Haiti Post-Quake: Cholera Outbreak

From The Economist, a Haitian mother and her child's health are in intense need due to the cholera outbreak 40 miles north of Port-au-Prince. Before the outbreak, the safety of women and children, the need for focus on long-term strategies in the tent cities, putting up water points, lights in the latrines, staying goal-oriented in terms of long-term moves versus camp eviction were all gaining higher importance. Yet, as of last week Haiti was again reminded how hard their country's short-term recovery because of cholera alone.

According to the Economist, "The [Cholera] outbreak originated in the Artibonite valley, 60km (40 miles) to the north. By October 27th more than 300 people had died and more than 4,500 cases were confirmed, according to the Haitian Ministry of Health."

However, as per most major news sources the outbreak is one that needs attention and comittment due to the fact Haiti remains a country in heavy and immediate crisis.

Photo credit: The Economist

1000 WORDS: Sing Her Praises

A singer in Sao Paolo, Brazil, warms up. From Isabela Senatore's series in Picturing Power and Potential, "Women in Music."

Haiti Post-Quake: The Past Ten Months and Counting

On January 12, 2010, Haiti was ravaged by a catastrophic 7.0 earthquake that extensively damaged the country's main city of Port-au-Prince. By January 24, over 52 aftershocks were recorded that measured at least 4.5. Ten months ago exactly, on January 20, the New York Times published Aftershocks, by Évelyne Trouillot sharing those first days post-quake.

The family has set up camp in my brother’s house. I live just next door, but it makes us feel better to be all in the same house. My brother, a novelist, is writing his articles; I am writing mine. From time to time a tremor will make us pause and run back outside, just in case, to be safe. I wonder how long we will have to be so cautious, and I long for normalcy.

We sleep; we listen to the radio; we exchange information. Mostly, we have been trying to stay alive and sane since that Tuesday afternoon a week ago when the earthquake changed our lives forever. It doesn’t help that the earth continues to convulse. Just this morning, we felt another tremor, the most violent since the earthquake itself. Let us hope it did not cause more deaths and damage.

In an already impoverished country, the level of displacement due to this cataclysmic environmental disaster escalated to epidemic proportions. With 230,000 deaths at least, 300,000 injured, and 7.8 billion dollars in damages, in August Her Blueprint published Haiti: Displacement, TB, and Progress?, which cited over 1.2 million people were living in tent cities and that safety and health concerns for women and children were fast-becoming a highly relevant issue post-earthquake. Although Évelyne Trouillot's eloquent Aftershocks calls in vain hope for the short-term aftershocks themselves to not bring more death and damage, what kind of long-term aftershocks are the country facing and what kind of strategies are evolving to protect the most vulnerable?

Six Months Post-Quake

Recently, I spoke with Joanne Blakemore who arrived to Port-au-Prince, Haiti on June 12, the quake's six month anniversary. With a background in third-world travel, humanitarian causes, and relief work, Joanne had done Katrina hurricane relief work as well in Mississippi.

"I was in Haiti pre-hurricane season. Commercial enterprise seemed to be functioning. Children seemed not to be starving. But, I thought it made Biloxi, Mississippi [post-Katrina] look like West Chester. The tents these women and children are living in are miniscule. You can’t stand up in them."

Outright distress, post-traumatic stress disorder, and health and safety concerns was the tone coming out of the camps when Ms. Blog broke the story along with AWID of MADRE's report, Our Bodies Are Still Trembling: Haitian Women's Fight Against Rape, and its findings regarding rape in the tent cities.

"Six months after the earthquake in Haiti, we see a continued crisis of safety and security in the displacement camps that has exacerbated the already grave problem of sexual violence. We found that women are being raped at an alarming rate-every day-in camps throughout Port-au-Prince. The Haitian Government, the UN, and others in the international community have failed to adequately address the situation. Women, especially poor women, have been excluded from full participation and leadership in the relief effort."

Enter acknowledgment of one of the biggest challenges of Haiti along with eviction, education, and myriad health concerns: the safety of women and children.

Nine Months Post-Quake

In September, the tent cities were still just as large as ever with around 1 million people displaced, and the weariness of those contained within them were again being expressed by major news outlets as were the overt safety concerns for women and children. On September 19, the New York Times published Haitians Cry in Letters: ‘Please — Do Something!’. The title of the article is culled from a direct quote from Ms. Saint Hilaire, 33, who shared in a letter posted to the boxes put up by the International Organization for Migration, about how she and her children are "stranded in a camp annex without a school, a health clinic, a marketplace or any activity at all."

"Please — do something!" she wrote from Tent J2, Block 7, Sector 3, her new address. "We don’t want to die of hunger and also we want to send our children to school. I give glory to God that I am still alive — but I would like to stay that way!"

Ten Months Post-Quake and Counting

On October 7, 2010, Bloomberg published Haiti Earthquake Camps Expose Women to Sex Violence, which cites that as a country Haiti had significant problems with sexual violence pre-quake, but that post-quake the numbers are staggering. “Living in squalid, overcrowded and spontaneous camps for a prolonged period has aggravated levels of violence and appalling standards of living,” the Refugees International report said. The humanitarian response to the earthquake “appears paralyzed.”

In fact, the title of the Refugees International October 6 report, Haiti: Still Trapped in the Emergency Phase, shares the exact issue at hand: long-term strategies are not taking shape or evolution. The report explains in detail how "enhancing proper leadership, enhancing the security for displaced women, improving camp management, bridging the communication gap, and decentralizing resources to promote recovery" are integral to moving past the emergency phase into effective long-term strategies for the country's recovery.

Photo credit: Ms. Magazine Blog

BOOKS: Survivor's Ed

After finishing her book, I am incredibly excited to hear Ingrid Betancourt, former Colombian senator and political hostage, tell her story in San Francisco on October 28 for IMOW's next Extraordinary Voices, Extraordinary Change Speaker Series event.

Betancourt's book, Even Silence Has an End, is completely engrossing. I read it cover to cover and frequently had to remind myself that it was a nonfictional memoir; the life she and other prisoners endure, for six and a half years, are unimaginable.

One thing that struck me in Betancourt's telling of her experience is her constant attempts to mentally and emotionally overcome her physical imprisonment. She writes about how, lining up to receive a daily meal, she and the rest of the prisoners became greedy and desperate to get the largest portion. She admits that she tries and fails over and over again to overcome the impulse to grab what she can for herself in the jungle, where it truly is a survival situation.

It's a lesson she tries to embrace over and over again--fighting against your most base nature to rise above circumstances beyond your control. Near the end of her captivity, Betancourt experiences and articulates this lesson most profoundly:

"Having lost all my freedom and, with it, everything that mattered to me--my children, my mom, my life and my dreams--with my neck chained to a tree--not able to move around, to talk, to eat, and to drink, to carry out my most basic bodily needs--subjected to constant humiliation, I still had the most important freedom of all. No one could take it away from me. That was the freedom to choose what kind of person I wanted to be."

An admirable goal indeed, and one that I've thought about in my daily life since reading the book. For all the painful physical struggles and the miserable injustice of having spent more than six years as a political prisoner, it seems to me that the hardest part of surviving captivity would be embracing your freedom to be a stronger, braver person.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Reconciling Women’s Employment with Motherhood in Sweden, 1930s: Alva Myrdal

www.nobelprize.org

Alva Myrdal

Women in many countries today think that the problem of reconciling motherhood with employment is a new problem. Unfortunately, it is an old problem, one that has been debated repeatedly throughout the previous century in many countries.

Among the first to address this issue and come up with workable solutions was the Swedish social reformer and political activist Alva Reimer Myrdal (1902-1986).

Sociologist, author, politician, diplomat, and Nobel laureate (Nobel Peace Prize - 1982), Myrdal first entered public life with her plans for reconciling women’s employment with motherhood in the 1930s. Myrdal was educated at the universities of Stockholm and Uppsala. She married the economist Gunnar Myrdal in 1924, the year she graduated, and working together (while raising three children of their own) they revolutionized the ideas of both Swedish socialists and the Swedish women’s movement.

Why Sweden? For a variety of reasons, including extensive emigration and a falling birthrate, Sweden in the 1930s had been experiencing severe problems with lack of population growth and replacement. Social Democrats in Sweden, who controlled the government then and since, had advocated the spread of birth control information in order to improve the living standard of the poor – but this approach was opposed by those who feared further population decline.

Alva Myrdal succeeded in reframing the view commonly held not only in the socialist movement but in many other sectors of society, including the religious right-wing – that married women should not be permitted to remain in the labor force. On the contrary, she insisted that women workers should be aided, not penalized, if they married and bore children. As Myrdal described her accomplishment, “The old debate on married women’s right to work was turned into a fight for the working woman’s right to marry and have children.” In order to implement such a policy, a support system for women including family planning, child care, sex education, and modification of domestic labor and even of domestic architecture would, she believed, have to be instituted by the government.

The Swedish government set up a Population Commission and appointed Alva Myrdal secretary of the Government Committee on Women’s Work. In that capacity, from 1935 to 1938, Alva Myrdal was able to realize enactment of many of her ideas, with help from her husband, who was a guiding member of the Population Commission. In her book Nation and Family, Alva Myrdal documented both the evolving ideology and the Swedish government’s implementation of her plan to facilitate a dual role for women – as participants in the labor force and as mothers of families. Among her proposals were several radical ideas – to attack the then-prevailing notions of sex-role socialization and to promote the participation of fathers as well as mothers in household and childrearing tasks. She extended her analysis in a subsequent book with Viola Klein, Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work, published in 1956 and most recently reprinted in 2003.

Clio recommends that everyone interested in this question of reconciling motherhood and employment revisit Myrdal’s writings and the subsequent solutions implemented by the Swedes which made their country one of the most prosperous and peaceful nations in the world.

Further suggested reading:

Alva Myrdal, Nation and Family: The Swedish Experiment in Democratic Family and Population Policy (London, 1945; reprinted 1968 by MIT Press; originally published in Swedish, 1940)

Yvonne Hirdman, Alva Myrdal: The Passionate Mind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008; originally published in Swedish).

1000 WORDS: Secret Garden

A women tends to the Victory Garden in San Francisco, from Anne Hamersky's series for Picturing Power & Potential, "Cultivating Change."

Team Congo Races the 20 Kilometers of Paris

Paris is known for its incredible light. When I was training for the 2009 Paris Marathon to race for Girls on the Run International, one of my last training runs found me at Place de la Concorde. Just as my running shoe hit the center, the Eiffel Tower lit up as did all the surrounding street lamps. The natural light here can be just as profound.

This past Sunday Alice Phan, pictured here triumphant at the 20K de Paris finish line, took to the city streets along with Run for Congo Women's Team Congo Paris in sunlight that marked beauty to the highest degree. Autumn. 20,000 runners. Unite.

In early September, I met Alice in person as we ran Parc des Buttes Chaumont together in training for the 20K de Paris. At the time, she was running about five miles. Later that month, we chatted excitedly at the start line of La Parisienne, a 6K for women's health, which also marked the ninth anniversary weekend of September 11.

When Alice initially emailed me about joining Team Congo Paris, she shared how she had always wanted to work with Girls on the Run Manhattan while living in New York, but that her work hours had always been an obstacle. Phan, an optometrist, is now living in Paris due to her husband's job transfer, and while acquiring her work visa, she volunteers at a hospital and has also become an invaluable asset to Team Congo Paris. To explain Alice's energy is like harnessing a surge of fresh air, a full deep-belly laugh; she is the kind of person who congratulates herself out loud on a fantastic idea and keeps on in the face of adversity with determination and a smile.

For the first ten minutes of the 20K de Paris race, I ran alongside Alice before I launched onward. On Sunday night post-run, I checked in with her and she shared that the first eight miles she was at a consistent 10 minute mile pace, but then a major cramp kicked in. "I probably could have walked faster than what I was running, because I was pretty much crawling," she told me, "but then when I saw the 19 km sign, I was so excited and was ecstatic to finish!"

She finished in under 2 hours and 15 minutes.

Born to first-generation parents who came to the United States from Vietnam then settled in Southern California, Alice often embraces Run for Congo Women's shared reason for being. She gets it. We are out there running together raising awareness, pushing our own bodies as a metaphor for Congolese women and children whose bodies and beings have been pushed far past any fathomable sense of resiliency. We keep on as a testament to their profound hardship. Around the time I met Alice, I wrote Resiliency, Congo, and Rape As a Weapon of War, which highlighted the July 30 attack of 300 women and children in Eastern Congo, only ten to twenty miles from a UN compound.

According to the Guardian's October 6 article, Militia Commander Mayele Arrested After Mass Rape of Congo Villagers, "Over four days, at least 303 people were raped – 235 women, 52 girls, 13 men and 3 boys – according to a preliminary UN investigation published last month. Many of the victims were raped repeatedly."

In a statement from Congo, Lisa Wallström, the UN's representative for sexual violence in conflict, says the arrest of Mayele is a victory for justice. "The numerous criminal acts committed under 'Lt Col' Mayele's command cannot be undone, but let his apprehension be a signal to all perpetrators of sexual violence that impunity for these types of crimes is not accepted and that justice will prevail," she said.

Although human rights activists have commended the arrest, they have also highlighted that Mayele was not a major player or the only assailant, and this act of small justice is only one step toward a more comprehensive and effective resolution. How that resolution takes shape – or if it will – ultimately depends on a variety of upcoming actions, reports, and initiatives.

In the meantime, Team Congo Paris will continue to race in support of the women and children in Congo. For their deserved safety and well-being, at least.

You can still join Team Congo Paris and race on November 7, 2010 or you can support us via donation.

Pakistan's Humanitarian Crisis at Scale

During July and onward, Pakistan was devastated by a surge of flooding that now encompasses one fifth of the country. That amounts to a mass of water larger than the size of England. In consequence, the response teams initially called in attempted to assess just how extensive the physical damage, which was readily apparent from the broken bridges, destroyed homes, and 20 million displaced people. Yet, as time passes the shift from immediate emergency response to effective, long-term strategies is essential. In a country where gender issues were already highly prevalent pre-flood, now they are even more pressing, if not dire.

When the Pakistan floods began, I looked at victim photos in the same way I did when Haiti experienced its massive earthquake almost ten months ago. In both situations where environmental and climate crisis created extensive displacement, there were also unique threats facing women and children.

In August, Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) released a statement on the post-flood humanitaran crisis that clarified some of the harsher realities for Pakistani women. "Many of the flood-affected areas of Pakistan have spent years in conflict marked by rising religious fundamentalisms. Reports from the ground indicate that fundamentalist groups are mobilizing aid and providing relief services in areas unreachable by the government with potentially dangerous implications for women’s rights."

The acquisition of women's rights in daily life are a struggle for most Pakistani women, but how extreme must these challenges become when faced with urgent disaster? Pakistani women already experience myriad religious and social inequities. As such, AWID's statement acknowledges that even while government outreach is not enough for a disaster of this proportion, that the rise of organizations functioning within the country in the relief effort that have incentives which are not human rights-based, much less in any way working toward positive outcomes for women and children, need to be halted.

Along with reports of missing women and children as well as women having significant issues accessing relief support and health care, AWID makes a call to action by inciting, "the government of Pakistan and the international community to take immediate action to ensure that the very much-needed aid is committed and actually delivered in a timely and effective fashion. Also, the well-being of women and girls has to be ensured through the provision of both emergency relief and significant longer-term support for reconstruction and development that responds to the gender-specific needs and circumstances of Pakistani women and girls. In particular, we [AWID] call for the full participation of women at all levels of reconstruction and for sustained efforts to be centered on the long-term development needs of women and girls and the promotion and protection of their human rights."

Any effectual response to Pakistan post-flood must encompass the strategic knowledge that human rights and women's rights are even more essential during times of disaster, because they were already extremely vulnerable pre-crisis.

Photo credit: Guardian

Read Kate Stence's article Haiti Post-Quake: The Past Ten Months and Counting about Haiti's struggles with displacement and the challenges to support women and children in long-term strategies of relief.

1000 WORDS: Salt of the Earth

Female salt miners in India take a break from the day's grueling work. From Selvaprakash Lakshmanan's submission to Picturing Power & Potential, "Working for Just Salt."

Running for Congolese Women to End Violence

Chris Jackson is running 12 marathons this year for Run for Congo Women to raise awareness about violence against women and children in the Congo. Here he is running the Congo marathon with Congolese children beside him.

Last Sunday morning, Team Congo Paris raced from Paris to Versailles for Run for Congo Women. It was a 15K journey heavy with French history, because King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were brought from Palace Versailles to Palace Tuileres at the start of the French Revolution. Around two miles into the race, came Île des Cygnes along river Seine housing a small version of the Statue of Liberty erected by Americans living here in France. It is a replica of the original standing in New York Harbor given by the French to America as a sign of international friendship in 1886.

The race had authentic historical depth to say the least. Yet, I spent it thinking how all last week while reporting on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), I noted that media did not acknowledge that violence against women and girl’s (VAW/G) is not one of the eight goals specified by the MDGs. In the World's Women at the Center of Achieving the MDGs conference during the UN Summit, one of the first points addressed was that very issue.

In August, Post-AIDS 2010 Conference Her Blueprint highlighted how tied the issue of violence against women and girls to the violation of a plethora of human rights in Health Versus Harm: Zero Tolerance on Violence Against Women and Girls. Yesterday, the International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA) was up for a critical vote in the United States Senate but was postponed until November. However, Ritu Sharma, co-Founder and President of Women Thrive World Wide published her thoughts about her own grandmother's death in East India in hopes of sharing why the bill should pass when voted on.

“I never met my grandmother. She was burned alive with kerosene doused on her sari and lit on fire. Some think it was suicide, some think it was a dowry murder since her mother-in-law was not pleased with what my grandmother brought into her new husband’s family. She had four children; one of them my mother, the other my uncle, who was just a few months old when she was killed. I cannot imagine her shock, grief and pain in the moments before she died…Regrettably, her story is not uncommon.”

In the United Nation's special meeting World's Women at the Center of Achieving the MDGs, Denmark's Minister of Health noted that women of the Democratic Republic of Congo have to ask their husbands before they can sign a contract or start a business. After citing this statistic, he asked, "Can you imagine?"

To be honest, I cannot imagine any of the previous scenarios. Yet, I know they are happening daily and consistently and have been for a very long time. On Sunday while racing Paris to Versailles, I began reciting statistics in my head about Congolese Women that I know by heart because right now they are who I run for.

“Congo presents one of the world's deadliest emergencies to date. More than 5.4 million people have died since 1998. Gang rape and brutal torture are a daily reality for the women and children of Congo. Women as old as 80 and as young as five have been victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence. 38,000 continue to die every month, 1200 a day. Half of these deaths are children under the age of 5 years.”

At moments I was not sure what to do with all the emotion.

One Man’s Admirable Effort of Support

Chris Jackson, a London lobbyist pictured here running the August 18th marathon in Congo for Run for Congo Women and Women for Women International, is well acquainted with the intensity of emotion and action Congo can provoke because he has devoted himself, utterly, to raising awareness about violence against Congolese women and children as part of his year-long endeavor to run 12 marathons for Run for Congo Women. Already successfully completing nine marathons, including an Ironman as well as an Olympic Triathlon along with a smattering of 10Ks, Chris is someone who is exceptional and sincere in his endeavor -- so much so he will actually be running 13 marathons just to make sure he completes one every month in 2010.

Chris can also voice what most of us can only imagine because he has run Congo. He went. He ran. He returned. And, now he shares why the Congo race was the hardest one so far for him.

BOOKS: Do It Anyway

Quick test: How would you describe yourself? What are the first three words that come to mind? Friend, Mother, Writer, Doctor, Caretaker...

What about "Activist"?

It's a loaded title, right? An identity that certainly comes with a lot of baggage. I can think of several angsty questions that run through my mind that make me hesitant to call myself an activist. "Am I really doing enough? Is what I'm doing important? What if I mess up? Or worse, what if all the work I do results in nothing?"

In Courtney Martin's new book, Do It Anyway, Martin (who, full disclosure, helped with the launch of Her Blueprint and is a friend of IMOW) profiles eight young people in the U.S. who she describes as "breathtakingly ordinary" and who are, despite setbacks, criticism, struggles, doing what they believe in to make a change in the world. She features everyone from Raul Diaz, a case manager who helps formerly imprisoned gang members in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles re-enter society, to the actress Rosario Dawson, who uses her celebrity status to call attention to movements such as Voto Latino, which encourages the Latino American population to get to the polls.

Martin acknowledges that, in the wake of the gamechanging activists of the 60s and 70s, this generation's activism can seem less passionate, less hands-on, perhaps less effective. But she says that's a misconception. Instead, this generation's activism "exists in defining moments--usually far from the glare of the television camera's eye or the flashing red light of the journalist's voice recorder." And indeed, the eight portraits in this book exhibit that the current activists are no less dedicated, no less passionate, and no less willing to sacrifice.

I see Do It Anyway as a call to arms for a new generation of activists, of people who want to make a difference in the world despite knowing how hard it can be, how maddeningly impossible it is to Completely Change Everything. And my favorite lesson in Do It Anyway is what's called "Good Failure." Martin says that after talking to the many young activists profiled in the book, she learned "that failure is, indeed, usually inevitable." Instead, she encourages the embracing of good failures:

"Good failures are what you achieve when you aim to transform an entire broken system and end up healing one broken soul. They are the small victories ... It's not that we shouldn't aim to transform the prison industrial complex, reduce wealth disparity in this country, cure HIV and AIDS, fix public education. It's that we must hold these large-scale revolutions in our hearts while tackling small, radical acts every day with our hands. We must wake up wondering how we might fail at changing absolutely everything in such a way that we manage to change a little something."

It's an inspiring message, a reminder to give yourself permission to put your all into it, perhaps fail, wake up again despite a record of setbacks and failures, put on the cloak of Activist, and do it anyway.

THEATER: Swimming Upstream

SWIMMING UPSTREAM from V-Day Until the Violence Stops on Vimeo.

In New York earlier this month, I had the opportunity to see Swimming Upstream, a vivid and moving play about women’s experiences post Katrina, written by sixteen New Orleans women. My experience at the theater that night was a powerful reminder of how the arts can touch us and bring experiences, ideas and emotions to life. Through the words and songs of the women of New Orleans I was able to begin to grasp the pain, frustration and sheer rage – and finally the optimism – of living through Katrina and the enormous impact on the women there, who truly knit the local community together.

Swimming Upstream was presented by V-Day, Ashé Cultural Arts Center and The Women Donors Network and directed by IMOW Global Council member Eve Ensler. The play is a testament to Eve’s passion for telling the story of Katrina through women’s eyes. The play not only provoked me to learn more about supporting women’s role in recovery post Katrina, but reminded me that unlocking an audience’s empathy and imagination is imperative in building not only awareness but whole social movements.

Learn more or buy tickets to Swimming Upstream [V-Day]