question 2: every day when you walk down the street, you are confronted with gender issues that are much less noticeable in the US. what is your experience of being a woman or man in Nicaragua? what privileges or limitations accrue to you by virtue of your sex? what is it like to be a part of a new gender system? what do you feel like saying or doing? what would have to happen for it to change? does Christianity play a part in encouraging the inequality you see? could Christianity play a part in changing it?

response:
these questions are really hard to answer. i don´t have very strong
feelings about gender issues because i guess it´s hard for me to
understand walking in someone else´s shoes or feeling discriminated
against when i come from a middle class family and have never
experienced inequality or discrimination first hand. the one thing
that does get me fired up is that the church is extremely patriarchal
in pretty much every aspect. to me, it´s sad to see how messed up the
various religions become, the difference between the beginning and
the present day religion. for example, in the early days of
Christianity the disciples ate and lived communally, there were women
who spoke to the small Christian communities and they had just as
much power and voice as the men. in Islam too women had some of the
most progressive rights in the middle east and Muhammad’s wife was
his partner and the first to hear his preaching, the first to believe and
encourage him. so what happened? humanity happened, errors
happened, greed and power and corruption happened. in liberation
theology of course women must be addressed because historically
they have been marginalized, stripped of rights and dignity and their
voice. JC shared meals with the prostitute and saved the adulteress from
stoning.
so after all this thinking i wonder where this attitude began, when
did men get the idea that women were somehow beneath them (or for
that matter anything else in creation). so i think the story of adam and
eve has done the world a great deal of harm. first somehow eve gets
blamed for disobeying God and eating from the tree of knowledge, but
it must be noted that while eve was tricked by the trickiest of
snakes-satan, adam was tricked by a mere mortal; who´s the smarter
one? also, in the ancient world the serpent was a symbol of fertility
and wellbeing, not of evil until this story pops up...one must also
ask what kind of god forbids human beings from having knowledge and
awareness? why would god test adam and eve in this way and then
chase them out of the garden of eden with bolts of lightening? my
professor last semester suggested that upon closer inspection this demy-
god of the garden of eden appears to be jealous of humanity that is formed
in the image of God and is afraid of loosing his own position and so he
sets the trap for humanity. furthermore he asked us if eating from
the tree of knowledge was a bad thing since afterwards Eve becomes the
mother of all humanity. i´m still not sure how to interpret this
story but i do know that women weren´t responsible for original sin
any more or less than men and furthermore that the great philosophers
plato and aristotle and even agustine later on were clearly wrong and
infuriating when they said the female was just a defective male. but
perhaps i´m off track with this question...do i feel any
discrimination here in nicaragua being a woman, not really i still
have white skin and i only say that because it seems extremely messed
up to me, after all these years white skin is still considered elite
and desirable. so if anything i feel like i have alot of privileges
that i don´t deserve here, the kindness people show me is incredible
and it boggles my mind sometimes. for instance last summer when i got
all my money stolen crossing the border from Guatemala to el Salvador
a nice man, a guardian angel if you will, gave me five dollars and made
sure i got the right bus to get where i needed to go. i can´t help
but think that would never happen in the US, if someone who sucked at
English got robbed and was lost i don´t see people going out of their
way like that to help them. i like to think i would, but we have all
these worries about personal safety and blah blah blah. so do i think
Christianity can change the inequality between sexes, i think that if
we were truly practicing and following Jesus this question would be
irrelevant. so like i said these are hard questions that i don´t know
if i ever can answer them completely but those were my thoughts.