On the opening day of the Congress we heard from three different speakers at plenary sessions where all the women of the Congress were in one room. Many people had headsets on that allowed them to understand the presentations through simultaneous translations. The three speakers included a representative of the United Nations. Her name is Ines Alberdi Alonso. The second speaker was Somaly Mam. And the last speaker was Nawal El Saadawi. They all had important things to say but the last two speakers moved me the most. Also, I really enjoyed one of the small group speakers, Aida Hurtado.

Somaly Mam is an activist from Cambodia. Her work is to speak out against modern day slavery and the trafficking of human beings. She has experienced being sold herself, but she got free and has devoted her life to speaking out against this injustice. Also, she speaks out on behalf of children as young as 3 with AIDS! I just think that that’s unbelievable! I am including a photograph I took with her for you to see. You won’t believe how you can see that she has such great energy even though she spoke about such tragedies. I can’t believe she lived through such horrors and is so strong. Her talk was moving and very real.

Nawal El Saadawi is an Egyptian woman who teaches at a university in the U.S. She is a medical doctor who speaks out against the violence towards women and about the need to always be creative in the way we think. While in prison, I don’t exactly know why she was there but it had something to do with her activism, she wrote notes for one of her books on toilet paper using eyeliner. She is a super energetic woman, over 70 years old, with a large messy white bun right on the top of her head. In her speech, Nawal talked a lot about creativity as the connection of knowledges, and by that I understood that we are supposed to creatively fit everything we know together and then to use our knowledge to learn more and always ask questions. Nawal said that to truly understand stuff we have to connect it to other stuff. She even spoke out against plastic surgery and asked why she would want to hide her age. She talked about the veil of the mind and how we have to free our thinking. All the things she spoke about at first didn’t really fit in my mind. But I think that’s part of her point, to fit all the things she said together.

Aída Hurtado is a Chicana scholar from California (with a great name!). Her presentation was called Finding Frida, it was mainly about an issue of Vogue magazine, but she said her topic applied to many things. Finding Frida was a photography spread in an issue of Vogue. It was supposed to represent Frida Kahlo’s life in Mexico. However, the model was an “exotic” European-looking model wearing outfits that cost up to like, 10,000 dollars! The settings were obviously not in Mexico and some were not culturally accurate. In one picture Frida is wearing a fancy flamenco dress with high heels, flamenco is Spanish, and Frida was partially disabled so she wouldn’t have worn those types of heels! One more image that stuck out was of Frida lounging on a beach in a little cabana that looked like the ones in the commercials for expensive resorts in the Caribbean. Anyway, the general message given by Aida was that the world doesn’t really use women of color as representations of beauty and doesn’t portray reality for anyone but the very wealthy. Cool message huh?

Anyways, I go home from Spain the day after tomorrow, my family has been using these last couple days as vacation now that the Congress is over. We have seen the famous opera Carmen, and today we went on a day trip to Buitrago del Lozoya, a township north of Madrid that has kept its original Arabic walls around it. There is a small Picasso museum there because his barber lived there and made all the paintings Picasso gave him into a museum. So much history!

Hasta Pronto!
Aida