Women's dialogue

Tuesday afternoon's women's dialogue with representative from the women's groups from most of the presbytery's congregations went up and the four women from the team plus Debby went up and down. In the past, teams had planned women's workshops (which some of the Guatemalan women there Tuesday had attended) which included non-verbal activities.  This time the team wasn't sure if this was to be more of a meeting or a workshop and so only developed a few possible themes to talk about.  At the start, the CHPC women et al. also left t hings open so that the Estore  o Presbytery women could take the lead, if they chose to.  But instead some inertia took place.  It was hard to get the Q'eqchi' women to talk, and it was very hot inside and noisy outside and the group was quite a bit larger than the team had expected and so it was very hard to hear.  Eventually, a sort of worship service - which included singing - and a nonverbal activity - which got things going more - took place.  Some CHPC women also got to talk with the leaders of the presbytery's Presbyterian Women organization, and some interesting side conversation took place.  But probably the high point of the women's dialogue came after it had officially ended when all the women informally broke up into groups, and chatted with each other.  Some interesting interchanges ensued, including exchange of photos, phone numbers, and Facebook accounts.  Afterwards, the CHPC women also heard some tough words about another female presbytery leader.  The women were generally pretty successful at keeping the men out (CHPC's men and Richard generally hung out with a mix of men and other women and kids outside, throughout).  And it would have been a challenge to break up into formal small groups into the activity because the team had only one really good female translator (plus worrying about Spanish-to-Q'eqchi' translation).  By the end, there were a mix of feelings about the afternoon (on the part of the CHPC women there) (as well as some ideas about future dialogues).

-Perry