From Davis: A Nuanced Understanding of Women through Case Studies

Kelly Taylor, an undergraduate International Relations student spoke on the Making a Difference: Challenges and Opportunities of Working Internationally panel, Wednesday February 29th at the International House. She spoke with Freedom from Hunger's Research and Evaluation specialist, Bobbi Gray, and International Agriculture Development graduate student, Byron Hoy, on her experiences gathering qualitative and quantitative data from micro finance clients in Peru over the summer.

"In the beginning of this quarter, I was asked to define what I thought was my role in development. What an interesting question, but to be honest, cannot cogently describe what my role in development should be. Development is a word with a big definition; includes expectations, implications, assumptions, and many, many people’s lives. The ethics and impacts of foreign development and poverty alleviation—the whole thing is very subjective.

I entered the field in Peru fascinated by different cultures, languages, histories, lifestyles, and people. I left the experience fascinated by the puzzle of 'development work'. Looking back, I am not sure that I really understood the living conditions of the people I was interviewing. Sure, I could describe the typical day of the typical woman I met in the countryside, but I was not thinking deeply about what a lifetime living this way would be like, or their position in the world in context with mine. I had never studied development and was working off of personal values and what I thought was a strong cultural understanding, but what turned out to be a very vague cultural understanding. What I learned most during this experience came from my interactions with the clients themselves. After all, they are the reasons why organizations like Freedom from Hunger exist. My perceptions on what my role in development should be morphed with each new woman I met.

The first day on the job, I wandered up into the countryside of Ayacucho to interview a woman with just her name and town written on a slip of paper in my back pocket. Once I found her, we sat outside her home and I began to talk about her life in the context of food security. She told me quite matter of factly, "Some seasons we have money for food, some seasons we don't. When we don't we live off the land". I always knew people lived in poverty, but had never seen someone; actually living in these destitute conditions we read about in class, speak frankly about her situation, like there was no other way to be. This set the framework for what I was to expect throughout the rest of the experience.

Something that has stuck with me after my experience in Peru is that, there is an array of problems facing the world’s poor and this cannot be accurately represented in simple numerical data. Each woman is quite different in the way she portrays her story and her interpretations of her life, sure when you look at the compilation of the women's situations from a "zoomed-out" lens, we see that they share a similar set of problems, but the differences between each client on the individual level is tremendous—I came to grasp this concept with more and more women interviewed. Another thing that I don't think I understood prior to my experience in Peru—when confronting a particular issue, you can’t tailor a program working to ameliorate a particular issue without confronting twenty other interrelated issues in the process.

FINCA Ayacucho client, Norma,
outside her home in Tambobamba

Throughout the interviewing process, I realized that many of the needs, wants, experiences, and issues of these women, the clients, would have gone unaccounted for if looking at simple numerical data, alone. One of those women, from whom I learned quickly about the multitude of problems they face, is named Norma. I met Norma in Ayacucho, a post-conflict region in the Central Andes. She lives in a town called Tambobamba, an hour motorcycle ride outside of town. Almost immediately upon beginning the interview, her daughter walked out and began crying at the sight of me, apparently I resembled an Andean folklore creature called a 'Pishtaco', a light-skinned creature that went around sucking the fat out of little kids. Needless to say, the interview was off to an interesting start. After Norma calmed her two-year-old daughter, reassured her that she was safe, and sent her playing barefoot with the baby chicks behind the store where we sat, we continued the interview as normal.

Norma told me how 6 months ago, her daughter Ruth was diagnosed with a serious heart condition that required medical attention in Lima. Over two months of surgeries and uncertainty, Norma used all of her life savings and was forced to take out an additional individual loan to cover the remaining costs. The family sacrificed all they had for Ruth’s health. While baby Ruth was receiving treatment, the family was often left hungry after small meals. With her loans and savings, Norma was able to pay the medical bills, but has been left to build up from nothing, again. She felt that her daughter’s life was saved due to involvement in her community bank.

Norma also told me how her family used to work as agricultural producers. This source of income was very stressful though because they were dependent on unreliable weather patterns to bring water to their fields. There was no water source that ran through the town and access to an irrigation system was beyond what she could afford.

FINCA Ayacucho village bank meeting 

During this event in her life Norma needed access to water. Norma needed a way to get her daughter medical attention. Yet, at the time of interview she measured food secure on the Progression out of Poverty Index survey. If looking at survey data alone we would not understand the breadth of challenges that faced Norma. What I learned from Norma is that we can’t simply extrapolate on the needs of a population based on such impersonal data and expect to understand the context of the whole situation. I learned first hand that numbers cannot represent women, and really the best thing to do is let them speak for themselves.

When it comes down to it, what better learning experience than placing me in the middle of the people I am trying to affect? To be speaking with the heart of development projects, asking questions like, 'how does this affect you?'—What better learning experience than that? Experiences like my consultancy with Freedom from Hunger in Peru, of course combined with enough in-class learning to satiate curiosities that arise in the field, are the most inspiring pair I can think up. I can’t wait to have more experiences like it and see how it shapes my perception of my future role in development."

Kelly Taylor, International Relations B.A. student