Women and the Sky (part three).

This blog’s aim is to give a conclusion to the previous two posts and to re-enforce how much impact reading “ Half the Sky” has had on me. As I stated in part two, once I had read this book, then my feeling was that I had to take some positive action.

This list is what is being done now,with even greater emphasis, and what will be done in the future:

1) It was soon clear, by chapter two, that sponsoring a child would be definite way of lifting, or at least considerably reducing a child’s risk of being sold into sexual slavery. There was no surprises when this was stated as one of the points raised at the book’s end. I have looked at suitable child sponsorship websites and most likely will be choosing Action Aid. My choice of country will be India, where the highest rates of prostitution and child sexual slavery exists. The aim is to have an Indian child sponsorship in place by the end of January at a cost of £15 per month. This will be a firm long-term commitment.

 2) I already had heard of Kiva and have two loans already in place for two women. One lives in Peru and one In Africa. Once the money has been re-paid I will then look at helping another two women.

3) Networking with other people is hugely important. I have forged more links with people, via twitter, WordPress (blog) and Facebook and this has been hugely exciting and rewarding. I recently met with people from FORWARD at Amnesty International London and this was very positive.

4) My strong interest in FGM/C is well-known among my closest friends and contacts. However, I have written very little about it and have been very silent in many ways surrounding this subject. This has been because I felt sometimes embarrassed writing about it, talking about genitalia and circumcision. A very sensitive subject many could find offensive. However, the silence is now off on this and I will be showing more of what I am learning, reading and doing as well as campaigning against it.

5) Finally, my training for a local race in May for my women’s causes goes on - all be it the snow has halted training at the moment.  There may have to be some changes to the races’ aims because of the weather and my own difficulties with training over the last three months. However, the beneficiaries for this effort will be FORWARD and the Women’s Resource Centre UK. There will be a separate blog about the race in the next month.

I have only made five statements here because I intend to fulfill each one of them. I don’t often make a New Year resolution but I made one this year which for me applies to all areas of my life. To set achievable goals that I can do, can stick to, and that I will see through to the end. To work when work needs doing and as well as recreation. 

 With this in mind, I will now get on and work on these. In six months, I will give an update saying what has happened as a result.

Women and the Sky ( part two)

A review of the book ” Half The Sky. Turning oppression Into Opportunity For Women Worldwide”.  Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. (2009) USA.

“Leave your heart behind”, I told myself as I was reading chapter six. A particular section I was struggling with was the story you may have read in my earlier blog, the Prologue about Mahabouba.

If anyone dares venture into this book they need two things: first, the ability to desensitize themselves from true horror (that is fact and not fiction), and secondly, a strong and compelling interest in the human rights and dignity of woman, with a desire for change and justice. I met the second criterion easily. The first had to be soon learned, otherwise I would have never got to the end. 

Half the Sky gives you little time for polite introductions. You are transported right at the very start, into the author’s world of grimness. A compelling force of authority on their subjects which hooked me in right from the outset.

The first five chapters are fast and as dark as any Black Hole in space. The vastness of suffering and human rights abuses, involving young girls and women, which is the main focus of the book, has detailed first hand accounts and knowledge which is well argued and presented. In fact, this is what impressed me most about this work. The incredible depth, research and detail with compelling authority  these authors clearly had in their subject areas.

This is no light weight book which can require lazy reading. I think we have well established that fact already. The book, whilst easy to read in its language use, took much of your concentration and thinking. Not only because you became so absorbed in the people stories and lives but you needed to keep up with all the detail of names and events. I sometimes had to re-read certain sections.

In spite of this, the first 100 pages of the 252 was finished by the first evening of introduction. This is a ” can’t put it down book” in all of its awesome content. Those first 100 pages discussed and informed you about the types of violence against women, including sexual violence. Sexual trafficking, prostitution, rape, honour killings and maternal health was a heady and unbelievable cocktail of jaw dropping stuff. I gasped and held my hands to my forehead several times as I tried to comprehend just what I was absorbing from the words on the page.

Other subjects discussed later concentrated on what could be done to help the empowerment and emancipation of these girls and women against the violence committed mainly by men, in a world where a female has no voice and  treated as if they are little more than cattle in a market stall.

Family planning, shamefully lacking and one of the most urgent health needs of women worldwide is addressed. Education- the key to a females future and her best weapon against violence, disease and poverty is discussed in length. Micro-financing, so women could lift themselves out of poverty was another tool, and the each story told was exhilarating and uplifting, in what most readers would view, as an extremely compelling but depressing read.

Female Genital Mutilation, initially is touched upon and I thought it was going no further, to my disappointment. However, in Chapter 13 ” Grassroots and Treetops” it re-emerged with, for me, fresh and enlightening material. An in-depth analysis about how hard this extreme form of violence is to eradicate is explained in a way which totally turned upside down my perception of the subject: how off course I was. How little I really knew of a subject that I thought I had a firm grasp on. For me it was like tearing up the rule book, the thoughts, the arguments and starting all over again. (It would take another blog to explain this more fully).

I wanted to cry at the success stories, like Edna’s hospital, to admire Jane and her 34 million friends and to despair at how the rescued girl from the brothel  saved but then voluntarily returned. Why? Not because she did not want a better life, but unbeknown  to me, before I read the book ,was her addiction to drugs; given initially to break her will and to make her incapable of fighting off  rape and prostitution, which lead her back to her prison of violation.

Anyone reading this book is unlikely not to want to do something at the end. There are four main suggestions about what the reader can do and a whole host of website addresses where you can get more information. Using Kiva to help micro-financing new businesses and sponsoring a child are two important ones suggested.

“Half The Sky” (for me personally) is the best written work on human rights centered around women that I have ever read. No work has ever whipped up my sense of urgency and longing to do something with meaning and purpose in this area. In my next blog- part three, I will be writing about what I intend to do as a result of reading this book. I have enormous respect for the authors, who clearly had put their own safety at risk to visit, speak to women and girls, and to come back and a write a book that so deserved the Pulitzer Prize it received.

Finally, I urge, implore anyone out there who cares enough about the dignity and rights of women to go out with care and  a dare to read this book. You need a strong heart and a hard stomach for the job but this is a one such work that demands a read.

Women and the Sky: Prologue (part one).

This is one of three blogs linked together by one incredible book.  

“Half The Sky. Turning Oppression Into Opportunity For Women Worldwide”. Written by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, for me has been one of the most stunning books I ever read and certainly the most powerful. The actual review of the book comes in part two. In part three, I shall be describing what impact the book has had on me personally and what I am doing  as a result.  

This prologue is to set the scene and to give a taste as to what is to be reviewed. Written in my own words and not copied, I wish to impart a story of amazing power and depth. Of one girl whose plight touched me the most, in a subject area passionate to my heart. Here the story unfolds.  Please read on:  

 

 The hyenas were circling around her. Mahabouba couldn’t move her legs at all, her childbirth injuries had left her immobile and her baby was dead. Now she was fighting to stay alive herself. Shouting and waving a stick at the wild beasts, her determination and force to stay alive was overwhelming. She wanted to live. All through the night the hyenas circled around her little hut, and all night long Mahabouba fended the animals off, until they had at last disappeared by the morning light.  

  The door of the hut, where she had been placed, had already been taken off, so that this 14 yr old girl, frail and critically ill, could be eaten by the wild beats. No one wanted Mahabouba because she was cursed: cursed by smell and odour.A river of misery that had become her short life, of leaking wastes and rotten flesh.  

Mahabouba was cursed by a condition known as Obstetric Fistula, common in Africa, now eradicated in the West by it’s modern maternity care. But this young girl lived in a very different world to the one most of us know. Her own personal world was beyond darkness, it’s injustice and cruelty beyond most people’s reasoning and comprehension.  

This culmination of this terrible scene of unimaginable terror, suffering and misery is one link in a chain that would eventually transport this tender, frail and desperately sick child to a white building on an edge of a city. An edge of hope, health and dignity which can be restored for as little as $300. Mahabouba found herself at the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital.  

The torment did not begin and end there for this girl. For her, prior to this terrible event, other serious trauma had already befallen her. Sold for eighty burr, ( $10), she became the second wife of a sixty year old man who had raped and beaten her. The first wife was also jealous of her younger rival. Mahabouba was only 13 at the time, and this wife beat her also. When she became pregnant, the girl knew that she and her baby would likely be beaten until both their lives perished. She fled and ran away when she was 7 months pregnant.  

Eventually she returned to her family village, but being pregnant and married no one wanted to have anything to do with her or to take care of her. Eventually an Uncle took her in.  

Mahabouba endured, like many African girls or women, her labour alone. There was no skilled Midwife to help her and she had received no anti-natal care. After 7 days of labour, her child already dead, Mahabouba lost consciousness. The baby’s head obstructed in an immature pelvis and birth cana,l had already restricted vital circulation leading to permanent injury of nerves and tissue.  

Eventually -someone by this time had summoned a birth attendant, she awoke: a miracle in itself. ( Most babies are eventually delivered still born) but a fistula remains. A hole in the bladder, or rectum, or both, where urinary and faecal incontinence results. This is when these girls are ostracised by their families. Known as the modern-day leper and divorced by their husbands these girl and women are outcasts, taken to a little hut like Mahabouba’s and left to die.  

But Mahabouba was one of the few where a miracle can happen and somehow she survived. Knowing that she would die, if she stayed in that hut and with a still unbelievable will to live, she crawled on her arms and pulled her body towards a village, where she had heard of a western Missionary who could help her. ( Nerve injury to her pelvis caused her inability to walk)  

Half dead and a day later, she arrived at the village and managed to find the man who would save her life. He took her in and nursed her sufficiently well enough to save her and then transported her to the fistula hospital.  

Eventually, Mahabouba with physiotherapy learned to walk but the damage to her pelvis could not be repaired fully and she was left with a colostomy. At first, after her recovery, she was given simple jobs to help out. But the medical and nursing personal at the hospital realised that this girl had potential. She was taught to read and write and given more responsibilities. Now she is a Senior Nurse Aide at the hospital and can be seen walking around it’s corridors in her nurse’s uniform, having found life and purpose helping others who had suffered the same dreadful fate.  

The World Health Organisation estimated, and it is only an estimated since no reliable and exact data can be calculated, that in 2005, 536,000 woman died in pregnancy and childbirth. That does not take into consideration many more thousands upon thousands of women injured in the way I have just told by this story  

99 percent of deaths occur in poor countries and the women who suffer this appalling and PREVENTABLE injury largely are left to die. Only a lucky few receive the treatment they need.  

My words can never fully convey the magnitude of what I have just tried to describe. I hope you will read the next blog to find out more about women like Mahabouba, whose outstanding courage against the dark tide of violence effecting women worldwide is an international scandal and outrage. 

To find out more about Obstetric Fistula see Here