How United Religions Initiative Celebrated International Women’s Day

Elana Rozenman (near far left) from Israel visits a URI leaders in India.

As the official blog overseer of the United Religions Initiative (URI), I search for stories and try to raise the voices of our interfaith activists as best I can. So, as a woman who deeply cares about peace building and women’s rights, my job can be hugely rewarding.

As most Her Blueprint readers are well aware, International Women’s Day (IWD) was celebrated around the world on March 8^th. 

For me, it was a pure joy to learn about how this momentous occasion was interpreted and celebrated throughout the global URI network.

Our Cooperation Circles—that is, groups of seven or more that represent at least three different faiths or cultures—can be very progressive. Imagine people from every faith coming together to talk about the delicate state of the planet and how to become better stewards of the Earth —it happens everyday, somewhere within the URI network.  

Now imagine women coming together for peace: Christians and Muslims in Pakistan, Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem—this also happens, but on an even larger, or at least more visible, scale on International Women’s Day. 

The women of URI never need a reason to celebrate and unify for peace; however, IWD is a great way to mobilize a series of events on one day and under one unifying theme.

This year, the United Nation‘s official theme was “Equality for women is progress for all.” URI’s women leaders embraced this sentiment wholeheartedly. Here are a few snapshots of their events:

- Just south of Mumbai in Satara, India, hundreds of Hindu and Muslims women created Rangolis, or floor decorations, on the theme “Women they want to be.” A panel discussion was held on women’s roles in nation building through peace and communal harmony work.

-In Pakistan, Muslim, Christian, and Hindu women came together to receive dance and other performances by children with the theme of women’s empowerment. The female attendees spoke about the local Cooperation Circle WAKE (Women and Kids’ Education), and how its vocational training programs were empowering them to find better jobs.   

-In the Great Lakes region of Africa, more specifically, Kampala, a panel discussion with roughly 50 women from very diverse faith backgrounds was held. The theme was “Inspired by my faith for positive social change.” Women were given a safe space to discuss workplace discrimination, domestic abuse, and the lack of rights to their children and in owning property.  

-In Jerusalem, Israeli and Palestinian women came together to view Women of Cyprus, a documentary about Turkish and Greek women reconciling after the Cyprus conflict. Along with the Greek female parliamentarian who directed the film, a panel of Israeli and Palestinian women discussed the documentary’s relevance to their current situation.

At United Religions Initiative, our women leaders are finding common ground and common goals, elevating both the cause for peace and the cause of women’s equality every day.

As UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon recently said, "The evidence is clear: equality for women means progress for all." 

Regina José Galindo: El mundo mordio mi corazon y me contagio su rabia

Regina José Galindo’s performances reflect the violence that is deteriorating Guatemala.

Born in Guatemala City, her work always makes references to perceived “lower” levels of society, and to women in particular. It also deals with the “other” who has been subjected to violence. Her performances are directly linked to the brutality of the patriarchal society she lives in. Galindo takes the place of the victims, inflicting upon her own body the same violence that she denounces in all of society.

Her works, which are of great visual impact, refer to global issues such as pervasive male violence, marginalization, subordination, and torture. With self-punishing actions, Regina José Galindo transforms a body into a medium that suffers: without losing perception of the reality of the hostile world that surrounds us.
In her work Perra (2005), Regina adopts submission yet desists from the post-modern strategy of seduction, because she carved with a knife "perra, " an insult and slur on her thigh muscle. In this brutal way, she recalls those women that are on the boundaries of submission, abuse, and denigration.

The artist courageously intervenes in the public realm, in order to show what the powers that be would prefer to keep hidden.

In some ways, Regina’s work can be viewed as a kind of “confession.” Her actions show that the subject can be built up only from trauma, revealing the repressions and turning corporeality into a place where the cruelty of power locates.

Yet her work carries significant messages. Regina José Galindo denounces the truth uncovered, as we see in El dolor en un pañuelo (1999), where she is nude, tied to a small bed in a dark room, with newspaper reports about rape and murder, and violence against women projected onto her naked body.

One extreme form of violence is nudity, which is a paradoxical state of communication, or rather a laceration of being, a pathetic ceremony in which the shift from humanity to animality takes place. Bataille considers that the dialectic of transgression and prohibition is the very essence and condition of eroticism. [1]

Celebrating National Grandparents Day

[Editor's Note: The following guest post was written by photographer Paola Gianturco.]

Storytelling Grandmothers throughout Argentina read to children in schools, libraries, bookstores and parks. The program, coordinated by the Mempo Giardinelli Foundation, has been so successful kindling a love of reading that the government has incorporated Storytelling Grandmothers into the national education curriculum and seven other countries have copied the program. (Credit: Paola Gianturco)

There’s a new kind of grandmother for us to celebrate on September 9. 

Today’s grandmothers are not like mine. My mother’s mother lived a mile away. I played under her bushes where spring violets grew delicate and dense. She baked treats for me--a dollop of meringue on a saltine cracker---and prepared delicious Sunday dinners for our family: chickens that my grandfather beheaded in the garage and vegetables she grew in the garden. My grandmother kept an art-nouveau lamp lit outside the room when I stayed overnight. She took the streetcar to visit her sister. Her bathtub had feet. Christmas wrappings got stashed in her linen closet to be used again. She kept her money in a safe hidden in a kitchen cabinet. The coal that heated her house was heaped high in the basement. She daubed on face powder with a puff. She wore housedresses with tiny prints and braided her hair into a pigtail she could sit on.

By contrast, many contemporary grandmothers have careers (half of all US grandmothers are too young to retire). They may read bedtime stories to their grandchildren via Skype because they’re travelling---or they live far away. If their hair is (what used to be called) grey, they think of it as silver---a shining symbol of a new life chapter.

Traditional Inca weaving patterns and dying processes were lost; the ancestors had been betrayed. Nilda Callañaupa founded the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco and arranged with local high schools for students to interview their grandmothers about their grandmothers’ weaving. Today, the practices have been recovered. Traditional garments are worn with pride in the Sacred Valley of the Incas.

Today, thanks in part to the Boomers, there are more grandmothers than at any other time in the history of the world: younger, healthier, better educated, and (despite the economic downturn) better off than they have ever been. Those attributes give them power: not “power over,” but pure power, the ability to catalyze change.

Causing change is in their DNA. Many grandmothers were students in the 1960’s; they know they can change the world because they did. They are passionate about their grandchildren, and uncompromising about making the world a better place for them.

They are working locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally because they understand that national borders are irrelevant since their goal is to improve the future for our interconnected, troubled world. I spent almost five years researching my upcoming book, Grandmother Power, A Global Phenomenon, interviewing 120 grandmothers on five continents. I was inspired by the intractable problems grandmothers are tackling: installing solar electricity in dark villages; reversing illiteracy; resuscitating good traditions (like Inca weaving) and convincing their communities to abandon bad ones (like female genital mutilation). Raising AIDS orphans; planting community gardens; monitoring military checkpoints to prevent abuse; demonstrating in the streets to end sex slavery.

The Grandmother Project understands that grandmothers are the family health authority all over the developing world, and that if one contemporary medical fact were added to their traditional knowledge, children’s health could improve permanently. When Senegalese grandmothers learned that their daughters were dying in childbirth due to female genital mutilation, they moved immediately to stop the practice. Next, the grandmothers want to eliminate teen pregnancy and child marriage. 

These grandmothers are not only changing the world, by modeling behavior, they are teaching their grandchildren patience, perseverance, generosity, justice, mercy, and peace.

I find great hope in this remarkable, unheralded grandmother’s movement and suspect you will, too. Just as IMOW’s new gallery honors MAMA POWER, let’s also celebrate GRANDMOTHER POWER with a salute on Grandparents Day, September 9. Please comment below and describe an activist grandmother—or activist grandmother group---you know!

***

About the author: Paola Gianturco’s fifth photographic book, Grandmother Power, A Global Phenomenon will be available September 18; 100% of her author royalties go to the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s Grandmothers to Grandmothers campaign, which benefits African grandmothers raising children orphaned by AIDS. The International Museum of Women will co-sponsor Paola’s slide lecture at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club on December 3. Find out more at www.globalgrandmotherpower.com

Lactivists Across the US Fight to Breastfeed in Public

The Milk Truck of Pittsburgh (via Gizmodo)

Lactating mothers that feel breastfeeding is a public right seem to have been coming out of the woodworks and are more vocal than ever in recent days.

In August, a Utah woman blogged about a negative confrontation by Whole Foods staff after she had tried to feed her child there. One social media campaign led to another, and soon a “nurse-in,” or the lactating mother’s version of a “sit in,” was established at 20 stores across the country. Whole Foods has since issued a public apology.

And just last month, a woman shopping in a Texas Target location said employees harassed her after she had breastfed her screaming infant in a secluded corner of the store. This spurred more than 100 nurse-ins in at least 35 states; and after 250 or more national demonstrations, Target Corporation issued a statement welcoming breastfeeding. Especially in the fitting rooms: “…even if others are waiting to use the fitting rooms,” claimed the apologetic memo.

They call themselves “lactivists,” or, more memorably, “NIP (Nursing in Public),” and, in case you haven’t caught them at a big box chain or major grocer near you, you may soon find them on wheels.

At least in theory, that is. An ice cream truck with a giant erect breast on its roof has been roaming the streets of Pittsburgh, PA as a safe haven for the lactating mother in need. Jill Miller, an art instructor at Carnegie Mellon, designed what’s known as the “Milk Truck” to come to the rescue of mothers wishing to nurse whenever they feel shunned publicly. The Truck, while not exactly practical for every breastfeeding mom in Pittsburgh, was part of the Andy Warhol Museum’s 2011 Biennial exhibit, which ended January 8.

As symbolic as the Milk Truck may be, the community support was overwhelming: Miller’s kickstarter campaign to launch the truck racked in more than $15,000 to start up, and the Pittsburgh City Council named Sept. 13 "Milk Truck Day."

A city proclamation declared: "Whereas, the Milk Truck…believes babies should be able to eat anywhere and everywhere; and … be it further resolved."

On a national scale, the Surgeon General issued out a call to action to support breastfeeding in January of last year. Surgeon General Regina M. Benjamin said: "Many barriers exist for mothers who want to breastfeed. They shouldn’t have to go it alone."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that while 75% of US babies start out breastfeeding, only 13% are exclusively breastfed at the end of 6 months. According to the call to action, breastfeeding protects babies from infections and illnesses like diarrhea, ear infections, and pneumonia. Breastfed babies are also less likely to develop asthma, and those who are breastfed for six months are less likely to become obese. Mothers themselves who breastfeed have a decreased risk of breast and ovarian cancers.

It wasn’t until 1999 that a US federal law was enacted to specifically address mothers wishing to breastfeed in public, but it only protects women wishing to feed in a federal building or a federal property. There are no stipulations for private organizations and properties that include retail stores and restaurants, although some states are passing laws for further protection.

In Canada, a 1989 Supreme Court case held that, since pregnancy was a condition unique to women, discrimination against women on the basis of pregnancy is a form of sex discrimination.

The most recent battleground for public breastfeeding? The streets of Sesame. That’s right, one of the nation’s most beloved children’s shows has now been targeted for failing to support breastfeeding women. So far, more than 30,000 people have signed a petition to bring breastfeeding back to Sesame Street.

Have women ever felt safe breastfeeding their babies in public? And if not, are these “lactivists” just the beginning of a new feminist movement?

Rich Country, Poor Children

The other night I watched a disturbing report on 60 Minutes about newly homeless children in Florida who were living in vans and cheap motels, studying by candlelight, and getting ready for school in public bathrooms. A large segment of these children were living with parents who made a comfortable living and owned homes just two, three, or even one year ago.

Now I am not a naïve U.S. citizen -- I know that the poverty rates in the wealthiest nation are at record highs, and the middle class is disappearing. Women, once employed at a higher rate than their male counterparts, are now facing the same unemployment rates as men. According to a recent story in the New York Times, the portion of American women at work declined to 53 percent in February, the lowest levels since 1988.

I have accepted that the jobless rate may remain the same, or possibly rise as projected, for a few more years. But I cannot accept the fact that our children are starving as our economy is booming and our bankers are reaching record profits.

According to the 60 Minutes report:

The government considers a family of four to be impoverished if they take in less than $22,000 a year. Based on that standard, and government projections of unemployment, it is estimated the poverty rate for kids in this country will soon hit 25 percent. Those children would be the largest American generation to be raised in hard times since the Great Depression.

I then discovered something greatly disappointing about my country: since its inception in 1989, only two countries have not ratified UNICEF's Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) -- the U.S. and Somalia.

On the presidential campaign trail, candidate Obama expressed a strong interest in ratifying the global initiative; in 2009, his administration then claimed the U.S. would sign on. That was two years ago, and we now have a rising poverty rate that will affect 1 in every 4 children.

Can our policy makers at the very least begin the process of attaining higher standards of living for our children and future generations?

According to UNICEF's site, the CRC:

"...highlights the unalienable rights of children. It establishes that governments will, to the best of their ability, ensure that all children have adequate shelter and a safe living environment, nutritious food, clean water, health care, and education. It grants children the opportunity to voice their opinions and concerns. In essence, the CRC requires governments to protect the humanity and value the potential of all children."

The Obama administration has a lot of policy decisions on the agenda that are surely taking a precedence over the CRC. But without prioritizing the millions of voiceless children suffering right now, the country is not prioritizing its own future. To tell your legislators to ratify the CRC, sign this petition.

MAKE CHANGE: Join Me on the Bridge for the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day

Ten years ago, when I was twenty-two years old my sister was in downtown Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001. I will never forget every detail of that day. Frantically dialing her cell phone number from my Midtown Manhattan office and holding a sign with her name outside my building while watching the Towers burn then fall. Everything, everyone was on fast forward then pause. I remember walking across the 59th Street Bridge more afraid than I ever have been still, yet knowing she waited for me to arrive home to her in Brooklyn. Safe. As sisters, we spent one day in outright war. Afghanistan has spent ten years due to the War on Terror. According to Women for Women International, in 2010 alone, civilian casualties in the War on Terror are estimated at 10,000 people. Since 1998, the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo has lost 5.4 million civilians. None of these numbers account for rape as a weapon of war, a recognized and grueling byproduct of conflict.

On March 8, 2011, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Mexico to China to India to Brazil to Afghanistan, women, men, and children are coming together on bridges all over the world to honor the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day in a call for peace. Women for Women International's Join Me on the Bridge Campaign is that call for peace: for women and children in countries where war is their every day challenge in life, and has been repeatedly for so many years fathoming their daily existence seems almost impossible.

In San Francisco, the event is hosted by Google and is meeting at Crissy Field before crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. In London, the march is lead by Annie Lennox and traverses the Millennium Bridge. In New York, we converge on the Brooklyn Bridge where Zainab Salbi, founder of Women for Women International, will speak. In China, people will gather on the Great Wall. In Paris, they will gather on March 6 and March 8 to honor the Join Me on the Bridge Campaign.


The 100th anniversary of International Women's Day is a global day celebrating the economic, political, and social achievements of women past, present, and future. One week from now, on the 100th anniversary honor and advocate for peace. In Egypt, we witnessed that the mass can come together in hope and create legitimate change.

Kate Nustedt, Executive Director of Women for Women International UK says, “A 100 years ago brave women stood up and changed the world for so many of us. Today, there are equally brave women standing up for equality in Afghanistan and other war-torn countries. Now is our chance to get behind these women and help bring peace and greater security to their lives.”

You can sign the petition here to acknowledge that you support women in Afghanistan and you can attend a Join Me on the Bridge event near you.

Women Make a Huge Impact on Protests in Egypt

A demonstrator kisses a soldier in Cairo. Image courtesy of Lefteris Pitarakis, AP.

"Whoever says women shouldn’t go to protests because they will get beaten, let him have some honor and manhood and come with me on January 25th...If you have honor and dignity as a man, come. Come and protect me and other girls in the protest. If you stay at home, then you deserve all that is being done, and you will be guilty before your nation and your people. And you’ll be responsible for what happens to us on the streets while you sit at home."

Twenty-six year-old Asmaa Mahfouz said these words just one week prior to "The Day of Anger" protests against the Mubarak regime, in an online video, her face shown plainly to the world.

Her video was said to spark a large segment of the demonstrators; and, according to the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights, 20 percent of those demonstrators were women. Some estimates put that number at around 50 percent. But even if those figures were lower, the presence of women activists in the Egyptian public sphere -- whether virtual or seen in Tahrir Square -- is unprecedented.

“Female participation is at an equal standing -- just like male participation -- and female demonstrators are not shying away from marching despite the tear gas,” said Amr Hamzawy, a research director at the Carnegie Middle East Center, to the New York Times. “It’s very impressive,” he said. “It’s not about male and female, it’s about everyone.”

A large female presence in the streets of Cairo--with little to zero sexual harassment reported--should not be seen as insignificant. Though women have protested alongside men in the past, reports of government confrontation targeting women are common. While covering a trial in 2005, journalist Mona Eltahawy noted that she was inappropriately touched by a police officer.

“Many women have experienced much more horrendous attacks,” she said. “It was very saddening, but also gratifying that these young women were prepared. They would say things like wear two layers of clothes so that if they rip off the first, you’re still dressed. No zippers. Carry a can of mace. If you wear a headscarf, make sure you tie it this way and not that way and wear two. … They [women] were determined because the purpose of these assaults and targeting women, obviously, is to shame these women and to terrorize them…These young women will not be scared away. We are standing up for our rights to be active and equal members of Egyptian society, which, again, gives me hope looking forward.”

The gains made for women's rights have yet to materialize in the world of politics, but the outlook is certainly optimistic. While Mubarak was in office this past November, Al Jazeera reported that a new law had been passed by the People's Assembly to allow 64 more seats in the house for women. If changed from its current status of only four seats, the law could mean an increase of 1,500% more women making decisions affecting the lives of all Egyptians. In the 1970s, a quota had been established to create more seats for female legislators, but it was repealed in 1986.

With enough momentum, the presence of women demonstrators in Cairo may be seen as a major turning point for gender equality in Egypt. A time when Egyptians chose a higher standard of living for themselves, with women leading the way.

Afghanistan: In Present, Past, and Future

As mounting protests sweep through Egypt and tensions rise across the Middle East, last weekend Bloomberg published U.S., Afghan Study Finds Mineral Deposits Worth $3 Trillion highlighting that the initial deposit of minerals in Afghanistan thought in June 2010 to be worth $1 trillion dollars now totals $3 trillion. The New York Times also reported United Nations and Afhanistan officials were signing a formal agreement to end the, “recruitment of children into its police forces and ban the common practice of boys being used as sex slaves by military commanders.”

A vast swath of minerals and resources. War. Child soldiers. Is this Congo or Afghanistan? Women for Women International’s Factsheet for the upcoming 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day cites that 75% of civilians killed in war are actually women and children. Yet, Women for Women International (WfWI) exists to help women and children survivors of war rebuild their lives and has been on the ground in Afghanistan and Congo implementing programs since 1993. This year the organization is hosting their second call to action in a campaign called Join Me on the Bridge. Held on March 8, 2011 to mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, women will gather all over the world on bridges in that shared call for peace.

This year also marks the ten year anniversary of September 11, 2001, the day which provoked the War on Terror and initial invasion of Afghanistan. Late last year, after Afghanistan elections took place and the US announced plans for a 2011 slowdown and 2014 pullout, myriad articles focusing on Afghanistan were published by mainstream news sources reflecting life for the Afghanistan women and children who remain alive.

In Nicholas Kristof's What About Afghan Women?, the New York Times reporter and human rights advocate shares that although less women wear the full burqa, they keep them on hand “just in case.” Kristof also shares that most women he interviewed, “favored making a deal with the Taliban — simply because it would bring peace. For them, the Taliban regime was awful, but a perpetual war may be worse.”

“Oppression,” Kristof says, “is rooted not only in the Taliban but also in the culture.”

Nancy Hatch Dupree, cofounder of The Louis and Nancy Hatch Dupree Foundation, which is dedicated exclusively to “nation building through information sharing and to raise awareness and broaden knowledge about the history and culture of the people of Afghanistan throughout the United States,” has spent most of her life studying Afghan culture.

Recently honored as archivist of the year, Dupree was quoted in 2009 by the Global Post commenting on the U.S. Military and diplomatic approach in Afghanistan. “They make strategies for people who they don’t talk to... They sit behind the fortress with razor wire walls... They don’t seem to realize the strategy has to be about the people,” Dupree said from her home in Kabul.

Last November, Canadian Journalist Sally Armstong’s To the Women of Afghanistan made an outright call for Afghanistan women to push for rights.

Women of Afghanistan, it is time to go to the barricades.

Now is the hour to claim your rights. Negotiations are under way in earnest; the Taliban are at the table, so are the warlords and bandits, tribal elders and the president. There’s not a woman in sight. Yet everyone knows you are the ones who can yank Afghanistan into the 21st century.

You’ve been denied everything from human rights and jobs to health care and education. You refer to your illiteracy as being blind because as one woman said, “I couldn’t read so I couldn’t see what was going on.”

Education of children in Afghanistan has been vehemently disrupted by the war as well as Taliban violence. According to It Takes a Village to Raise a School, published last September, New York University Professor Dana Burde cited a CARE report that shows community-based schools are less terrorized than the 1,000 schools bombed since 2006 that have left less than one percent of Afghan girls in some southern provinces in school and active education. Suicide bombers target girl's schools more often.

In December, National Geographic’s Afghan Women posed the questions: “Why do husbands, fathers, brothers-in-law, even mothers-in-law brutalize the women in their families? Are these violent acts the consequence of a traditional society suddenly, after years of isolation and so much war, being hurled into the 21st century?”

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.

Strength in Numbers: Mobilization, Awareness, and Health

Yesterday morning at the foot of the Eiffel Tower over 20,000 women converged ready to race in the 14th edition of La Parisienne to celebrate women's health and raise awareness for myriad causes. En route to the start line from Metro École Militaire, I thought about the passage of time. I looked to the gray misting skies of Paris and remembered that sunny day nine years ago when everything my fellow New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, and Washington, DC residents knew, my country knew, and I knew about safety changed.

This weekend also marked the ninth anniversary of September 11, 2001, when the United States as a country and as individuals, including my sister and myself in Manhattan, experienced one day of terrorism in an act of war. One day. Nearly 3,000 victims. It took months to recover, years to fully heal. A week after the 9/11 attacks, I vividly remember my sister and me in Grand Central Station crying in front of a sign seeking two missing sisters. Out of thousands of posted missing persons signs, we cried for those sisters because enough days had passed we knew them probably gone, but also because we knew they could have been us.

 The Healers of 9/11, by Nicholas Kristof, shares the journey of Susan Retik since she lost her husband in the 9/11 attacks nine years ago along with Patti Quigley, another widow who was pregnant with her first child when her husband was also killed that day. Though devastated and suffering post-9/11, "they realized that there were more than half a million widows in Afghanistan — and then, with war, there would be even more. Ms. Retik and Ms. Quigley also saw that Afghan widows could be a stabilizing force in that country."

America has been at war in Afghanistan since October 2001, meaning Afghan women have been suffering the strife of war for almost a decade. Kristof explains that "at a time when the American government reacted to the horror of 9/11 mostly with missiles and bombs, detentions and waterboardings, Ms. Retik and Ms. Quigley turned to education and poverty-alleviation projects — in the very country that had incubated a plot that had pulverized their lives. The organization they started, Beyond the 11th, has now assisted more than 1,000 Afghan widows in starting tiny businesses."

Intervention in the Streets

A group of Blank Noise activists take over a bus in 2003. Image: flickr

In America, when a man directs unwanted attention towards a woman or initiates sexual advances, it's called sexual harassment. But in Northern India, the term is "eve teasing," and it's getting a strong backlash thanks to a coalition of female artists called Blank Noise. Last month, several women from various cities joined forces to share their experiences and walk the streets together. Calling themselves "Action Heroes," the women became both activists and performance artists.

Blank Noise began in Bangalore, as a student art project, in 2003. Mimicking the "Take Back The Night" movements in the United States, the group unites large groups of women and encourages them to walk the streets at night as a collective, making a statement to the men who could otherwise harass them individually. Participants "Reclaim the Streets" in other ways as well: from spray painting the testimonies of sexual harassment victims in public places, to wearing clothing bearing anti-harassment messages.