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El Proyecto Final

Cross Cultural Art Project

Introductory Reflection

I am someone who is much more comfortable when I have a plan and therefore a purpose. Fortunately for me, I am motivated to ask a lot of questions related to stories and experiences. This final research project component of the LACS 20 course has provided the opportunity for me to ask some of those questions and put together a lot of what I have learned from our course related to Nicaragua and oral history/ ethnography conducting. It also means that when in Nicaragua, I will feel more comfortable talking with women and entering their emotional and physical space to ask for their stories because I will feel as if I am actually doing something with their stories that is for them as well.

A course I took this past summer called "Telling Stories for Social Change" has made me reflect these past months upon remaining within my comfort zone. The experiential learning component of the course took us to a women's Rehabilitation Center to collaborate to put on a play that was aimed at continuing a dialogue across populations that rarely interact about social stigmas, sexism, marginalization, addiction, a messed up system, and the emotions of it all. One of the main takeaways was that we learn the most and the best when we feel uncomfortable and push ourselves outside our comfort zone. I'm not sure whether the comfort that I am feeling with this aspect of my experience going to Nicaragua can be labeled good or bad. On one hand, I think it shows how I've really internalized a need to do things in a collaborative and reciprocal manner, and feel uncomfortable stepping outside of what is clearly and safely within that realm of interaction. It is also driving me to put a lot of time and thought into the project and want to take it further than simply producing the mural. On the other hand,  I feel as if I may not be giving enough space for things to just happen and to set myself up to be comfortable with the unexpected and recognize that sometimes the better option lies in the unknown. Proceeding forward, I think I will do my best to push myself in Nicaragua to explore past the limits of the project and find those spaces where I feel must more uncomfortable. That may mean making special efforts to talk with people outside the times I have a tape recorder and ask for permission to ask them questions, or to ask more daring and new questions if it seems appropriate within the oral histories.

The Final Project

Project implementation plan
Project implementation plan

The inspiration for this project came from a variety of sources that my group partners and I were able to bounce off each other. From my end, the experiences that helped shape our project idea were the Telling Stories for Social Change course I mentioned above and two of the movies I watched for the course: Dreaming Nicaragua and Pictures From a Revolution. The two movies presented the power of art and specifically photography to evoke emotions and address stressors and reality. Pictures From a Revolution particularly introduced the idea of a Polaroid image being a safe type of photo that would allow our project to communicate with other women and themselves in the future and restore mutuality by making it our interaction more reciprocal.

Natasha Mauthner best describes the power of the mother to mother sharing that we wanted to harness in our project in her book The Darkest Days of my Life: Stories of Postpartum Depression that published her doctoral thesis work exploring women's experiences of motherhood. She details that for many of the women she talked to, talking with other mothers allowed them to shed the "illusion of their uniqueness" and re-evaluate their moral worth as mothers. The Telling My Story program is similarly built upon the worth of sharing openly and breaking down invisible and visible walls. These experiences led to the development of a cross-cultural exchange and eliciting shareable responses.

The Goal of the Project

Goals & questions we planned to ask the women
Goals & questions we planned to ask the women

The goal of our project is to understand the social, cultural, interpersonal forces underlying  postpartum mental health that extend past the hormones. We are hoping to create an easy and approachable way for people to express how they are feeling to themselves and others. The first step of this project will be implemented at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Women's Health Resource Center in Lebanon, NH and the second in the Casa Materna in Nicaragua. The first phase will give us an opportunity to figure out how to best communicate our intentions and execute the project in our native language and in a lower risk setting. The objective will be to create a large mural of pictures that is a cross-cultural representation of feelings, emotion, and mental health. This project assumes that something lacking in the field of mental health both in the USA and Nicaragua is the opportunity and ability to express one’s feelings openly (mother to mother sharing). By providing a medium with which people can express how they are feeling at a certain moment, we plant the seed that openness and communication can be part of leading a healthy life. We hope that the mural will provide a visual reminder to reflect on the questions we asked when making it and for continuous personal reflection.

Reflections From Phase One of the Project

Polaroid images from Phase 1 of the project with the Fourt Trimester group at the Women's Health Resource Center
Polaroid images from Phase 1 of the project with the Fourt Trimester group at the Women's Health Resource Center

I felt as if I found what I want to do in life while in the room with the mothers in the Fourth Trimester Group at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Women's Health Resource Center. The women shared so openly and it was overwhelming how much more I learned from them than the ethnographic and psychology scholarly work and narratives I had read in preparation. I couldn't have been more appreciative of the vulnerability each woman presented herself with to present both positive and negative experiences.

The women really seemed to want to participate as an effort to unite mothers across the globe to talk about the reality of pregnancy and motherhood and find support in each other. We got such wonderful responses and pictures! And the babies were so cute! 

Observations from Phase 1 of the project with the Fourt Trimester group at the Women's Health Resource Center
Observations from Phase 1 of the project with the Fourt Trimester group at the Women's Health Resource Center

Because of the nature of the women and the support group they were in, we ended up asking our questions to the whole group and inviting people to share their responses after each which evolved into a moving and productive conversation. The lady who runs the support group nudged us in that direction and facilitated much of the response to what was being shared, which was great. We gave the women who wanted to participate in our project (it ended up being all of them!) the options to illustrate or write down their responses on colorful index cards we distributed around, but everyone was in some way part of the conversation and sharing. It was beautiful and many women shared their excitement, frustration, confusing feelings, and much more. You can see in the wordle we made in our data collection phase the most common words/ comments we heard and were written down. It gives you a clear sense of some of the things we heard from the mothers. 

Words from the written of responses Phase 1 of the project with the Fourt Trimester group at the Women's Health Resource Center
Words from the written of responses Phase 1 of the project with the Fourt Trimester group at the Women's Health Resource Center

 

 

 

Implementing In Nicaragua

 

The success with the project we experienced with the Fourth Trimester group was overwhelming. That being said, I am very hesitant about the next phase of the project as I know that we spoke with a unique group of women in US who value and are practiced in sharing their emotions, and were therefore able to readily open up to Leah, Kate and I. In Nicaragua, we will therefore have a few more considerations for the implementation of the project:

  • Shyness, foreign-ness of concepts (talking & pictures), sensitive material
  • Communicating openly about sensitive topics
  • Wanting to have the space to do something more with their response
  • Culture of making the best of the situation
  • Family as primary source of support- not strangers (women or younger people like us)
  • 1% national budget dedicated towards mental health- rarely talked about
  • Previous research has identified different origins for anxiety and depression in Nicaragua than in other Latin American countries
Foto de Bridges to Community
Foto de Bridges to Community

For this reason, our group has interviewed anthropologists, mental health specialists, physicians, and the coordinators from Bridges to Community on how to best approach this cultural difference. We have realized the importance of designing the project to be as clear and approachable from different comfort levels as possible, and of being flexible and going with what happens. I am hoping that we will find parteras or other trusted maternal health experts in the community to help us start a dialogue around the responses in a similar fashion to what worked so well at the Resource Center, but we'll see.

Future Directions: Where I Hope the Project Will Go

Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator, activist and theorist, defines conscientization, or the process of critical consciousness, as the focus on gaining an in-depth awareness and understanding of the world. It means allowing oneself to be exposed to socia

l realities and contradictions, and taking action against the oppressive elements to end the “culture of silence”. I am hopeful that this project will not only empower me in this process of conscientization about postpartum mental health, but also of generations of mothers. For women to have agency, they must have both capacity and willingness. One possible direction we hope this project will take in the future is for women to form a "Women In Action for Maternal Health", similar to the current Women In Action in La Primavera, Managua. Part of our research identified there to be three levels of intervention to increase women's health care seeking behaviors: individual, household and community. We are hoping that the cross cultural art project will inspire something like a WIA group that would target all three levels of intervention and form a new generation of women and parteras regularly talking about childbirth and the emotional experience pre and post partum to dramatically improve community and maternal health.

You can watch a great video on Compas de Nicaragua (another organization working in Nicaragua) and Women In Action here.