Warm greetings from Kuwait

I hope all is well and Happy International Women's Day. By the time you get this, our day would probably be over here and we get ready to leave to Dubai on Friday morning.

We have learned a lot and met with some amazing women.  It has been challenging I have to say on multiple levels that I will probably talk about at the report back when at the office.

Kuwaiti women are known to be very strong and powerful. They are overall highly educated, many have studied in the US or the UK but usually all return to Kuwait.  We have met with older activists and old organizations, the Women Cultural and Social Society was established in 1964, and with younger ones.  However, youth participation is not very strong. Although we did hear from professors at the university that many young women were involved with women campaigns in the past elections.

What is on everyone's mind here is the political right that they have finally acquired a year ago. The past election was an emergency one because the government fell and so women had little over a month to campaign. We met with two women that had run for elections.  In total 30 women ran for office and they gained tremendous experience even though none had won.  They are though very determined to organize training programs on running an election campaign and also explaining the ins and outs of the political process in Kuwait. Some are already planning to run again for office.

Even though on the surface, we all hear about the wealth in this country, yet there are multiple layers to the society that we have learned about and witnessed.  There is a large marginalized population of the bidun, a group without a Kuwaiti citizenship. There are different levels of citizenship as well.

In honor of International Women's Day, we attended two events. One organized by the Women Cultural and Social Society, was a lecture at the society's center on the political process and the internal dynamics of the parliament, as one in a series of lectures to provide training on how to engage within Kuwaiti political structure. Another event was organized by the Alumni Association (a mixed group that also organizes several programs on women and is generally engaged with the civic and political affairs in the country). The event was a musical night of traditional Kuwaiti songs. The band was made up of all men. However, the one woman played the
qanun (a traditional Arabic string instrument), which is not a very common phenomena.  Both meetings were attended by men and women of all sectors.

We will have pictures to share when we come back.

Zeina Zaatari is the Global Fund's program officer for the Middle East and North Africa.

Warm Greetings for International Women's Day from Nepal!

We are excited to share with you the energy, hope and inspiration we found marching with about 300 women as part of the 10th anniversary celebration of Tewa, the Women's Fund of Nepal.

Women from every part of Nepal were marching with us - young girls with t-shirts and jeans, Muslim women with headscarves and banners calling for full equality, blind women walking in a loving chain of sisters, women with other physical disabilities keeping pace and waving to the passing drivers who stared at this brightly coloured collection of smiling faces and banners in Hindi, English, and Nepali. Men marched with us as well, the sons and sons-in-law of Tewa activists, sexual minority activists, and other fellow feminist male allies. Their presence gave us hope and drew interest from passers by. And, international activists threw our lot in with the Tewa march - women from the Czech Republic and South Africa, from the United States and Australia, from India and China. We were together marching for change, remembering our sisters around the globe and pledging to continue our struggle for justice and peace.

We began under the magnificent wooden windows of the ancient palaces in old Kathmandu and marched through the city until we assembled in an open park. Speeches by young lesbian activists were followed by slogans from peasant women's associations and international guests. I was up there on the podium, speaking in Hindi, which many Nepalis understand much better than English!  Around us standing with brightly colored banners stood the many grantee groups of Tewa Nepal, who had braved 14-hour road journeys, barricades, strikes, and security challenges just in order to get to Kathmandu.

Despite all the amazing energy of the morning's activities, nothing could prepare us for the joy of arriving at Tewa's new site. The endowment that Tewa raised was invested in land and buildings to ensure its long-term continuity and sustainability. But, how could we have known how absolutely breathtaking and gorgeous the setting would be. Situated on a hill outside Kathmandu proper and surrounded by emerald and mustard terraced fields in the foreground and towering Himalayas in the background, TEWA's new surroundings are in total concert with its highest aspirations for a philanthropy of inclusivity, justice, and respect. Every detail shows love, from the Tewa motif on the curtains, to the rooms honoring special members of the Tewa family, to the earthenware rubbish bins and environmentally conscious materials used in the design of the space. The young architect who designed the buildings in the TEWA complex (there is a shopping arcade, a recreational facility, an open air auditorium, and an office building) has blended the most gracious aspects of traditional Nepali architecture with the clean lines of modern minimalism and created a gem that sits in its space as though it were always meant to be there. I only wish more buildings in the developing world could demonstrate such strong rootedness in their own traditions and less shallow mimicry of the worst that the West has to offer.

Yet, as one of the speakers at Tewa's celebration said wisely, "the buildings are nothing except a reflection of the way TEWA treats and values people". People are at the heart of Tewa as they always have been - the rural, often illiterate grantee reprentatives sitting in colorful traditional costumes side by side with Nepali businessmen who are proud donors to TEWA, the cheerful smiling volunteers of Tewa, housewives and mothers who cook, drive, do the books, clean up, run the store, and a myriad other tasks. All of them make Tewa what it is - a true model that enables us to see what a living culture of giving can look like even in one of the poorest conflict stricken countries in the world. Indeed, these beautiful buildings emerged even as Tewa volunteers staffed hospitals in Kathmandu serving the many innocent people who were injured in clashes during the protests for democracy.

Speaker after speaker also spoke to pay tribute to Rita Thapa, a Tewa founder, a true leader, and a living inspiration to us all. And, then there was music and dance - wonderful celebrations that engaged and involved us all. The multi colored balloons that we sent up into the air with Tewa prayer flags attached to them! The gifts made to honor all Tewa staff who have served for five years or more. The smiles on the faces of the construction workers as they received awards from Tewa. The laughter and shouts of the children from the local community all through the ceremony in delight as they tore around the playground. Rita's daughters and son with tears in their eyes as they listened to the tributes paid to her in public. Rita's two year old grand-daughter Amodini rushing onto the stage into her grandmother's waiting arms.

It was a great day to feel part of a movement for change. I send you all that energy and that strength and that resilience. Think of what our work has helped the women of Nepal to accomplish. Think of one of the poorest nations in the world that has built a space for women where they don't just hold up half the sky - they spread their wings and fly.

With love and all good wishes for International Women's Day.

Kavita

Kavita Ramdas is the president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women.

I would like to acknowledge this day with both smiles and tears because our struggle for women's rights has been a long game of snakes and ladders. We see courage among individual women who have tried not to give up and keep moving forward against all odds. That probably is one thing we can be very proud of.

The sad part is that the society that we wanted to change has become more rigid, more conservative, and more humiliating for women than it was ever before. Women have been marched naked in the streets of our country, gang raped and murdered in the name of honour or righteousness but regular citizens wish not to be bothered. Are these signs of a dead society or we have moved to medieval times where people have decided that woman's place is very low in any case so why get ourselves into trouble by protesting these inhuman acts?

When the decision of International Women's Day was taken in 1910 in Copenhagen, the purpose was to acknowledge women's movements and struggles for their rights. I wonder what I should celebrate today. Movements and struggles are made up of common people. But I wonder if the common people are pained by what is happening to the women of this country. Do people only scream when their own body hurts? Do they not feel the pain of the bruising of collective spirit of a society?

I have been working on issues of sexual harassment at the work place intensely for many years. Many women approach me with their individual problems and ask me in frustration why such a common and painful problem is not dealt with in our society as a whole. I always say, it is because each woman wants to resolve her own problem, but does not want to work collectively to solve the larger problem.
So, even those who have been burnt in this fire fail to put in the time and effort needed to resolve this problem once and for all. I think this failure to take collective action is why such problems persist.

I invite all women and men concerned about the future of our society to join the movement. I invite them to join not only to try to look for solutions for their own problems but help each other to attack the social roots of the larger problem collectively. However, as our economy has improved, our movements and struggles on women's issues have really dwindled.

People usually expect social organizations to be available to help resolve their personal problems, but most do not turn around and help the collective struggle to deal with the larger issues. The recent spate of violence directed against active women, including rape of Union Councilors and the murder of Zile Huma has produced no outpouring of anger from our society.  This has greatly depressed me.  Tomorrow I am opening PTV's live transmission for International Women's Day. I will try to gather my strength and be more cheerful. We cannot afford to loose hope.

Fouzia Saeed is a member of Mehegarh, a Global Fund grantee in Pakistan.

We just received  an announcement from  the Women's  Learning Partnership, a Global Fund grantee organization representing organizations in the Global South, particuarly Muslim majority countries.

Thirty-four of our colleagues and partners in the Iranian women's movement were arrested on Sunday, March 4 outside of Tehran's Revolutionary Court.They were staging a peaceful protest against the increasing government pressure on civil society activists and, in particular, the trial of five women activists charged with "endangering national security, agitating against the government, and taking part in illegal gatherings" because they had organized a peaceful protest for women's rights on June 12, 2006. Four of them who were present at the trial were arrested with the demonstrators as they were leaving the court.

There are varying reports of police violence at the protest. One woman said that the police tried to intimidate the activists, using obscene words and insulting gestures. The thirty-four women leaders were detained in Eshratabad Prison for ten hours before being transferred to Section 209 of Evin Prison. Eight of the youngest detainees were released without charges on March 6. The detention occurred just ahead of the planned gathering in front of the Parliament on March 8, in honor of International Women's Day.

In August 2006, Iranian women's rights activists launched the "One Million Signatures" campaign to demand an end to discriminatory laws against women. Please support the campaign by going to our website at http://www.learningpartnership.org/advocacy/alerts/iranmillionsigns0207.