Children and Women

The education of schoolchildren about disease is important because children and adolescents constitute half of Bolivia’s increasing population, with a growth rate of 2.7 percent a year. Children share knowledge with their parents. Sometimes parents resist children advising them, but studies by Fryer (1991) show that even though many parents showed initial resistance, they eventually began asking children about their lessons and learned with them. When fathers migrate to work and mothers tend the fields, older children often are left to take care of the smaller children and the households.

An important factor for Chagas’ disease lessons for children is making them applicable to household tasks (housing hygiene) and assisting children in educating their parents, such as assigning shared tasks for children and parents while calming parents’ fears about their own inferiority in the face of their children’s knowledge.

In Chuquisaca and elsewhere in Bolivia, inequality of women is increasing. Because of its social and cultural complexity, the division of labor among women, men, and children needs to be studied by anthropologists and sociologists so that education about housing improvement and maintenance and vector control can be carried out more effectively.

Andean women have always worked alongside men; but, because men have migrated to find work, women have had to assume men’s traditional roles. Women often have become the sole agriculturalists, child raisers, and housekeepers of families. Some mothers work the fields carrying their babies; urban mothers take babies to their market stalls, where they are kept in cardboard boxes, being called “cardboard box babies.” Vinchucas can take advantage of these babies. Toddlers remain at home, being cared for by slightly older siblings, usually girls. Thus, girls especially can spend less time at school. Peasant girls average four to six years of education, boys six to eight years.

Gender inequality also influences Chagas’ disease, in that there is greater malnourishment among girls than among boys, because Aymara girls often receive less food than boys. This makes girls more susceptible to acute attacks of the disease than boys. Also disadvantaged with less schooling and less Spanish instruction, girls learn less about Chagas’ disease.

One lesson observed from PBCM’s educational approach is that more efforts need to be made to educate women about Chagas’ disease and to address their increased responsibilities. This matter also needs to be discussed in group sessions with all community members.