Herstory Comes to Nicaragua!

By Antoinette Hertel, Associate Chair
Modern Languages Dept., St. Joseph’s College

From April 2-12, 2009, a group of St. Joseph’s College students and faculty continued the work of our ongoing service project with the people of Sutiaba, an impoverished community on the outskirts of León, Nicaragua. One important aspect of our work from the program’s beginning in 2007 has been to meet with women who are leaders in the community, in order to better understand and support them in their needs and efforts.

After hearing bilingual Herstory readings of Page One Moments, and attending several Herstory bridge-building workshops with Erika Duncan and Silvia Heredia, I was eager to give the method a try with the female leaders in Sutiaba. Over the years, they had shared amazing stories with us, stories to which I hoped to give voice so that others could hear them in their own words. At the same time, the workshop would provide a space in which the students from Long Island could share on equal footing with the group at an extremely intimate level, building bridges between our sometimes very different worlds.

With the assistance of Ledis Coronna, our gracious host in León, we gathered a group of 12 women from Sutiaba, along with four students from St. Joseph’s College. Over the course of the week, we met for a number of three-hour bilingual sessions at the aptly named “El Puente” center (an extension of the home of Ledis and her husband, John), with the goal of producing a strong Page One Moment, Herstory-style. It seemed a great challenge, yet each woman in the group shared her life, both orally and in writing, some with the assistance of family members or friends. They worked hard in a very condensed period of time, writing, editing, and commenting on each other’s stories. I returned with a stack of powerful moments to share with others, possibly in a forthcoming Herstory publication. Most important, the experience was so valuable to them that the women’s group is continuing to meet and write in our absence. I expect great things!

To view photos of the writers' workshop and writers in their homes, click here.