A country of many worlds, weaving a shared future

LA PAZ, Bolivia — Holding up an aguayo, a traditional woven cloth, Julia Pachacopa Llacsa traced a zigzag pattern with her hand.

“This weaving is like a book,” she told participants gathered at the Bahá’í National Center in La Paz. Her mother had taught her to understand the pattern as the path of life—with moments of difficulty and joy, mistakes and learning, and the need to keep moving forward.

For Mrs. Pachacopa, an Indigenous authority of the Yampara people, the cloth carried knowledge passed from one generation to another. It also gave vivid expression to an idea animating a series of forums organized by the Bahá’í Office of External Affairs of Bolivia: “Tejiendo Futuro” (“Weaving the Future”).

“To weave, you need many threads,” said Rosmery Chambi, a member of the Office, in a conversation with the News Service.

The forums have brought together people from Indigenous communities, government, academia, faith communities, and civil society organizations—some representing sectors that have not always found it easy to enter into conversation with one another.

The first forum, “Indigenous Women as Builders of Peace and Development,” explored the contribution of Indigenous women to education, family life, community leadership, and the preservation of knowledge.

Participants reflected on the understanding of complementarity found in Indigenous cultures, including the Andean concept of chacha-warmi, which views men and women as interdependent partners, and its points of connection with the Bahá’í teaching that women and men are like the two wings of one bird, whose flight depends on both being equally strong.

The discussion also broadened conventional ideas about education.

“Education has always existed,” Mrs. Pachacopa said. Her mother had never attended school and neither read nor spoke Spanish, yet through weaving, observation, stories, work, and play, she had passed on a rich body of knowledge. A pattern can become a lesson in perseverance; spinning wool, an occasion to speak about how one lives an upright life. Knowledge of land, family, mathematics, and culture passes naturally from one generation to the next.

Other participants spoke of combining this inherited knowledge with formal and spiritual education, particularly for girls and women who in previous generations often had little access to schooling.

The conversations suggested that equality does not require cultural differences to disappear. Rather, participants explored how differences in experience and knowledge can enrich a common undertaking when relationships are characterized by mutual respect and equal participation.

What equality looks like in practice was explored further in a second forum, “Without Equality There Is No Peace.”

The gathering examined themes from a Bahá’í International Community (BIC) statement, Reconceptualizing Justice: Laying Foundations for a Gender-Equal World.

Participants were invited to consider justice as extending well beyond legal and judicial mechanisms to encompass the values, relationships, and social norms that shape the daily lives of women and girls.

“There can be no justice without equality,” said Nidya Pesántez, Resident Representative of UN Women Bolivia, “and there can be no peace if there is no justice.”

A culture of peace, she said, requires people to place differences openly on the table, listen to one another, and seek common ground rather than resort to violence.

Mirna Inturias, a researcher at NUR University—a Bahá’í-inspired educational institution—has worked for years with Indigenous communities in Bolivia’s lowlands, and particularly with groups of women organizing to govern their territories. While theories of justice are debated elsewhere, she told the forum, these communities are already building practical models of justice.

Indigenous women in the lowlands have long participated in organizations made up of both women and men, Dr. Inturias said, though established patterns of interaction within some of these spaces often left limited room for women’s participation.

Drawing on principles of collective organization, listening, and assembly already present in their communities, these women have also formed their own organizations. This has given rise to additional spaces in which they can develop capacities and bring greater clarity to the priorities of their territories.

“It is not enough simply to ask to participate,” Dr. Inturias said. “We have to develop capacities for that.” She emphasized that such a process ultimately involves women and men alike, even as this particular effort begins by strengthening women’s leadership. In this way, she stated, new structures and social spaces emerge that “generate processes of greater justice and greater participation.”

That insight has taken shape through a collaboration between NUR University and the National Confederation of Indigenous Women of Bolivia, where women are strengthening practical capacities in governance, environmental stewardship, project administration, and leadership. An initial class of 38 women completed training in environmental governance.

The concerns motivating the training are those of daily life in the territories: who decides about land, how water sources and forests are protected, how food security is sustained, and how present choices will be felt by children and grandchildren yet to come.

For Dr. Inturias, these experiences gave concrete expression to a broader conception explored in the BIC statement: “justice as a community’s freedom to conceive and pursue its own path of development.”

The qualities emerging through these processes, she said, are cooperation rather than competition, decisions taken in assembly, and a mutual care that extends to protecting the biodiversity on which a whole community depends.

“These are processes that are taking place,” she said, “and they generate hope.”

The Office will continue the series under the same name. “Our future is not yet fully built, but we are in the process of building it,” Ms. Chambi said. “Who participates in that process, and how we do it, is already in our hands.”