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- Mar 2010Working with women in DRC LESS
- The laughter of a dozen children playing in the dirt by a mud hut fills the wet heat of the morning. Marie smiles to herself as she measures out their vitamin supplements.
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The hut is perched on the side of a valley and as you look out across it, you can see what once were homes, now overrun with forest growth, and the edges of abandoned fields.
Marie was just a child when a militia group burnt this village, Muhila, to the ground. For many years she and her family dared not return.
But now she is back, with help from Centre Resolution Conflits, a local peacebuilding organisation that is helping people like Marie all over eastern Congo. Throughout the region, thousands of villagers have been forced from their homes by 16 years of civil war. Local peacebuilders are helping some of them to go home.
In Muhila, CRC set up an orphanage for 14 children who had lost everything in the war. Malnutrition makes these children look years younger than they are. CRC found the funds to train Marie as a nutritionist. CRC’s presence gave villagers like her the confidence to return, to overcome the fear of what they have experienced.
The centre in Muliha provides the orphans with what they need for a second chance to be strong and healthy children: food, shelter, care and security. And CRC allows both Marie and the children to face a brighter future.
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- Mar 2010Working with women in Zimbabwe LESS
- Mbuya Mambiro has seen a lot in her long life in Zimbabwe. But the last two years have been the hardest. Since the elections of 2008, she has lived with the daily MOREfear of political violence and the collapse of local services.
As a mother living in a sprawling township, her worst fear has been cholera. In 2008 as political chaos spread, her town council cut off the water supply to people’s homes and schools. She and her neighbours crowded round boreholes and streetside taps to gather water for their cooking and washing. Others drew it straight from the river, though the waters were contaminated with sewage.
Two years on, the streets of her town are still awash with sewage from rusting pipes that burst with sickening regularity. The health risks are obvious to residents who must jump across mounds of uncollected rubbish to reach their own front doors. And there still isn’t enough water: Harare needs 13 million tonnes of water a month, but only receives seven.
Into this situation stepped local peacebuilding organisation Envision Zimbabwewhich held a township meeting with 30 local women, to see what they could do for themselves about water, waste and public hygiene.
The women came from all walks of life and all political groupings – women split apart by the violence of the times. Working together was unusual. Uniting on a common issue they began to rebuild bridges between their communities. One woman, Mai Kanoyerera, spoke out: “There is a lot we can do as women to help our communities help ourselves.”
They decided to organise a clean-up of the township, and to set out ways for the town to keep itself clean - by small things like not scrubbing pots with sand in the sink, or fixing central collection points for everybody’s rubbish. And they asked Envision to help them to meet the city council.
Chipo Chung from Envision was there on the day the clean-up began. “I was in awe of these women, equipped with donated protective gear - gumboots, gloves, face masks - enthusiastically throwing themselves into gutters that were knee-high in human waste, sewage and rubbish, and clearing it out by hand. The stench was gut-renching, I was gagging because it smelt so bad. But these women, some old enough to be my grandmother, worked without stopping for four hours!”
Mai Kanoyerera adds: “We were surprised to hear from Envision that we can actually make money from recycling rubbish that we usually just throw away. For example, we can melt down plastics to make paraffin or floor polish. We can make compost from all the vegetable matter we discard, to grow more food for our families around our homesteads. So we decided to get bins to sort the rubbish that can be recycled.”
For Mbuya the fear of recent years is beginning to subside. “We needed to show ourselves and our neighbours that we have the power to do much to clean up our neighbourhoods, to create healthy places for our children to play, to restore the dignity of our living spaces.
“Once we piled up the rubbish in specified locations, we did get the council to come and collect it. Now, with the help of two engineers, found through Envision, we will solve our water and sewage problems. And we are looking at how we can earn income by turning our waste into ‘gold’.”
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Mar 2010Working with women in Sudan LESS - The old woman folds a shawl around her crinkled face as she squints into the midday sun. She holds out a basket for sale. In the pouch around her waist is enough MOREcash to feed her family for a week. Today she will not need to dedicate her singing to bloodshed.
Fatima is from southern Sudan. Her people, the Hakamat, revere the elder women of their tribe as singers of ritual songs – songs that accompany building a house or gathering a crop, but lately have supported war.
During decades of civil war, each armed group in her region of South Kordofan would adopt a Hakamat woman to sing them battle songs. The singing gave them courage and confidence. The singers became rich and important.
When the civil war ended, the militias disbanded and the singers lost business. They fell back on their villages to support them – and found that songs of blood worked there too. A lucrative line of work emerged. In pastoral communities where old wounds remain from 23 years of war, the influence of a Hakamat singer could inflame a dispute over a cow into a vendetta between tribes.
Local peacebuilder Rasha El Fangry understood the influence of these women. But she believed the advocates of war could become ambassadors for peace.
Other people had tried this before and failed. Hakamat women had agreed to sing peaceful songs at festivals, and then returned to their ways. As Rasha explains, “Villagers do not give money to songs of peace, and as soon as a festival was over the women returned to the way they were before.”
But Rasha, with her local knowledge and contacts, looked deeper into the problem. She talked to the singers. They told her that the real problem was how to earn a living. One said, “We want to learn the songs of peace, so no more of our children will be lost in war. But you must train us in something, so that we can support ourselves.”
So Rasha brought a trainer from Khartoum to their village, a woman who was skilled in [weaving], and for two weeks the trainer taught the Hakamat women her skills. And all the time, Rasha talked with them about war and peace. “I told the women their hands needed to be with the hands of all Sudan.”
Today these women are makers of all kinds of handicrafts. They sing about peace. And Fatima can feed her family without inciting violence.
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- Mar 2010Celebrating International Women's Day LESS
- To celebrate International Women's Day 2010 I asked the peacebuilders we fund to tell the stories of the women they work with.
You can watch them online at www.peacedirect.org/women.
Join us MOREin celebrating International Women's Day - there's a whole host of ways you can celebrate, here are just some of our suggestions.
Appreciate the women in your life. Your mum, your wife, your best friend, we all know fabulous women, so why not tell them today just how much you appreciate them. And you can even send them a peace ecard with your own personal message
Blog for International Women's Day - Gender Across borders are asking you to blog about what equal rights means to you.
Watch "Pray the Devil Back to Hell" the story of courageous Liberian women who came together to end a civil war and bring peace to their shattered country.
Get inspired by these quotes by women - and if you have any more email Helen@peacedirect.org and I'll add them to the website.
People with clenched fists can not shake hands.
Indira Gandhi
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Anais Nin
I decided it is better to scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Russian writer, Hope Against Hope
I am only one, but still I am one.
I cannot do everything, but still I can do something;
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
Helen Keller
