Lessons of the Heart
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A member of the cooperative bank with her child. Photo by Gary Samson

The course was funded by the UNH Center for the Humanities through a grant from the Sidore Lecture Series with a focus on "education for the new millennium." In the classroom, students grappled with the complexity of how women and sustainability are connected. The students prepared for the trip by studying the theoretical concepts of machismo and marianismo, traditional Latin American gender roles that ascribe virility, education and a role in the public sphere to men, and passivity, dependence and domesticity to women. The course also enabled the students to understand these concepts in the context of sustainability, which is the balance of economic viability, ecological health and human well-being.

"Very few courses take students overseas as part of the curriculum," says Jane Stapleton, coordinator of Presidential Commissions, who taught the course with Julie Newman, education director for the Office of Sustainability Programs. "We really wanted to have an experiential component to the material our students would be reading and discussing, and we wanted to provide an environment that would support their experience in Guatemala."

Stapleton and Newman built upon their relationship with Florencia Tohom Locon, the president of a women's cooperative bank and a community leader in San Andres who visited UNH in the fall of 1999 to speak about the changing role of indigenous women in Guatemala. Their students stayed with members of Locon's cooperative, and assisted in various community projects. They helped Locon plant a garden; they attended a meeting of the cooperative bank; they visited the market where many of the women sell produce and homemade crafts; and they closely observed the roles that women and girls play in their community.

Angela Bigonia '01 helps to plant a garden in Florencia Tohom Locon's backyard. Locon is director of the women's cooperative bank. Photo by Gary Samson

"We need to be able to push the boundaries of our own frame of reference to accommodate other ways of living," Stapleton says. "The goal of the course was to build on students' world views by immersing them in a culture very different from their own." Using Guatemala as a case study, the professors and students explored women's roles in community and how this affects successful sustainable development.

"A big part of sustainability is building community," Newman says, "and our students saw a very strong sense of community in Guatemala. This might have been a hard lesson for them, because many of them saw our communities here in the States as more fragmented in comparison."

--Anne Downey '95G

Megan Taft '01 and Kristen Ringman '01 dance with Florencia Tohom Locon's granddaughter, Barbara.Photo by Gary Samson

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