October 15, 2003
Afghanistan
Report on Global Fund grantees in Afghanistan.
Kavita: Actually I'm going to be out in Massachusetts
next month, not next month, next week. Next week I'm coming to my first
board meeting as a trustee of Mount Holyoke College...it's very
exciting. It was exactly twenty years ago that I came to Mount Holyoke
College, so it's very exciting to become a trustee twenty years later.
So I'll be in Boston and then in South Hadley for a few days.
What did you think of the website? I heard that you had logged in.
A: Yes, I did. I hope that there is going to be a way of
people putting in little messages. I would like to hear what people are
doing in their local chapters, lets say like ours, developing, or just
for sharing ideas for local events.
Kavita: So it would be sort of like a bulletin board? Where you could read what other people are sharing?
A: Yes.
Kavita: That's a good idea. Was it easy to figure out how to put in your information?
A: Yes, I wanted to put in my telephone number and email, and I
hope that other people will do that. And if we have something that is
happening in our area related to Global Fund for Women, we can let
people know about it through the calendar and bulletin board.
KNR: Great idea.
Kavita: I think we're going to get started. It's just after
nine-thirty in California. Welcome to people who are in other parts of
the country who are in different time zones. We have someone from Woods
Hole, MA someone from Boulder, Colorado, someone from Rochester, New
York, and then a few people from the Bay Area, from San Francisco, Palo
Alto, and from Oakland on the call.
I also want to let you know that there are a few other people here at
the Global Fund office joining me for the call, some of whom you may
know, some of whom you may not have met before. Nicky McIntyre who is
my colleague and vice president for Development and Communications is
here as well as Ammie Stobaugh who works with the Development team on
individual donations and Lanell Dike, who many of you know and have
been in touch with is also here. Welcome, we are really delighted to
have you here. I'm just going to say a little bit about logistics, and
then I am going to talk a little bit about some of the recent
happenings at the Global Fund, for about ten minutes. Then we'll open
it up for questions and answers either about my comments or about other
things that you might have questions about, and we'll try to wrap it up
at about ten past ten. Does that sound all right to all of you?
A: Sounds great.
Kavita: Okay, so just a little bit of exciting news about
Inspiration Partners as Lanell just shared with me and I'm really
excited to share with you—since our last call which was in June, just
before I left for the summer, more than forty-three new Inspiration
Partners have joined, bringing the Inspiration Partner network up to a
hundred and one. So we're really excited about that and want to thank
each of you for making this initiative so successful.
I actually just came back last night from meeting with two IPs and a
potential IP at a little lunch they held for me in Santa Barbara. And
there was a lot of excitement about having this network and being able
to touch base with each other and we'd love to, at the end of my
comments, ask for feedback on the website and suggested reading and if
you have anything to suggest we'd like you to send that to Lanell at
her email address ().
I'm going to just begin by sharing a bit about where I was this summer
and what I was doing. I combined a wonderful trip home to see my family
in Pakistan and India with the opportunity to visit some of our grantee
organizations which we've partnered with in different parts of South
Asia.
In Pakistan we visited a women's organization working in a very poor
slum community, and I actually had the opportunity to take my almost
ten-year-old daughter with me and she got to meet some of the young
girls, some of whom are very close to her age at the center. This was
both inspiring and also really hard for her because it was such a poor
community and the kids have so little and many of them don't go to
school.
I think that was sort of our experience the whole time on this trip—the
balance we saw on the one hand of the work our grantees are doing which
is so inspiring and encouraging and on the other hand just looking at
these situations in which women and their families find themselves.
This was particularly striking in the case of Afghanistan. Many of you,
like all of us in the U.S., heard so much of what was happening and
what was the potential for change in that country....I went to visit
the Afghan Institute of Learning, which was one of our earliest grantee
organizations inside of Afghanistan. We've also been working with other
Afghan women's organizations in refugee camps in Pakistan.
It was striking to see that they are trying to do so much with so
little in that country...and that there is really an issue with the US
not having come through on a lot of the promises that have been made,
and how much pressure that is putting on women and their families to
just cope on a day to day basis.
On the other hand, I think the most inspiring part of the visit was
watching a group of forty school teachers, most of them men, maybe from
70 years in age to 20 or 25 just listening in rapt attention to the
teachers of the Afghan Institute of Learning—all women—talking about
how education has to be something fun and how children need to be
inspired by their teachers and why even though they have limited
resources they can make learning fun and they can make learning
something both boys and girls could be a part of.
For me it was especially wonderful to see the men respond to my
questions because I asked them very direct questions about how they
felt about learning from Afghan women and they were just so excited and
so inspired that one of them actually said to me, "Perhaps it's time
that the men of Afghanistan learn from our women and perhaps it's been
too long that we have not had children have the opportunity to learn
anything else other than war."
So that was very exciting. I think that is a similar kind of feeling
that we had at the Global Fund, for those of you that looked at our
website recently last week we just finished a wonderful meeting of our
advisors and our grantees from the middle East and from North Africa.
We brought them together for a day and a half for a larger conference
that was looking at issues of gender and human security. You know
what's been happening in the Middle East and I think it's become
something that we begin to feel that we can only throw up our hands in
despair and I think again we were reminded of the small but significant
efforts that are being made when you bring a group of Arab women
together in a room and you also make sure that you've invited an
Israeli peace activist so that Arab women can sit for sometimes a very
short time with an Israeli women who is working on the same issues and
concerns and can really hear each others pain and anguish and also
their hopes and dreams for making a different future in the Middle East.
And I think again, that was really inspiring for us because we could
hear about different things that were happening in the Middle East that
are hopeful.
One of our Egyptian grantees was literally dancing, bubbling over with
excitement, because the Egyptian parliament has just announced that
they will now allow Egyptian women to give their children Egyptian
nationality even if they marry a foreigner. Until this time, if a women
married a foreigner she was not allowed to give her children Egyptian
nationality, while if an Egyptian man married a foreigner he could give
nationality to his kids.
Even in the midst of all of the conflict in the Middle East I think
women are counting the achievements they have made and are excited
about that. We also met with a women writer from Algeria and she gave
us a sense of what their hopes are in that part of the world.
In the meanwhile as we and as the world focuses on Afghanistan and the
Middle East I think it's important to know that the Global Fund
continues to be involved it the other parts of the world. We also at
this same meeting had the opportunity to meet with a wonderful woman
from Sierra Leone, who hosted our Program Officer Adaora when she was
in Sierra Leone. We are committed to strengthening support for women's
organizations there.
We have also been continuing to do a lot of work in Latin America and
Asia, so that continues although that isn't necessarily what is on the
front pages of the news. I think for the women from those parts of the
world it is incredibly important that the Global Fund continues our
commitment to them and recognizes that although their stories aren't on
the front page, their work and their achievements aren't any less
valued.
I am going to stop here and leave room for questions and answers, I'm
looking forward to hearing from every one of you, so please go ahead.
A: I just had a chance to look at the website and it just looks
wonderful! I appreciate the fact that you have suggested reading for
those of us who haven't been to Afghanistan, this is just a wonderful
way to really get a feel of what's been happening.
Kavita: Great, we would also love to have your suggestions up on
the website...if there is something you've read and want to share... I
actually have three new books I'd like to add to the suggested reading,
or maybe four.
A: I think it's a good, idea. And I think also, not just the reading, but a brief description of what the book is.
Kavita: Oh, that's a great idea. Any other questions or comments
that you might have about what the Global Fund is doing or issues we
might be facing? Go ahead, you were telling us what your local group
has been doing in Cape Cod.
A: Yes, I'll just mention that last fall we had a lovely person
from India, teacher both yoga and dance, and speaker on spirituality
here. We combined this with information about the Global Fund for Women
and that led to an invitation from one of our members to come back from
Kentucky next week to do a second program on the subject of women and
global cultural change, and combining that with dance, spirituality and
she will be doing some dancing. So it's both entertainment and
information.
Kavita: Wonderful, that sounds really exciting. So maybe there
will be little outbursts of this kind in other parts of the country as
well.
A: One thing we could use is a simple brochure about the Global Fund for Women, it would be nice to have something to pass out.
Kavita: Oh sure, we have brochures and we can send you a packet. Would other people like to have brochures?
A: That would be really nice, it would be really helpful.
Kavita: Okay, well we can do a little mailing to Inspiration
Partners so you can have copies of brochures to hand out. Thank you for
that suggestion. We also could send you more copies of the newsletters.
I know most of you get the newsletters, but if you would like to have
additional copies to send out or share with friends or people in your
communities, that is something we can certainly do.
Nicky: This is Nicky, the vice president of development and
communications. I would love your feedback on the brochure, if you feel
that it is too elaborate, maybe at another time we could talk and I
could get your feedback about that. It would be very helpful. So I'll
follow up with you about that.
Kavita: Are there any other comments?
Q: I guess I'm wondering if your organization is in Iraq.
Kavita: Yes, we actually are funding women's organizations in
the northern part of Iraq. Amongst the Kurdish women, because that was
the only part of Iraq where we were able to get money to, because of US
sanctions. US put sanctions on all of Iraq, but those sanctions have
now been lifted and we are in the process of evaluating the situation
for grantmaking.
It's a very difficult situation right now, since there is no really
functioning governmental authority. So a non-governmental authority in
that context, as a women's group might have a hard time getting
resources, and what they may need more than anything else right now
from us is sort of moral support and knowing that we're out there as a
resource for them in the future.
But we are in touch with women there and are trying to increase our
connections on the ground. Are there any other parts of the world or
issues that you'd really like to see discussed at the next meeting?
Other people who haven't spoken?
Q: I am sort of curious to hear a bit more about your meeting
with the Middle East group and what people are doing right now and
where they are finding pathways to taking some action or having hope.
Kavita: Well, I think a big issue for the Middle East is the
whole question of how the Palestinian-Israeli issue will be resolved.
Almost every country in the Middle East is looking at that as a really
critical issue for resolution. Particularly as women and children
continue to live in refugee camps and as their daily lives are
compromised by the ongoing violence but the other side of that is that
I think there is a very strong support for women being engaged in the
peace process, and feeling that the UN has passed a resolution. It's
called resolution 1325, they passed it last December in which there is
actually a requirement that women be engaged at all levels in peace
negotiations and in peace keeping forces. That hasn't actually been
implemented anywhere in the world yet and I think women in the Middle
East are feeling that this might be an opportunity to have a different
set of voices at the table. A set of voices that have actually been in
dialogue with each other. Israeli and Palestinian women have been in
dialogue for almost fifteen years, even through some of the worst
violence, so I think that that's one very significant concern.
I think the other one is the whole question of violence against women.
And women's organizations around the region are doing work on issues
like honor killings...one of the advisors to the Global Fund, a
Jordanian human rights lawyer, has been pushing for a number of issues,
but particularly in the Jordanian parliament to insure that men who
right now kill female relatives because of an issue of honor, quote
unquote, which usually concerns a women making the decision to marry
someone on her own or having been seen by herself with a man who is not
her brother or near relative, that right now men can get off with a
minimum sentence of three months in prison and then they're out in the
streets again, and they're really condoning, if you will, violence
against women, and I think women all over the region are feeling that
they have to really have an effort to make it visible.
And then the last issue is this whole question of dealing with faith
and tradition and finding ways in which to enable women to pursue their
human rights and to protect their human rights and their dignity as
individuals while continuing to be able to practice their faith whether
that's Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam, in the context of these
different countries.
So I think those are some of the key issues that we talked about at
this meeting. They were very, very appreciative of the fact that the
way the Global Fund is approaching our funding in the region is to
really listen to them, and our staff presented our initial draft of
what we hope to be doing, and then I just say to you that we've been in
conversations with the chair of our board who was at that meeting and
we have a very strong recommendation which we will be taking to our
board meeting which is coming up next month about doing an outreach
trip to the region of our board and some staff members as well.
That would culminate in a board meeting held maybe in Cairo or in
Beirut so we could demonstrate our own commitment to the women in the
region by actually going there and spending time and listening to
women's groups directly. So that's some of what came out of that
meeting.
Is that helpful? Actually, something else that we can put up on the
website might be some good UN websites to go to which have very good
information on women's rights and statistics on women's participation,
and then some of the key resolutions that have been passed that really
require countries to comply with certain standards for women's
participation. So we'll make a note of that and try and put that up as
well.
Afghan Women's Bill of Rights
On The Ground: No Stability
(Inspiration Partners Exclusive)
Year After War Began, Afghans Still Suffering
(Inspiration Partners Exclusive)
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi, Random House, 2003
An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan by Jason Elliot, Picador, 2001
A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Karen Armstrong, Random House, 1994 and
The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong, Random House, 2001
Kartography by Kamila Shamsie, Harcourt Brace & Company, 2003
Recommended reading from IPs:
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future by Riane Eisler
Politically Inspired
This is a link from an IP with bibliographic work her local group has done: http://www.vsx.cape.com/~bethelwh/taskforce.html
|
