Support4Change Blog

January 1, 2008

Categories: Q-and-A Club, Expanding Your Horizons

By Arlene Harder, MA, MFT

NOTE: I learned many things during our twenty days in Africa and in future blogs I’ll tell about more of them. However, because I see things from a woman’s point of view, for this first blog of 2008 (written between washing a month’s worth of clothes and taking naps to get over jet lag) I want to give you my response to the state of women and children. I don’t have time to make this shorter (that would take too much editing), but by the time I got to the end of the blog I realized I wanted to do more than just tell you my impressions. I’ve decided to turn this into a Q-and-A Club entry. So if you wish, you can quickly scroll to the bottom and answer the questions or read the whole blog more thoroughly.

For me the riots in Kenya are not just another indication that voter fraud and tribal conflicts make it difficult to build a strong nation with a governing system that respects the rights of all. You see, a week ago we were riding in a Land Rover on a camera safari through the Samburu and Masai Mara areas looking for the “big five.” We talked about the upcoming elections with Jim, our Kikuyu guide (that’s the same tribe as the contested presidential winner). He had little faith in his fellow humans to make rational decisions and frequently talked about man’s capacity for self-destruction, so I’m sure the riots would not surprise him. Nevertheless, knowing someone there puts a human face on the conflict and I wonder whether the violence has hit him directly and how and his family are doing.

As you can well imagine, I am most grateful that I’m not there right now, but very concerned for all the people we met on our travels who cannot escape easily. We’ve had our own riots, of course, when people felt there was no other way to protest the conditions in which they live. Yet as with all such conflicts I wonder what might prevent future riots or mitigate the conditions that cause them.

Since I am a woman interested in quality-of-life issues, I’d like to tell you why I’ve concluded that education of children and opportunities for women provide the best chance for creating economic progress, social justice and greater stability on that continent, and throughout the world. It is true that those are not the only issues required for progress. Business and political decisions can also make a difference. But focusing on women and children is a major step in the right direction for many reasons.

When women obtain full equality and participation in society, they can contribute their talents more fully than acting primarily as the source of hard labor in a home (everyone with whom we spoke in Kenya said women carried the major burden of work in the family) and the production of children. And since children are the future of a country, education is essential if undeveloped countries are to keep pace at all with the rest of the world. In fact, in recognition of the roll of women in raising children, large billboards throughout Kenya say, “Educate a girl and you change the country.”

I am aware, of course, that twenty days in Egypt and Kenya don’t make me an expert on either country and when I talk about the poor and disadvantaged in the places we visited I don’t mean to ignore the progress that has been made. For example, Kenya has outlawed female genital mutilation (which was euphemistically referred to as female circumcision) and it is no longer practiced in the larger urban areas. However, in the more rural areas it will take another generation or so to completely eradicate this great discrimination against half the population. Another example of progress is the fact that education in Kenya is now compulsory and in the cities women have more freedom today than ever before, but there is a long way to go.

As anyone who has read my blog and visited the Q-and-A Club on Yahoo! or on Support4Change knows, I believe in asking questions—and I took full advantage of every opportunity to ask lots of questions. This gave me got lots of answers, some of which contradicted one another. However, when you ask the same question of several people, you can begin to build a general consensus and to understand situations you hadn’t been able to appreciate before you started questioning what you see and hear.

First, it is clear that both countries are poor. Even though Egypt has more resources than many other African nations, about 1 percent of the population is very rich, while perhaps 20% falls into the category of middle class, and the other 79% are poor, often very poor. This isn’t an official statistic, of course, but it is the opinion of a number of people with whom I spoke.

Compare this with a quick look at the Wikipedia entry for Social Class in the United States and you can see how a broader distribution of wealth results in higher GDP and greater opportunities for all citizens of a country. True, there is a lot of disparity between excessive salaries of CEOs and workers in their factories in the West, but here the chance for advancement is much greater and we have a safety net that most African countries don’t have. There most labor is paid by the day and there is no pension or social security, except for government jobs (and that is quite meager).

In much of the countryside in both Egypt and Kenya we saw many people living under conditions we wouldn’t tolerate. With infrastructure poorly maintained and services less than satisfactory, maintaining minimum health and cleanliness standards is difficult. This is particularly true when inflation hits. For example, in Egypt we were told that three months ago the price of a jar of cooking oil was $3.00. Today it is $8.00.

Consequently, it is easy to see that radicals with political agendas can easily exploit the poor in the name of Islam. It is for this fact, if non other, that we must strengthen and expand our support for the most vulnerable members of underdeveloped countries, the women and children. The honor of a man in Islamic countries is often tied to his ability to provide for his family. When he cannot, he loses face and his family suffers.

We often saw children helping their mothers carry large jugs as much as two miles from the nearest water source. (Yes, we saw some men carrying water as well, but mostly it was the women.) That is a chore that no one welcomes but is essential for survival. The water needs to be boiled but in a hurry to prepare a meal it may not get done and typhoid strikes the family.

Many of the children in Kenya wore clothes we suspect came from GoodWill and The Salvation Army. It’s not a crime to wear second-hand clothes, of course. But my guess is that their parents couldn’t afford new clothes if their children asked for them.

When our guide stopped for gas or for any other reason, children would come quickly to our vehicle with a smile and hold out their hands for a small gift (pens seemed to be preferred if money wasn’t available). Yet as much as it was tempting to give them something, we believed that contibuting to an organization that has the ability to fund education would be a much better gift in the long run. Besides, we didn’t have that many pens or money.

I went to Kenya with images in my mind from many stories of proud and noble Masai, the warriors and cow-herders of the south-western part of Kenya. I had also heard a little about their “cousin” tribe, the Samburus, north of Nairobi. But my impression of these nomatic people has now expanded to include images of the most dirty living conditions I have ever seen.

In one Masai village we saw fifteen round houses surrounded by a stick fence. Each “house” of sticks and mud,which was little more than a hut, was built by one of the man’s fifteen wives (by herself) and took a month to construct. The men’s job (performed communally) was to build the fence, which takes one day! The yard through which everyone walks had many piles of cow and sheep dung, but the women were barefoot. Even the sandals of the men didn’t seem to give them much protection.

For those who believe it isn’t our right or responsibility to try to change these nomadic people and impose Western culture on their traditions, I respond by saying that there is a great difference between requiring people to change and giving them a chance to choose a different way of life. Unless one knows there are other choices one can make, traditions are prisons of the past, as noble as that past may be.

So I don’t apologize for finding the conditions under which those people live to be intolerable—and to do whatever I can to help them change that environment, for it is naïve to believe they “want” to live that way. In fact, the Samburu junior elder who took us around his village was very clear that they would like to improve their living conditions. Even if it was his wife who carried the heavy water bottles, he didn’t want her to have to do it. But he emphasized that the Samburus wouldn’t make progress toward change if they didn’t have more representation in the government, toward which he was working very hard. When I asked what he needed for the school, he said “everything.”

Incidentally, one area in which compulsory education in Kenya has already made a small difference is in the nomadic tribes since they now must stay close enough to a school for their children to have a formal education. Moving is more difficult.

Of course in addition to education, technology is a vehicle for change. Once we saw a young man walking behind his sheep and talking on a cell phone! Incidentally, a Kenyan’s access to wireless is better than ours. Although they have few land lines, they have powerful cell towers and even in the middle of a vast game reserve you can get good reception.

I do not know if the woman whose picture I took (with her permission) in a traditional Egyptian bazaar in Cairo was happy with her life. She certainly smiled nicely and both men and women were fairly quick to smile at us. But whether or not she freely chose to wear the garment of black is an open question. And I certainly don’t know if she had a choice in whom she wanted to marry, or if she would agree with her husband’s right to have four wives. (Many of the men with whom I spoke were clear that one wife was all they could handle. Some, however, expected to have another wife to make life easier for them.)

I realize that in the large cities of both countries women are slowly breaking out of their confined roles. However, in the more rural areas almost no woman could choose whether they got married and to whom. I heard this several times. So when I decided to have a massage while my husband went on a walk near Mt. Kenya, I talked with the massage therapist about gender issues. She affirmed quite strongly that it would not be possible for a woman to say “No!” to rape. The fact that women can’t even consider that possibility was particularly amazing to me. (Remember, that would primarily be true for the rural areas, but even then that applies to millions of people.) And when women can’t control the number of children they have, conditions only get worse.

Therefore, because of what I saw and heard in Africa, I wrote a check for half of my 2007 charitable contributions to The Global Fund for Women when I returned to the states. This is a foundation that advances women’s human rights worldwide through grants to women-led organizations that promote the economic security, health, safety, education and leadership of women and girls.

The other half of my yearly donation has gone to The Global Fund for Children. This organization helps improve educational opportunities for children who would otherwise be left behind.

Travel changes people. It gives them an education that books alone can’t give. That is why I am very thankful that I have the opportunity to see parts of the world that others will never be able to see. An extremely few of the people we saw in both Egypt and Kenya have the resources to travel beyond their borders. In fact, one of the most startling statistics I learned was that from 75 percent to perhaps 90 percent of Kenyan children have never seen the wild animals I came on safari to find! There is, however, a special center near Nairobi where school children are taken to see Rothschild giraffes and learn about the need for conservation.

Another image will stick with me. We stayed one night in a lodge near Mt. Kenya that had a salt lick at the side of the building and you could watch baboons, elephants, buffalo, warthogs, and other animals while sitting on a balcony outside your room. The afternoon we arrived I saw a girl about ten years old working at a computer in the lobby. She was Googling “waterfalls in Kenya” and copying from an article into a Word document, perhaps for a school paper, or perhaps because her parents had given her that assignment. In any case, it was a good example of how girls are being given the opportunity to learn, something with which I heartedly agree.

ASK YOURSELF QUESTIONS IN THE Q-AND-A CLUB CATEGORY OF EXPANDING YOUR HORIZONS

What have I learned through travel that I wouldn’t have known otherwise?

How has travel changed me? Why?

How do I live my life differently because I’ve traveled some place?

Where would I like to travel? Why?

What would I like to learn there?

How willing am I to ask questions when I don’t know people?

If I don’t ask questions, what stops me? 

Reprint of blog articles and Q-and-A Club topics: These questions are available for no charge if you want to use them for your blog, newsletter, website, or discussion group, but you must (1) attribute the questions to the Q-and-A Club and me, Arlene Harder, and (2) provide a link to Support4Change. Ordinarily I stipulate a third requirement, that you include both the introduction and the questions, but since this is so long you don’t have to do it this time.