Women and children defeat police in Lima
by Hubert Campfens
Women and children waged a pitched battle against armed police in Lima recently when the authorities tried to take away from them control over the 'glass of milk' programme. Armed police used tear gas, water hoses and guns to disperse a huge rally of mothers and children in Peru's capital. Hundreds, many of them children, were wounded. Angry mothers had organized the rally to protest the newly elected municipal government's attempt to transfer the Vaso de Leche (Glass of Milk) program from the independent local women's committees to "mother's club" controlled by APRA, the governing national party. Later that very afternoon Peru's president pressured the mayor of Lima, also a member of APRA, into leaving the program in the hands of the local women's committees.
Introduced in 1984, Vaso de Leche was an effort by a previous, more left leaning councU of Metropolitan Lima to combat malnutrition by giving each child a daily glass of milk. The Vaso de Leche and the Comedores Populares Familiares (Popular Family Kitchens) are two rare examples of projects which go beyond the usual official efforts to satisfy the basic physical means of survival but also build up skills, self-esteem and solidarity. They have also mobilized hundreds of thousands of women into becoming active community participants.
Communal kitchens for barrio families
A few years ago, women in Lima's shanty towns, or barrios, started to band together to help themselves by forming a type of kitchen operation that functions as a mutual aid system to 10 to 15 families. Many barrio women in Lima are Quechua-speaking decendants of the pre-Hispanic Incas from the Andean region, and the communal kitchen idea comes from a centuries-old Inca tradition of the Ayllu system, an Indian form of family clan. The women pool the inadequate food money they get from their husbands, and take turns cooking, serving and cleaning up. The cooking is rotated among those families who have enough space both for the large cooking pots and for the women preparing the food.
Special fundraising activities or donations from local embassies, churches and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) raise money for utensils. As the kitchens began to mushroom across the metropolitan region, the Catholic Church and several international organizations started to add to the meager food supplies to provide more balanced meals.
A lot more than meals comes of these kitchens. Women are drawn out of the isolation of their homes and link up with other women. They talk about the way their husbands treat them and they support each other in standing up for themselves. They realize the importance of their ability to stretch the family's budget a bit further. The men, while skeptical of their wives' involvement in these communal kitchens, are hard up to resist when they themselves are unable to feed their families and the women, in their turn, are beginning to understand that everything does not depend on men. Acting together to meet their families' needs is a confidence builder for the women; it is a process of liberation that deeply affects traditional family relations.
Women run the Comedores Populares very democratically and independently, at the same time acquiring management skills in settings and roles in which they feel at ease. This experience helps them realize that they can affect broader social and political issues. No longer are they "objects" of their husbands' largesse. No longer do they need to depend solely on charitable handouts, government programs, services of "work-in-exchange for food" projects. Then can control their own destiny.
Government disturbed by Women's new skills
From this domestic experience the barrio women are learning how to plan, how to negotiate and present proposals to state and private agencies. NGOs help by giving them support and technical advice while for the most part - unlike state agencies - honouring the popular and autonomous nature of these small local organizations.
The national government became sodisturbed by these now widespread autonomous operations that it set up its own brand of popular kitchen, called "Comedores del Pueblo." These are promoted by a new official "Program of Direct Assistance," headed by the wife of Peru's president Alan Garcia. Some three or four women loyal to the governing party are incorporated into a "mother's club"; the government provides a place fully equipped with expensive modern kitchen facilities; the women prepare food and sell it to the barrio dwellers. The Comedores del Pueblo function more like a business, operating on the profit motive and aiming at turning the women into small entrepreneurs. The program ignores the heritage of the majority of Lima's barrio dwellers who prefer to work together in small independent communities.
Laws passed to bring the Women's Kitchens under government control
Early in 1986 the Peruvian government decreed that the autonomous Comedores Familiares had to form and
register as civil associations if they want to receive support from the government's "Program of Direct Assistance."
Representtives of the Comedores Populares from across the nation met during the summer. They directed a brief to President Garcia, severely criticizing the new decree as an attack to their local autonomy and mutual aid system. The decree, they said, would force on the Comedores an exclusive form of organization which the government could manipulate for its own ends. It would provoke divisions and confrontations between barrio dwellers.
The representatives further suggested that a special incentive program be set up to help small farmers produce essential food items, and demanded an end to the control by multi-national companies over production of such basic items as wheat, oil and milk.
Multi-nationals, the brief argued, are more interested in increasing their profits than in feeding the poor of Peru.
Glass of Milk(Vacho de Leche) Programme
Independent research is now evaluating the different types of "comedores" and the early results indicate that the independent Comedores Familiares, with some supplementary food donations from the state or from charities, provide more realistic, though limited, solutions to an economic problem. They fit better into the traditions of the barrio dwellers. The Comedores Familiares have a liberating effect on women by introducing them into the life and economy of the wider community through a co-operative rather than competitive process.
To everyone's surprise the Glass of Milk program was a resounding success, meeting all the objectives set out by the left leaning municipal government of Metropolitan Lima elected in November 1984. The program had the dual purpose of combatting widespread malnutrition among children and mobilizing local barrio women. Women were to assume full responsibility for the distribution of milk and the other tasks of administering the program at both regional and local levels. Until then the barrio women had rarely, if ever been allowed to take an active role in government programs or in community affairs.
One million benefit children
By March 1985 no less than 100,000 women were participating fully in the program. The capital region with its six million inhabitants had 7,500 local Vaso de Leche committees. Thirteen hundred male-dominated neighbourhood organizations were involved in 33 of the 41 municipal districts, providing support to the women's committees instead of assuming control as had been customary before. One million children under 13 received the daily milk made from powder contributed by the European Community. Through Vaso de Leche mothers became aware of the importance of proper diet; they managed their own local communities and organized preparation and distribution of this vital food product.
On several occasions, the governing national party attempted to undercut this municipally initiated community program through political manoeuvering. Through massive social mobilizations the women forced Peru's Congress to pass a law to finance and extend the program eventually to all municipalities of Peru.
From the deepest grass roots level to the top regional administrator's position, the program came to be largely controlled by women. Yet it has also had its share of internal difficulties and criticisms. A program which serves all women and children regardless of political allegiance requires complete political impartiality. This is difficult in an environment that is increasingly subject to fierce partisan politics. Barrio women are frequently jealous and distrustful of the elected committee co-ordinators who receive the milk powder and other food products from municipal distributors. This basic distrust is, of course, a natural reaction for people who face a daily struggle for survival, and who have become accustomed to seeing corruption everywhere.
In addition there are critics, usually male, in the municipal bureaucracy and established local community organizations, who question women's co-ordination and management abilities.
Programme has fostered a recognition of children's rights
In spite of these problems the many benefits of the program can already be seen in the family, the community and society as a whole. It has restored a recognition of children's rights; it promotes women into organized community activity where men have before tended to dominate; it has given women a needed measure of self worth, respect and liberation.
A growing number of Latin American and international researchers are calling attention to the fact that projects have to aim at more than meeting minimal physical needs. People also need to become involved; and for that they have to have a sense that society and its institutions will respect and respond to them. Only if professionals and officials support this expectation and treat those whom they are supposed to serve as equals can such projects succeed.
As for the barrio women in Lima, they are on the move. Temporarily, they may be beaten down, silenced and ignored by governments. But eventually this new creative force will thwart official and male attempts at keeping women in their place.
Source: Women & Environments Winter 1988