The community of Santa Maria (pseudonym) in rural Nicaragua has been receiving foreign visitors (ISL students and participants from other organizations) for a number of years. These groups are hosted by an active women’s cooperative who take pride in their ISL involvement and for whom ISL groups have been the main ally in their personal and collective struggle for community development. Through participant observation and interviews, the data collected indicated that the ISL involvement was a highly gendered experience for the residents. The personal accounts of both women and men showed that involvement with ISL programs had led to empowering experiences on an individual and familial level, even transformative for some individual women due to social and material benefits. However, the caring economy and temporary fictive kinship in which the accommodation of ISL programs lay upon reproduced segregating dynamics for men and women in the community, reinforcing the perceived need to perform highly gendered roles in order to access the benefits that the programs bring. We conclude that without a critical approach towards the gendered dynamics that ISL reproduces, these programs fall short of challenging the oppressive gender structures in the community, and fail to create structural change.

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