A Woman who Works There

A woman who works there got there after it happened. She didn’t witness the bodies being slammed on the concrete by four masked men. She didn’t feel her heart racing while being chased before being tackled. She wasn’t disappeared. In fact the act made her super visible. She had to be, for the semi-anonymous known only by nicknames by their fellow compas and for the U.S. citizens that this type of thing wasn’t supposed to happen to.

But it did and a woman who worked there worked with other women who worked there and got their sooner to gather facts. The women who worked there looked through videos and gathered names and fielded the press as they came. This was the third time at this one location for the woman who worked there and what? The eighth? Ninth kidnapping by masked men across her job sites? She couldn’t keep track in her head, so she relied on lists and notes made by the other women who worked there.

It is mostly women who work here. It is completely women who lead here and yet when across all the signal chats and instagram posts, we have to repeat ourselves, more and more loudly and IN ALL CAPS over and over because of the men who used to work here. It doesn’t matter that the women who lead here have been doing so for over a decade, the male voice still is needed to confirm.

It was the women who worked here who gathered around street corners , around cars and trucks left as ghosts. It was the women who worked here who made the payments, and listened to the weeping while waiting on the line into the basement where the disappeared were hidden behind metal and glass and paperwork and lies.

It was the women who work there that still had to walk the dog, figure out dinner, pay the bills, mother, caretake.

Is it that they- the media, the other dique activists and organizers can’t imagine that the women who work there could be the women running the whole thing? Is it because they don’t throw themselves in front of any camera and don’t invent scenarios on other people’s turf to make the day to day grind of the non-profit industrial complex look sexier than it often is? Is it because usually the other leaders are not the sweaty, out of breath, tired looking ones because they have bigger teams, bigger budgets and stand next to bigger politicians?

Que se yo. What do I know.

I’m just the woman who works there