Untitled Document

From Nuns
to Ants

Inspired by her father, a man who welcomed Mayan women who asked for charity at the door of his house, inviting them in to sit at the table, and by her missionary sister, Linabel Sarlat decided to become a nun.

Her desire to devote her life to others, nurtured by her own experience as a missionary in a marginalized zone of her native Merida, led her to enter into a novitiate of the Society of Saint Theresa of Jesus in Mexico City when she was 20 years old.
“Now you will learn to obey,” her mother said to her when she set off for Mexico City on her birthday. “I was a crazy kid,” Linabel explains.

Upon leaving the novitiate, Linabel entered into her first community in the college of La Florida. Shortly after, she began to study literature at the UNAM, where she attended her first protest march.

Educated to work in schools for upper-class girls, in the mid-80s she was sent to an indigenous mission in Oxeloco, Hidalgo. This alternative reality left a lasting impression on the young Linabel. Two years later, Linabel was transferred to Ciudad Juarez, where the Order of Saint Theresa founded a middle school in a poor, peripheral part of the city. This experience reaffirmed her vocation to work with families in grassroots communities.

She later spent four years in a school for rich teenagers in Guadalajara. Concerned that her students have contact with the country’s reality, Linabel introduced a program that included bringing the young girls to a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.

The Community Center

“The sisters at the school began to not like the idea. At the end of the school year they transferred me again to Juarez to the same work where I had been. A short time later the project ended. By this point I felt tired of the blind and senseless obedience and I began to contemplate the idea of abandoning the Order.”

Once again in Juarez, Linabel reunited with Elvia Villescas, a former companion from the novitiate and the UNAM with whom she shared dreams and enthusiasm. With her, she participated in the founding of a high school within the doctrine of the Order of Saint Theresa in the same marginalized neighborhood where she had previously worked. Among the proposed subjects were Human Development, Thinking and Reflection Skills and Community Action: fundamentals for transformation and pillars of the philosophy of the organization that they founded several years later.

A year and a half later, the Order notified her of a new transfer. Without understanding why they separated her from this work, she and Elvia decided to listen to their most internal voices in order to understand what it was that God wanted from them. “What reasons did I have to stay? What reasons to leave? I had a mountain of reasons to leave and only two to stay: my economic security and my age,” says Linabel with the smile and human quality that defines her.

In December 1999, after 23 years of service, Elvia and Linabel requested permission for a release from their vows in order to separate from the Order. “We had to leave the community before the end of the school year because the other sisters treated us like plague victims. We went to look for a room to rent close to the high school but we didn’t find one and so we went to Anapra with some nun friends. They helped us to find one, without drainage or water. We moved the next day. In the last trip we brought our german shephard dogs.”

Eight out of ten women suffer some type of violence in Anapra. Many children do not attend school, and also suffer from some type of domestic violence. There are no daycare centers, no libraries and no 24-hour clinic. After working for a year as teachers in the area, Elvia and Linabel decided to legally establish the organization, The Ants: Community in Development. Their objective: to transform the unjust and poverty-ridden social reality through development and personal change.

In 2004, Semillas funded the project, The Ants: Neighbors Helping Neighbors, whose objective was to transport women by bus to buy provisions and return them to their homes in a dignified way, as opposed to the disrespectful and violent treatment that they suffered on public transportation. From this project arose what are now the community promoters for women’s rights. These promoters hold weekly meetings with groups of women in the community, enabling them to discuss and address some of the problems affecting their daily lives.

Linabel Sarlat

In this same year, The Ants Community Center was inaugurated with an estimated beneficiary population of 500 people, among them women and children. This Center carries out a project for personal transformation through psychotherapy, I Grow, Evolve and Commit Myself to the World, in which Elvia and Linabel, educated in Gestalt therapy, offer 50 individual therapy sessions a week. “We have even succeeded in having three sexually abusive men come to individual therapy,” Linabel emphasizes.

The Center also is the headquarters for the program, Smiles in the Desert, for children that do not go to school or have learning or relational problems, with whom they work in a Montessori environment.

At the end of this year, The Ants plans on opening a Childcare House that can admit in an initial stage 20 girls and boys living in high risk situations, including children who have suffered from sexual abuse.

We share with them the dream of a new, just and equitable society, where people live in dignity as human beings, consciously and responsibly. Currently, Semillas funds a project of The Ants to strengthen the Community Center and consolidate a group of women’s rights promoters, as well as providing training in resource development for two members of the organization. www.comunidadlashormigas.org.