It's been two months since we left on our Peruvian adventure. At times, the memories seem to overlap with my present life and at others Peru feels like light years away. Thankfully, we've had each other to help us along as we reintegrated into Canadian society and reorganized our lives in light of what we've experienced.
My outlook on life has certainly undergone some significant changes since coming home and I think the most important of these has been my appreciation for being a young woman in Canada. While in Peru I was acutely aware of my gender, especially in the mountain village of Tallapampa where women and men are treated very differently. Until then, I had known that women all over the world are rarely given the same respect and freedom that men have but I had never experienced this gender divide for myself. I came face to face with this divide when I was asked by several village women (and a few school children in Lima) if I was married and if I had any children. I had never truly considered that had I been born anywhere in the Global South I would already be married (probably to an older man) and have several children. The lack of options for women, beyond becoming a wife and a mother, really affected me and really made me grateful for the options I have as a Canadian woman. I can get a university degree, I can travel all over the world, I can pursue whatever career I choose, and I can decide whether to be married or not or whether to have children or not. These opportunities are not available to hundreds of millions of women all over the globe. They are often afforded no other purpose than to create families and keep them alive, and in Peru I could clearly see the toll that this sort of existence had on the women I encountered.
This entire experience left me with a sense of astonishment at the life I have been blessed with and a desire to do something with the relative power and privilege I have as a Canadian woman. I am constantly reminded of the line from the Spiderman movies, "With great power, comes great responsibility" and I feel that because I am so lucky I have an immense responsibility; to the Peruvian women I met and everyone else I come into contact with on a day to day basis.
So while it's clear where we've been (and we're now beginning to formulate what it all meant) we're still a bit unsure of our direction now that we're home. To me, this is the exciting part- when we get to live what we've learned and I am so grateful that I get to continue on this journey with the incredible group we traveled with. Wherever we end up, I know we'll get there with compassion, a sense of justice and a lot of jokes and I can't wait to get started on this next step of our trip!
Erika
