Morning Musings

 

Switch on your radio today and no doubt your ears hearken to those danceable beats of that song, what is it called? Anyway, you cruise the broadband searching for a station to suit your mood and after a short time you hear a song you last heard as a small child in the village. No wait, *Snap!* your uncle comes in and switches to the BBC local frequency saying, “My child, that is noise, listen to this glorious music…” You hear the announcer tell the listeners it is Tchaikovsky. Uncle never fails to remind you to learn the name spelling of each composer. Bringing oneself to the realization that our culture has changed is like slowly getting accustomed to altitude change inflight.  The only thing is that you never quite retrace your steps, and realize that the move is not just about music, but you also find that one day you cannot quite live where you used to live, and that things as you knew them, and loved them, will never be the same way again. So you cannot wait to leave for the day.

Looking around the neighborhood from the window, you see snatches of color as people dash to school and office, trying to beat the clock. 3 piece suits, designer ties and those pointed ladies heels pierce your still sleepy mind as you get ready to join the column headed to the city swiftly. None that you can see is dressed in traditional attire, or African print, although a local manufacturer and a smattering of designers have tried to popularize African attire as office wear. Like the first travelers to the great Rome, we have embraced the corporate world dress code wholly, identifying ourselves with others globally and wear the same uniform. It is with this heightened awareness that the morning chill is thawed by the strange glances as you sport a blood-red kitenge dress. The consensus of the glances that you must have missed the memo or seek a life in the creative economy.

Just another morning in Nairobi. 

Women and Leadership : Sandra Fluke and Speaking Up

Often, I celebrate women in leadership – and at a themed mini-conference this week, I had a chance to do so with like-minded global women. I couldn’t help but think that Ms Fluke, as a 30 year old law student, were she a NYC student as we are, could have well been in our midst at the meetings this week. I choose to celebrates a woman speaking up and what that potentially means for women like Ms Fluke everywhere.

This post is not about the meat of the testimony, or the rejection and ridicule by the media personality, although I certainly take issue with the Limbaugh response. In case you have not been following the news this week, she testified to Congress about the necessity of birth control for women, and was greeted with the spiteful backlash of Limbaugh, a popular conservative talk show host, who called her several unprintable names and, by welcome contrast, the support of the Head of State, who personally placed a call  to encourage her following these disparaging comments.

Speaking up for one’s beliefs always exposes one to criticism, however, with the polarized debates recently about the right to abortion and birth control funding over the last few weeks, the testimony and the controversial response showed the ugly side of the stormy politics around women and reproductive health in America.

Ms Fluke has the right to her perspective, and indeed many healthcare experts could also testify to the multiple applications of birth control. The radio host  also has a right to make his own views known. However, in a genuine debate, shouldn’t we create an allowance for dissent and welcome comments of dissenting others? His wholesale disposal of her comments and his personal attacks on her person using his influential platform surely laid aside any chance of good debate. Certainly, his response was neither dignified nor warranted. Women should learn from this week, and understand the media and politics behind expressing one’s opinion especially as we engage fully in the public domain.

As we walk towards the March 8th – International Women’s Day – it seems especially apt to include some thoughts on leadership we can take from Ms Fluke.

1) Your voice is powerful – Many women wait to be asked to speak, and then we speak. When we do speak, many of us have gentle opinions, rarely polemic and rather timidly expressed. By the time some women find their voice, and use it to defend their health choices or to propose a course of action, it is the final round where they have been pushed beyond politeness, and prodded to persuade others what ought to happen. Ms Fluke,  your participation at a relatively young age made headlines and somewhere, there is a young girl following the news who is cementing her plans to address the classroom and speak up for herself, and perhaps one day run for a local or national office. Thank you for stepping into the limelight, and encouraging that kind of expression.

2) You are forging a path – Women who speak up literally are digging a path through a frozen-over walkway, heavy with iced over soil, jagged shards of snow and upsetting the balance of conversation. Or so it seems  from those who try to shout you down, cut you off or dismiss your participation as unnecessary and quite enough.Those who have followed women’s political aspirations around the world, especially in countries with low numbers of incumbent elected women, can attest to the difficulty of addressing heckling mobs, standing up to fellow candidates personal attacks and getting their policies out into the media. In this country, one can find forums to address the public, yet not nearly enough women do so, or want to start.

3) You never walk alone – Ms Fluke has shown women, particularly under 30 – a fresh example of do-ing, rather than waiting for things to happen. This week, I learned from young women from all over the world preparing to travel to lead corporations, start nonprofits, become journalists, practice medicine, pioneer new education initiatives, and revolutionize international relations. Women under 30 and over 30 at every level are surveying the tracks already laid out for leadership, they are taking over the mantle from previous generations and they are creating new ways to make women’s voices heard. For every one woman like Ms Fluke, there are thousands in the wings who are going to make their voices heard in the elections coming this year across the world. I hope she and they know that they do not walk alone.

Oh, and “Hinamatsuri” (Girls’ Day) today to all the girls in Japan and all around the world!

As of the time of this posting the NYT reports:

March 3, 2012, 11:26 PM

Limbaugh Apologizes for Attack on Student |

As Brian Stelter reports on The Caucus blog: In an about-face, the conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said Saturday that he was sorry for denouncing as a “prostitute” aGeorgetown University law student who had spoken publicly in favor of the Obama administration’s birth control policy.

On Saturday, a day after President Obama telephoned the student, Sandra Fluke, to say he stood by her in the face of personal attacks on right-wing radio, Mr. Limbaugh published the apology on his Web site.

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Diary of a trainee prison governor

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Diary of a trainee prison governor.

Isabel, the Prison Governor

I suppose I only really remembered Anna the Air Hostess and Pamela the Probation Officer from my younger days. This is really interesting, especially as I ponder what I shall be doing for the rest of my life. I keep on dreaming big dreams. On to Isabel though.

This article had me thinking about when we were younger and were asked, what do you want to do for life. Especially girls and women, because when I was growing up, few women drove buses or trains oor worked as long distance truck drivers.

The lady in this article is 26 years old and a prison boss, or prison governor – fast track leadership which she has worked towards for 14 years. Another lady I know dreamed she wanted to be a doctor for 15 years before she actually got credentialled to practice medicine. I reckon the average wait time to be what ‘you want to be when you grow up’ is 14 or 15 years now.

STOP…Violence against women continues…STOP

This post is like a telegram and because that is what the urgency is. If you have a sister, or a mother or a girlfriend, a spouse, a daughter or you have been held dear by a woman, you need to keep reading this post on the kind of violence against women that has been going on, in light of International Womens Day and Women’s History month.

I give credit where I can, since these were emailed to me.(Emphasis is mine and my quotes are in ITALICS)

NOTE: The references in some of the quotes I have made may be quite stark to the casual reader.

1)The Violence Continues in IDP camps (4 March PLUS News)

“Since the violence started we are seeing similar numbers of cases to what we would normally see over the same timespan, but there is one major difference: 90 percent of the cases we are seeing since the political crisis began are gang rapes,” said Lucy Kiama, head of the Gender Violence Recovery Centre at the Nairobi Women’s Hospital. “The gangs range from groups of two men to as many as eleven.”

Women are travelling form all over the country to seek treatment at the NWH, many arriving too late to receive prophylaxis for HIV/AIDS which prevents HIV infection following exposure. And why women? “…these are crimes of opportunity…” and “…the spike in gang rape in a situation as violent as Kenya was at the beginning of the year was not unusual.”

My emphasis here is to highlight the fact that there is a bad precedent of violence against women in times of conflict that goes unchecked, and this lack of media exposure et al, is the primary cause of a lot of the continued anguish of these women.

The lure of assistance

“An interagency assessment of GBV reported that in the early stages of camp development at the Nakuru showgrounds (an agricultural exhibition facility), community members reportedly took girls from the camp to serve as domestic help, likely increasing their risk of sexual exploitation.

The same report said women had stated that men in the community around the camp set up on the showgrounds at Eldoret, another town in Rift Valley Province, were inducing girls to leave the camp with the promise that they would “eat something sweet”.

“In some cases, team leaders responsible for handing out food have been making girls give them sex in exchange for the food they are actually entitled to,” Kiama said. “So even when the sex is consensual, it is often survival sex – the girls and women don’t feel they have a choice.”

And we say there is peace, and an agreement. Help a gal understand where these arrangements of national peace help our women and girls

So there is a precedent.

On to the article that had me livid when I read it.

*Writer/photographer Ann Jones is working as a volunteer with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) on a special project for their Gender-Based Violence unit called “A Global Crescendo: Women’s Voices from Conflict Zones.” Her blogs about the project can be found here http://www.theirc.org This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute.

This article from Pambazuka News Digest Vol 93 issue1 written by Ann Jones, looks at the various ways in which the war against women continues long after the peace deals have been signed. It had me thinking over and over, just what this peace means. Does it mean that we keep the stories even quieter about Africa? about our women and girls? A few things I did not know stand out.

Ann Jones has been working with women in three neighboring countries, all recently torn apart by civil wars: Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire. While we in Kenya and of course friends of Kenya all over the world are not at the point of civil war, we share many of the same characteristics.
She says, “When any conflict of this sort officially ends, violence against women continues and often actually grows worse. Not surprisingly, murderous aggression cannot be turned off overnight. When men stop attacking one another, women continue to be convenient targets. Here in West Africa, as in so many other places where rape was used as a weapon of war, it has become a habit carried seamlessly into the “post-conflict” era. Where normal structures of law enforcement and justice have been disabled by war,male soldiers and civilians alike can prey upon women and children with impunity. And they do.”

I was indignant . Why should these women not report these perpetrators?

AJ adds ” Human Rights Watch points out that “cases of sexual abuse may be
significantly underreported,” because women fear “the possibility of reprisals by perpetrators… ostracism by families and communities,and cultural taboos.”

So every time a woman is attacked, she is blamed and then she is ostracized and, if she decides to keep the child product of her attack, she is labeled as a loose woman.

Physical emblems of the post-conflict on a woman in these areas; Ann cites the Amnesty International report on post-conflict in West Africa:”The brutality of rape frequently causes serious physical injuries that require long-term and complex treatment including

uterine prolapses (the descent of the uterus into the vagina or beyond)” — one has to wonder what lies “beyond” the vagina –

“vesico-vaginal or recto-vaginal fistulas and other injuries to the reproductive system or rectum, often accompanied by internal and external bleeding or discharge.”

It notes that such women usually can’t “access the medical care they need.”

Some still find it hard to sit down, or stand up, or walk. Some still spit up blood. Some have lost their eyesight or their memories. Some miscarried. Many contracted sexually transmitted diseases and HIV. No one knows how many of them died, or are dying, as a result.

I sat in stunned silence, still reading this article…

Surviving women as per the UNFPA/CDC survey in Lofa County, Charles Taylor’s backyard:

More than 98% said that, during his war (1999-2003), they lost their homes; more
than 90%, their livelihoods; more than 72%, at least one family member. Nearly 90% of them survived at least one violent physical assault; more than half, at least one violent sexual assault. No one inquired about the number of women now caring for the permanently disabled.

They are not called crimes against women

” In recent years, every kind of horror has been inflicted on girls and women in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire because they are female. If females were a particular ethnic group — Albanians, let’s say, or Tutsis — or if they espoused a particular religion, as did Bosnian Muslims, we could recognize what goes on as a kind of “gender cleansing” or mass femicide.”AJ article

Also, there is the idea that women are willing, and this next quote reminds me of when a certain Kenyan politician and published legal scholar, who graduated with top graduate honors in Law from a certain small school in Boston no less, made a remark on national TV in Kenya that likened some political move that “was like raping a woman who was already willing…(laughter by him)” Go figure that he lost respect from me right then. He was chided lightly and barely apologized to the nation. So rape is a joke to a lot of people

AJ reports,” Interviewed for a TV documentary on mass rape in the Democratic
Republic of Congo, a smiling guerrilla says he’s “made love” to many women. The interviewer asks if all the women were willing, and he laughs. He admits that many fight him, and he says — still grinning– “If they are strong, I call my friends to help me.” Despite his use of euphemisms, he knows just what he’s doing. When the
interviewer labels his love-making “rape,” he typically insists that rape happens in wartime and that when the war is over, he won’t do it anymore. The state of war excuses men’s crimes against women because rape — so the claim goes — is something that just naturally occurs in war. “

This long quoted article caught my attention. I hope it gives you some basis to begin thinking about International Womens’ Day and the women in your life, and how you can play a part in making their world safer.

Woman Against Violence: A Beginning Should Be More Than A Start

Toni Morrison said, ” Beginnings must do more than simply just start.” Thinking over the last two months and the changes in Kenya, I see so much more in her words. Sitting, phoning, lying awake late into the night, I thought of the real victims in the post-elections violence, women. Since we have determined that Kenya will never be the same, this year 2008 is a new beginning for us. We must decide how to approach Kenyans once again, and relearn how to talk around tribe and ethnicity, and of course politics.

I must go beyond my anger with the politicians, who have much more in common with each other and with mutual political survival, and focus on how to do something tangible to empower( note that I cannot really help the situation if I aim just to hand out things and words of kindness) If we have to start donating, then this beginning is not yet mature, because our co-operation for the humanitarian crisis in Kenya cannot end there. This beginning is a call to re-build. As an African, as a Kenyan and as a woman, my activism has barely begun.

My angst one night in January knew no bounds and reached a crisis when I heard from female family members, and while I was so relieved that are all well, caught myself about to sigh for relief, until I thought of the other women who went to women’s group meetings with my mother, my grandmothers and my aunts. Ruefully, I reflected on my own efforts and saw the stark reality that I was doing nothing but sitting at a computer reading the news.

It seemed obvious to an outsider, but I did not realize how powerful an African woman’s voice is in the call to action. The pictures and the presence of those women and their children who had been displaced kept me up at night and kept my eyes wet with tears. It dawned on me that there was nothing that I had done that qualified me for my safety, my travel and my education. Any of them could have been me, and it could have been my cracked heels that dodged arrows, machetes and my wails could have pierced the night sky at the loss of a child, a sibling, a spouse or a neighbor.

Come February first, I had not taken any real steps to do anything about the story, the one of the silent rape of women, blamed on their tribe, being in the path of a gang, and those attacks on men, forcibly circumcised or sodomized, that those were my brothers, were leaders, my countrymen. Living in a nation now, where there are still not enough women in leadership, I remembered all the great women who had served as my mentors, and as my teachers, who believed that I was good enough.

I remember going to visit a Kericho family who had hosted me when I was ten and on a school trip to Kericho. Or those women who eked out a living as in Mombasa and Malindi, whose livelihoods depended on the tourist visits in the peak season, who would be laid off from their jobs and have to take to the streets. I remember taking a fourteen hour bus ride both ways to Kampala and back to Nairobi last summer, when I passed through Eldoret and Kisumu and across the border to Uganda, and all at night, since I prefer to travel. Was it true that if I took the same trip now, I may be pulled from a bus and killed for being from the wrong part of Kenya? Woman, girl and child, my memories of a happier time were not, unfortunately, the same as those of the children taken out of school to return to their homeland, with not a shred of their tribe language to their memory. But the violence was not mine this year, I could opt out of it.

“The United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence against Women (1993) identified three main areas where violence against women occurs, namely in the family, the general community, and perpetrated or condoned by the State, clarifying that such violence can take physical, sexual and psychological forms.” The violence on ones emotional state has yet to find a scientific measurement that counts the level of abuse women take on a daily basis.

I believe that gender violence activism is the most under-reported effect of the recent violence in Kenya. Outside of Nairobi, where the harshest news emerged, amid the uprooting, women were still expected to continue their roles as nurturers and care-givers in the internally displaced camps. If she was the one who was from the minority community, she had to leave, and if he was the one who was a minority, he had to leave or worse yet, was beaten within an inch of his life, or killed. She still had to get up the next morning and fetch water and make a meal and take care of their home.

Was the violence perpetrated or condoned by the state? As policy makers debate these questions and broker peace, I am not alone in assuming that she did not have a choice as to whether the group of armed men could enter her homestead and ransack everything including her dignity and her body. Nor do I think that now, as the family sits in the camp waiting for the next inadequate ration of meals, that she can avoid the pressure to go and sell her body for a little more posho(ground cereal) for her baby. As I sit in my cushy seat trying to see who from the U.S is sending things in a container, I doubt that she can afford to wait for my secondhand clothes nor my canned string beans, or even sit to think about whether the peace will make our wealthy leaders more considerate, or not.

I doubt that the girl whose early marriage has been speeded up for more money to salvage the family will pen a letter to our overpaid members of parliament to buy her freedom, nor will the fresh wound of a newly initiated female genital mutilation(fgm) survivor cover the hole in her heart from the brutal rite carried out to prepare her for the new school year. Still yet, it is unlikely that the woman whose partner welcomes her return to their tent with a shower of patronizing slaps will stop because Kofi Annan and his team got our esteemed leaders to sign to a solution.

You can learn that one in three women is a victim of abuse. Yes, one in three,
If you do not know already, March 8 is International Womens’ Day, look for events in your area and attend.
If you have sisters, daughters, partners, spouses, mothers and other relatives, imagine how you would feel if anyone harmed them, and think about what has been keeping you from activism, from speaking to men about gender violence.
When you next read a story about Kenya, if you see a picture of a child, remember its mother, the siblings, and the future for a woman in rural Kenya today.

I dedicate this post to the women who have endured violence in war zones and conflict areas. Darfur, Bosnia, Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo and here in the United States