by Marie-Pierre Smets

08 March 2012

Quito, Ecuador: I have been working in Quito for two years as an international UN Volunteer with UN Women’s regional office dealing with indigenous issues.  My job focuses on managing and supporting projects by indigenous women’s organizations or mixed indigenous organizations where women are represented.

The goal of the program is to strengthen indigenous women’s ability to drive the defence of their individual and collective human rights, thereby developing their leadership potential and their social and political participation as a way to combat the many facets of ethnic and gender discrimination.  The women’s improved empowerment is especially necessary to address issues such as cases of violence, access to land, protection of ancestral knowledge, access to justice and participation in decision-making at the community and organizational level and in areas of public policy concerning them.

My daily work involves constantly managing two perspectives, gender and cultural diversity, and seeing to what extent all the problems facing indigenous women are related to the concept of intersecting oppressions.

The significance of my contribution as a UN Volunteer is realized through initiatives against discrimination and injustice and by offering support for the building of a more inclusive society.  The society I am striving for is one where all can exist equally, where we would change our attitudes, our behaviour, our manner of including or excluding “others”, and learn more and more how to have a better relationship with each other, with more respect for diversity and differences.  It is one with more empathy towards those who are “different”, making one a “brother or sister”, seeing the world with a spirit of inclusiveness, little by little substituting the struggles for power and domination with an environment of dignity and equity.

Working with cultural diversity and gender issues allows you to see reality through different eyes, and makes you more aware and attentive to existing inequalities.  It is similar to putting on a brand new pair of glasses that allows you to see the world of men and women in a new light.  It also creates an awareness of the learnt social behaviours of men and women, which may change over time, and vary within similar cultures or in a multicultural environment.

Gender is not synonymous with women.  It is a subject for all men and women and requires a joint effort by diverse men and women.  Working for gender equality also means that men should get involved in creating a new masculinity, abandoning machismo to begin thinking about complementarity.

These multidimensional aspects of my work as a volunteer, inspire and motivate me daily to act, collaborate and contribute to the processes of change that are happening in the Andean and Amazonian regions.  The indigenous women of the region and their social foundations are credited mostly for generating this process.

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Story translated from Spanish by UN Online Volunteer Howard Brown.