Last Friday I spent the day in Toledo at a meeting about gender-based violence with the leaders of Castilla La Mancha (the president of the autonomous region can be seen in the photo--he is the man in the center with the grey suit jacket). My job was to interpret for Maysa, Mukarram (both from Jordan) and Rawda (from the Palestinian territories). I was told there would be headsets and simultaneous interpretation and my job would be to translate when we had breaks and meet and greets. It turned out not to be the case, and I spent the better part of a day whispering to Maysa in English while she wrote what I said into Arabic so Mukarram could understand. Rawda couldn't hear me, so we spent breaks filling her in on what was discussed. I admire professional interpreters because after one day my head hurt and I didn't know which language I was speaking, English, Arabic or Spanish.

While it was interesting to learn about the different institutions in place to prevent gender based and domestic violence in Castilla La Mancha, most of it was statistics and numbers and little substance. One the one hand, it seems as Spain is truly confronting the issue of domestic violence, whereas in the U.S. we don't have any government-based institutions that work to prevent and talk about this issue and its implications in society. We assume we have already made everything "equal" since women now work at the same jobs as men. Problem solved, right? As the head of the Equality department in Ecuador's government told me, "this problem is everywhere, maybe it just seems like it more in Spain because they are actually vocal about it."