Let's talk about dating!

In the last few weeks of my time in Los Marranitos, I was inspired to make up for lost time and hold some sex, gender, and dating themed info and discussion sessions for the young teen and preteen girls in the community, with whom it had taken me so long to establish a real rapport. It had been one of my goals for the year to start a "girls' group" that would involve discussions on these themes, but I had struggled to find just the right way to go about it.

Two years before I arrived in the community, another volunteer started a girl scout troupe with girls from both Los Marranitos and Los Dajaos. However, after talking to a girl scouts' representative in Santiago and bringing a couple of the girls along to a one-night girl scout sleepover camp there, I was totally turned off by the organization's exclusivity, military origins, and emphasis on getting totally hyped about cheering and screaming all day and night long. I also found that the girl scouts catered more to privileged city girls who wanted to become more "in tune with nature" by learning to start a fire and the like. This was simply ridiculous when applied to girls from Los Marranitos, who would never build a campfire just to roast hot dogs and marshmallows, and could have benefitted more from a lesson on crossing busy streets.

So, the girl scout troupe idea went out the window. I was going to do the girls' group my own way, dammit, and preferably without all the high-pitched screaming and giggling. But I soon realized that 1) it was hard to get a regular group to attend reliably once a week, and 2) it felt kind of inorganic for me to try and start discussions about sensitive issues with these girls I still didn't know that well. So the group began with activities mostly centered around self-esteem and self-image issues, and then, when I still didn't feel completely comfortable delving into the female reproductive system, evolved into a girls' arts and crafts group. I always was nagged by the feeling that I wanted to be doing something more with the women and girls, but could never figured out the best way to approach it.

For some reason, I have never been good at connecting with 12- to 14-year old girls (I think they remind me too much of the mean, cliquey girls in my middle school past). I have always found it much easier to work with younger kids. But near the end of the year, I finally realized that I had developed the rapport I needed with a small group of girls to launch into some "girl talk". So one day, I told five of them to come to the library the next day to talk about dating, and the differences between the Dominican Republic and the United States. Suddenly, the attendance problem was no longer an issue; the girls might have actually showed up to the library early. Beforehand, I prepared a little quiz full of value statements that the girls could either agree or disagree with, such as "Is it OK for a man to have more than one girlfriend? For a woman to have more than one boyfriend? Is a woman a whore if she has sex before marriage? Is a woman who isn't married by the age of 20 an old maid? Is it OK to use condoms or pills? Should a married woman drop her studies and stay at home? Is it OK for a Dominican to marry a Haitian? Is it OK for a man to beat his wife?"

When it came to the way we answered those questions, I was actually in agreement with the girls on most value questions. No one thought that it was OK for a man to be a cheater or beat his wife. Everyone agreed that a woman had the right to use birth control, to continue her studies, to have help in household chores from her husband, etc. In short, the girls supported gender equality in theory, and even agreed that Dominicans and Haitians should be able to marry in theory. But when I reworded the questions in more personal ways, the responses were different: "Well, I wouldn't have sex before I got married. You can do that in the United States, but not here." And more disturbingly: "I wouldn't have a Haitian boyfriend. They smell bad. I like blue eyes and blond hair." Naomi, the most outgoing of the group, insisted that this was just her personal preference and she was definitely not being racist. As disappointed as I was, I realized that my arguing with her wasn't going to do much good.

We also got into an interesting discussion about the other aforementioned issue. It was generally agreed that in their community, a girl who had sex and didn't commit to that person as a lifelong partner would be seen as a slut. However, for a man to have multiple sexual partners, both before and after "marriage", would be considered normal. The girls clearly thought this to be unfair, but when I asked them, "Would you get married to someone who had had sex before?", Naomi chimed in with, "Well, as long as he didn't tell me about it." I countered, "But isn't honesty the most important thing? He would be putting you in danger by not telling you-- what if he had HIV?"

"Well," said Naomi, "I would marry him, but I would make him get checked for HIV first."

It turned out the girls knew more about HIV than I'd anticipated; happily because they had some of the knowledge they needed to protect themselves, and sadly because the reason they knew about the disease was because it had affected their community. I learned from this conversation that there was a boy attending the school in Los Dajaos who had been born with HIV. The major misconception they had was that they seemed to think that the boy with HIV had "gotten better" and that he wouldn't ever actually get AIDS. They simply refused to believe me when I said that although he might live for a long time, he would eventually die of AIDS. They were also taken aback when I explained that you could protect yourself from AIDS with a condom, but not with the injection form of the pill that many women get here if they don't want to become pregnant right away. Although the girls thought that using a condom is kind of gross (hardly anyone in the community uses them since the birth control injection is more popular), they seemed gratified to have learned this important piece of information.

That first discussion session, despite some frustrations, went so well that I decided to schedule another one for the next day and do a mini-lesson on the reproductive system. It quickly became evident that the girls had never heard anything about this topic before. They didn't know whether to be weirded out or scandalized by the anatomical drawings I was making on the board. When I asked the group if anyone knew why women have their period, Ariel chimed in, "Because we're women!!" All the girls chuckled when I explained that women produce "eggs" inside their bodies and were both fascinated and disgusted to learn that their period blood was actually a discarded bed for the eggs.

Then Yaneli, always the inquisitive one, began asking me personal questions about sex. This is the same girl who, a few months earlier, had the gall to ask me with a smirk on her face if I staid over Fermín's house when I went to visit him in San Cristobal. After a brief hesitation I decided to give her the straight up truth: "yes." I tried to explain to her that in my culture it is not just that people want to have sex all the time; rather, a couple might wait many years before deciding to get married, so it may not be that important to them to stay celibate until marriage. To this, Yaneli had responded, "I wish here could be more like there!" But I am still not sure which part of the American cultural norm appealed to her: getting married later or having sex without being married. Probably both.

Even though she had a tendency to ask impertinent questions and make the usual smart-ass teenage comments, I had become fond of Yaneli over the course of the year because I recognized that she was very intelligent and much more likely than her peers to think critically about issues rather than clinging steadfastly to the set of (often machista) values she had learned growing up in the campo. She also was an avid reader. When I first started opening the library in September, she (at 13 years old) insisted on reading children's picture books even though I kept encouraging her to try out the young adult novels. I tried to counter this tendency in the pre-teen and teenage girls by reading to them out loud from classic young adult novels translated to Spanish: first Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, then Charlotte's Web. By the time I was halfway through Charlotte's Web, Yaneli got impatient because I was not reading enough for her in one day. So she took home a copy of the book that night and by the next day she had finished the entire thing. Since I had not read the book for awhile, it was she who had to remind me what happened in the end! (When I went back to visit the farm the following March, Yaneli was already halfway through the Harry Potter series.)

Back to my educational session on the reproductive system: I was done with the female and beginning to explain the male reproductive organ when Yaneli, with that familiar smirk on her face, took in her fist a piece of pink sidewalk chalk about 3 1/2 inches long and maybe 3/4 inch in diameter, with a rounded point at the end. "Naomi, is THIS what one looks like?" she asked, giggling. "You know, one of THOSE?"

I laughed and said jokingly, "Well, a little bigger than that."

But Yaneli stopped laughing. She was incredulous. "BIGGER?!"

"Well, yeah, usually, I mean, a little bit," I said nervously.

"But then how in the WORLD do you get it IN??"

The smile returned to my face. "Well, I think when the time comes, you will figure it out," I said. "Don't worry."

When the time comes. When I came back to visit the community a little less than a year later, Naomi, at age 14, had gotten married and was probably on her way to having her first child. In Los Marranitos, the transition from "young girl" to "married woman" happens instantly. I can't judge anyone for that, much less change the minds of these girls in a day. And indeed, some women (though probably a minority) seem truly happy with the child-rearing life. But I admit to finding some consolation in having at least helped prepare Yaneli for her future first encounter with the male organ. Perhaps she won't be as frightened when she finds that it is, indeed, just a bit bigger than a piece of sidewalk chalk.