’t even have the chance to play those memories back through her mind on Sunday as she scrambled for her life, scratched her attacker so that the police would be able to identify him the next day by the marks on his skin. That last view of those memories was one of so many things she was robbed of on Sunday. We say, over and over again, #niunamas, and yet there are always more and more.

I experienced all of my solo adventures with a certain tightness in my chest and distrust in my eyes that are part of being a woman. But I did them nonetheless. I want my daughter to do them. I want the world to be open and honest about the dangers she will face. I want the world to talk about these murders of woman after woman in Costa Rican and Latin America. I want our leaders, in this case tourism leaders, to put all the weight they can behind the legal changes and prosecution and cultural shifts and nitty-gritty practical steps that will make those daughters and sons safer.

I suppose I want every hotel owner and every police officer and every human in the world to see all other humans as the daughters and sons they are.

I want María Luisa to have her life back. The memories that were stolen along with her breath.

I want to delay the day when my daughter no longer jumps for joy.

More proof that women’s soccer is the best

Posted on July 15, 2020 by stanleyobando

Today, La Nación reported that women’s soccer player María José Brenes of the Saprissa club has been giving away jerseys to people who donate money, food or masks for those in need during the COVID-19 crisis.

This wasn’t a team effort or a project of the Saprissa Foundation. It was just María José, trying to figure out a way to help. And I’m not surprised: women’s players have to hustle their whole lives (to get respect and recognition, to eke out a living between their sport and their other jobs), so they are well suited for a moment like this.

María José isn’t alone. Raquel Morera, Lixy Rodríguez, Viviana Chinchilla and Valery Sandoval are also listed in the article as impromptu fundraisers. They’ve been joining forces to pick up in-kind donations and get them where they need to go. I hope that after today’s press coverage, some more resources will line up behind these players.

Thank you, ladies, for showing us not just how women do, but also what it means to be an athlete and a role model. We see you.

Bonus Boost: Women’s right to vote

Posted on June 20, 2020 by stanleyobando

I don’t usually post on weekends, but today’s a special day: let’s hear it for the 71st anniversary of women’s suffrage in Costa Rica!

It’s impossible to imagine the incredible women of Costa Rica without a say over the future of this country. (And the fact that we, today, find that impossible to imagine, would have delighted the feminists of the past who worked so hard to make it that way.) Just as an example, look at the few I’ve been able to feature in this project in recent months: Extraordinary activist Mariana Camacho. Groundbreaking Ngöbe doctor Mirna Román. Athlete-leaders Stephanie Blanco and Shirley Cruz. The Afro feminist collective Costa Rica Afro. A group who took on obstetric violence, and won an essential victory. Badass young authors. The girls of Soy Niña. The list goes on, and on, and on.

Here’s to women’s voices, loud and clear at the ballot box, and growing stronger every day in all other areas of life.

And Happy Birthday to my mother, my favorite badass woman of all.

Do you love a Costa Rican tourism microenterprise? Now’s the time to reach out

Posted on March 12, 2020March 12, 2020 by stanleyobando

Today’s post is a quick preview of forthcoming information about the effect of travel cancellations due to COVID-19 on the social fabric of Costa Rica, but honestly, I’m so worried that I wanted to get something out there as soon as possible!

Do you know and love a Costa Rican enterprise that’s dependent on tourism for survival? A beloved family hotel, a community association, a nonprofit that depends on tourism for donations? It is undoubtedly facing mass cancellations, uncertainty and panic.

I realize, of course, that the economic impact of COVID-19economic impact of COVID-19 is being felt around the world, with many needs calling for our attention; that most everyone is struggling with this on various levels; and that health is, of course, the biggest concern here. However, if you’re stuck at home or otherwise have some bandwidth, do consider reaching out and even making a donation to that small business or cause you love.

I’d LOVE to hear from you if you or someone you know recently had to cancel an upcoming trip to Costa Rica (or postpone a trip you were hoping to book); if you have more information about organizations being hard hit by this situation; or if you have heard or thought of any creative ways entities in CR could mitigate this crisis and encourage support from folks who can’t come right now, but are concerned about Costa Rican communities. More to come! Watch this space.