“Save a girl, save the planet”

Mar 16th, 2010 4:05 PM UTC
By Chris Scott

When you have a minute, check out Kathleen Parker’s column in today’s Union Leader, in which she profiles women in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond who are daily risking their lives to bring about gender equality in their respective countries.

Plugging the organization Vital Voices along the way, she writes:

“We are not victims.”

Yes, of course, many have been victimized by brutal regimes in some cases, or by cultural forces, or by men who have hijacked religion to justify actions that would be treated as crimes in our part of the world. But these women are not seeking restitution; they are seeking empowerment.

This is a crucial distinction that underscores the courage they display in the routine machinations we call everyday life.

Female judges kiss their families goodbye in the mornings and make peace with their maker just in case they don’t return. Parents send their daughters to school despite incidents such as the acid attacks on 15 schoolgirls and teachers in 2008.

I heard the “not victims” refrain a day earlier from another group of women — from Bahrain, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kenya, Brazil and Haiti — in Washinton to be honored by Vital Voices Global Partnership, a nongovernmental organization that works to empower female leaders and social entrepreneurs around the world.

Vital Voices, which grew out of the U.N.’s Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, focuses on advancing women as a U.S. foreign policy goal. Translation: Empowering women will lead to greater prosperity and world peace.

One cannot sit and talk with these women and escape inspiration. On one end of the spectrum is Afnan al Zayani, a CEO from Bahrain who leads the Middle East and North Africa Businesswomen’s Network. On the other is Rebecca Lolosoli, matriarch of Kenya’s Umoja Village, an all-women’s community she created to support women, girls, orphans and widows who had been abandoned by their families or were fleeing domestic violence, forced marriage or genital mutilation.

It sort of puts that bad hair day in perspective, doesn’t it?

But, again, they refuse to be victims.

The whole piece is worth a read.

TAGS: ONE, Women ONE2ONE