Haiti Quake Puts 63,000 Pregnant Women at Risk | Womens eNews

Haiti Quake Puts 63,000 Pregnant Women at Risk | Womens eNews

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Haiti Quake Puts 63,000 Pregnant Women at Risk | Womens eNews

Haiti Quake Puts 63,000 Pregnant Women at Risk | Womens eNews

Posted using ShareThis

The PB&J Campaign

The PB&J Campaign
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Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich
Who knew it was so easy to change the world? The next time you pack this all-American sandwich for lunch, you're helping the environment. You don't have to change your whole diet to change the world. Just start with lunch.
How to Help the Environment at Lunch
A PB&J will slow global warming. Next time you have one you'll reduce your carbon footprint by saving the equivalent of 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions over an average animal-based lunch like a hamburger, a tuna sandwich, grilled cheese, or chicken nuggets. That's about forty percent of what you'd save driving around for the day in a hybrid instead of a standard sedan. If you have a PB&J instead of a ham sandwich or a hamburger, you save the equivalent almost 3.5 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions. A PB&J will also save water. That's about 280 gallons of water over the hamburger. To put this in perspective, three PB&Js a month instead of hamburgers will save about as much water as switching to a low-flow showerhead. A PB&J will save land. Have a PB&J and save 12 to 50 square feet of land from deforestation, over-grazing, and pesticide and fertilizer pollution.

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"…Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Letter from the Birmingham Jail

Memoir Goes Behind Iran's Prison Gates

By Juhie Bhatia - WeNews correspondent

(WOMENSENEWS)--On the evening of Jan. 15, 1982, Marina Nemat was arrested in Tehran, the capital of Iran. She was sent to Evin prison, notorious for its political prisoners' wing, and sentenced to death for political crimes. Nemat was 16 years old.

It was the early days of Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution. Nemat didn't consider herself to be an activist, but she protested when her calculus teacher taught a lesson on Islam instead of math. Her teacher said, "If you don't like what I'm teaching, you can leave." So Nemat did, and other students followed.

As a result, Nemat was rounded up and sent to Evin. She escaped execution at the very last minute, though, and was released from prison just over two years later. But Nemat kept secret the story of how she was saved and what happened in Evin. Even her parents and husband were in the dark.

Now, more than 20 years after being freed, Nemat is finally sharing what happened in Evin in her memoir "Prisoner of Tehran." The rights to her book have been sold in 21 countries, providing a rare glimpse at the life of a political prisoner in Iran.

"My book isn't political, but it's ended up being portrayed as political," said Nemat. "It's about what happened to me as a young, clueless Christian girl who was thrown into a strange situation and happened to live to tell the tale."

Marriage Behind Bars

When Nemat arrived at Evin in 1982 she was interrogated by two guards. One of them, Ali, fell in love with her. Just as Nemat was about to be executed Ali removed her from the firing squad. He got her death sentence reduced to life imprisonment. In exchange, though, he asked her to marry him, which required her to convert to Islam. Nemat spent the next two years as a prisoner in Evin and as her interrogator's wife.

What's most poignant about the book, said Lee Gowan, one of Nemat's writing instructors, is the way she tells the story of how Ali made her marry him, and essentially raped her, without making him into a stock villain. "Objective writers need to understand the human heart and she does," he added.

Nemat said that Ali, like her, was a good person who had been imprisoned and tortured, but he chose to focus his subsequent hatred and anger on those who were against his religion or beliefs. "We're all in danger of becoming fundamentalists, whether we're Christian, Muslim, et cetera, when we allow ourselves to become blinded by basic emotions," she said.

Nemat's relationship with Ali ended abruptly when he was gunned down by rival revolutionaries. When she was released from Evin in 1984 she never talked about her marriage, or what happened to her or the other women she lived with in Evin. Some of these women, unlike Nemat, didn't escape execution; each had her own story.

"There was a wall of silence after I got out. There was an absolute fear that dominated us. The past is the past, we didn't dare mention it, we just move on," said Nemat.

Writing From Memories

Nemat married her teenage sweetheart and moved to Toronto in 1991 when she was 26. She worked part time as a waitress and was a housewife, raising her two sons. She wanted to forget Iran and put all her effort into being Canadian, she said. But her mother's death in 2000 triggered something. She wondered if she should have told her mother about what happened in Evin. Once Nemat started to remember, the memories flooded.

In 2002 Nemat went to an office supply store, bought some notebooks and started writing it all down. At first she wrote for herself, but as time went on she decided she wanted to reach more people. She finally revealed the details of her time at Evin to her husband of 17 years, and then started taking writing classes.

"She was the most determined student I'd come across," said Gowan, program head of creative writing at the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto in Canada. "She wanted to tell her story. Beyond anything personal to her, though, she wanted to tell the story of the other women in that prison, to give them a voice."

Nemat wrote her story in English, though it's not her first or second language, and completed the book in four years. Her memoir was published in Canada in April and in the United States in May. Since then she has spoken at many different high schools and universities across Canada and has sold the television film rights to her memoir.

Reminded of Prison

Nemat had just written the third draft of her memoir when Iranian Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was arrested for taking photographs in front of Evin. Almost three weeks later, in July 2003, she died in Iranian custody.

In 2005 an Iranian doctor who had examined Kazemi's body revealed that he found evidence of torture, including rape, broken fingers, missing fingernails, flogging on the legs and a skull fracture.

"When she died I felt guilty because I was a witness who never testified," said Nemat. "But her death, as sad as it was, shone some light on political prisoners in Iran. All I can do is tell my own story, but by doing so hopefully also shed some light. Maybe then the world will be more willing to listen to other stories. Maybe a collection of these stories will eventually change things and the way people think."

Michelle Shephard, Nemat's friend and a reporter for the Toronto Star said Nemat's book is important now, even though it recounts events from the past. "Iran is still a closed country to report on and her book is a little window, even though it was 20 years ago. It's hard with Iran and other closed societies because it's difficult for people to be brave enough to tell their story, since they assume risks by doing so," Shepard said. "Hers is an important voice. She's a mother of two who has lived through this and come forward. What she's saying carries a lot of weight."

Now that the book is complete, Nemat is ready to leave it behind. She is working on and off on a novel. She still lives in Toronto and has not been back to Iran.

"Iran has changed, but it's not become better. People have learned to deal with the dictatorship and how to stay under the radar," Nemat said. "Even Evin is the same, but the number of prisoners is lower since people aren't getting into trouble as much. But if they get into trouble the evidence suggests people are as badly treated as back then."

Juhie Bhatia is a writer in New York City.

Women's eNews welcomes your comments. E-mail us at - editors@womensenews.org .

For more information:

Zahra Kazemi: - http://www.zibakazemi.org/

"Ardalan Tells Story of U.S.-Iranian Tensions": - http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3016

"Iranian American Women Caught Between Homelands": - http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2624/

Gender and Finance

The United States of America (USA) is one of the few countries not to have ratified the

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). At the subnational level, several states, counties and cities have passed resolutions urging

ratification. San Francisco has gone further by enacting its own ordinance incorporating

CEDAW principles. The city’s Commission on the Status of Women was given responsibility for implementation, with oversight from an eleven-member CEDAW task force which included elected officials, government employees, organised labour and community advocates.

The first step in implementing the new ordinance was to develop a set of guidelines for a

gender analysis that would assist in examining two departments for discrimination in

32 respect of employment practices, budget allocation and provision of direct and indirect

services (see http://www.ci.sf.uf/cosw/cedaw/guidelines.htm). The Department of Public Works was chosen because of its size, because traditionally it provides few jobs for women, and because services are provided indirectly rather than to individuals. The Juvenile Probation Department was the second choice, as it provides services to an increasing number of women who are also very diverse. The Commission worked with the international consulting group Strategic Analysis for Gender Equity in developing the gender analysis guidelines. It completed its first report during 2000. It is currently looking at four more city departments and also at City-wide practices, such as work-life policies and practices.

In a separate initiative, Jane Midgley has done work on women's budgets in the US and is

currently writing The Women's Guide to the US Budget.

ANGLICAN WOMEN “GO PUBLIC”

CLAIMING AND DEVELOPING A PUBLIC VOICE

ANGLICAN WOMEN “GO PUBLIC”

May 2007, The Rev. Margaret Rose

For the past four years our office, in partnership with the Anglican Observer’s Office has brought women from around the 38 provinces of the Anglican Communion to participate at the annual meeting of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Through a movement called AWE, Anglican Women’s Empowerment, the women—and this year there were fifty—participated in forums at the UN, met with government officials and led strategic regional caucuses. Their voice, along with others, claimed that the voice of faith is vital as we seek to make the world a better place to live, not only through churches but also through so called secular means, as in governments, non profit institutions and civil society. Often in national dress, the international women carried their AWE tote bags, which served as a name tag and gave visible proof that the Anglican delegation was the largest Non Governmental Organization present at the UN meeting.

As important as their work at the UN however, was the work the women did together as leaders in their churches, dioceses and communities gathered from around the Anglican Communion.

None is unaware of the controversies facing us as a church and as a communion. Yet in our years together we have been clear that our work is about poverty, AIDs and the issues of survival which face so many around the globe. These take top priority. The women working at the UN, and among ourselves, saw that when our voices were joined in community—out loud and in public, we could indeed make a difference in the church and in the world. At the close of this year’s meeting, the women issued a unanimous statement, sent to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates of the Communion, which read in part:

“Given the global tensions so evident in our Church today, we do not accept that there is any one issue of difference or contention which can, or indeed would ever cause us to break our unity as represented by our common baptism. Neither would we ever consider severing the deep and abiding bonds of affection which characterize our relationships as Anglican women. This sisterhood of suffering is at the heart of our theology and our commitment to transforming the world through peace with justice. Rebuilding and reconciling the world is central to our faith.”

But it is not just those women who come to the UN, but all of us, who have the gifts and talents to claim what I call a PUBLIC voice in the church and in the world. Our call is to use that PUBLIC voice for the Gospel mandate of reconciliation in a world riven by controversy and polarization, to say nothing of disease and violence and hunger. Let me explain myself with a story:

One Sunday some weeks ago, when I should definitely have been at church, I was at the gym running on the treadmill. It was a treadmill where you put the ear phones in and watch the television in front of you. I chose to watch Meet the Press. The subject of the day was the recent vote in Congress about military appropriations for Iraq. Around the circle were the moderator and various congress men—from both sides of the aisle. As I listened and watched, (realize of course that I am huffing and puffing two inches in front of them on the treadmill) I suddenly had this image of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum from Annie Get your Gun. “I can do anything you can do better. I can do anything better than you. No you can’t . Yes I can. No you can’t . Yes, I can, yes, I can.” It was not long before it became clear that the conversation was not about how to make the situation better but about who was going to get his way—a familiar power struggle! Clearly these men have, via the media and many other means, a public voice. A loud voice. A political voice. And they are making decisions which will affect not only their communities and our country but the world!

Aware that there were no women or people of color in this particular conversation, I wondered how that might have made a difference. Upon reflection, I was drawn to the work we are doing among women at the Office of Women’s Ministries and to my conviction or rather to my evangelistic message and witness, that when there is gender equality, when women and men together are sitting at the decision making tables, be it in church, in communities or in Congress, then the conversation is richer and more balanced. And there is the distant hope that the outcome will be one which truly seeks the common good. But as long as there is no balance, then the leadership of church and civil society and governments will list toward the traditional solutions of power and control rather than wisdom and relationship.

This is not a new idea of course. But I believe it is the idea for now, a wave that we as women of faith are called to catch, indeed impelled by the Gospel of Jesus Christ to do so. I believe that Now is the time for women to claim our own public voice in every area of social and political life. It is the time for women to come out of the closet, to do and be in public what we have been doing in private for eons.

What do I mean exactly? And how will this make a difference? Do I want women to appear on Meet the Press? Do I want to dredge up the Equal Rights Amendment and argue about that? Not exactly. Let us look at a little “Church History”. Remember that in the early church, before we had the big buildings and all the worry about heating bills and wardens, there were essentially house churches, often led by women.

In 1 Corinthians 16:10 Paul writes, “Warm greetings to Priscilla and Aquilla and the church that meets at their house.” In Colossians 4 we read “Give my greetings to the brothers and sisters in Laodicea, and to Nympha and the church in her house.” And in Romans 16, though the greeting is to Gaius in whose house the church meets, I suspect there was a Mrs. Gaius in there too. The roles of women were very clear. They were the presiders at the meal. They prepared and served the food and drink. When those small gatherings shared bread and wine “in memory of Jesus”, the roles did not change. The women were in charge of the private sphere and the meal, even when it included what we today would call the Eucharist.

With Constantine, however, in the 4^th century, for better and for worse, the Church itself went Public and became the established religion of the Roman Empire. Christianity was no longer a private affair. Gathering as Christian community was legal, and certainly a good thing for those who were persecuted. But as it went Public, men continued to play the same roles they always had, becoming the public purveyors of religious ritual. And the women, still presiding at the home table, no longer had a role at this now public table. Culturally we did not rock the boat.

Some did of course, and always had. There is precedent for women speaking out and getting called uppity even in biblical times. Remember Paul’s insistence that women keep silent in church? No one would make such a rule if it weren’t in danger of being breached. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect some of the women who had been in charge of churches as a more private affair—were speaking out in public. So even in the early days before Constantine, there was a move afoot to silence the uppity women even from the house churches.

Nevertheless for two thousand years most of us have been pretty quiet. There have been of course notable exceptions. There are the ancient ones, Blandina, later Joan of Arc and more you could name. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Amelia Bloomer, Susan B Anthony ( all of whom are commemorated in our Prayer Book as Saints) Others more recent would include Bella Abzug, Margaret Chase Smith, and Jeannette Rankin . You could name your own of course.

In recent years the movement of women into public life and decision making has been astounding. And today, there is a woman who is Speaker of the House, another who is seen as a viable Presidential candidate, and women heads of state elected in their own right in Germany, Liberia, Chile to name just three. Another who was, at least for a while, the leading candidate in France. And much to my own faithless surprise and delight, a woman who is the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.

A good start I would say---but what about us? What about those of us whose ambitions are not necessarily to be quite so public. What about us who are seeking to be disciples of Jesus in our own churches and communities? I believe there is a public vocation for each of us as well, a call to speak and act in the world in a way that demands in public what women have always demanded in private for the good of their families and communities. We must develop and claim - a public voice that is different from the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum of Meet the Press, one which reflects what some have called women’s moral authority, values which the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington has stated as Women’s Public Vision.

I am on an advisory group for this organization--- which includes women from religious groups—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and so called secular groups. We have written a values statement which we hope to use in public policy work which offers a public moral vision we believe should under gird all our work in church and society. It simply includes basic values and insists that these should inform our public policy and our ways of working. It insists on a conversation whose premise is the common good as the primary value before even individual rights. Community, balance, equality, and family are its basic tenets. Such conversation should not be too difficult, partially because women have often had different ways of talking to each other, ways of being together which have been different from the ways of men.

Let me be clear, however, I am not suggesting that women should now be “in charge”. It is rather that women’s voices in public have been a missing piece. Neither am I appealing to some notion of women’s essential nature as nurturers or even that women’s voices are guaranteed good and effective. But care giving is what we have been schooled to do and for thousands of years women’s work has been the home--care and nurture of children and families and keeping folks – often even warring family members - together at the dinner table.

It is like my Aunt Roberta when the cousins would gather in my hometown of Carrollton, Georgia—cousins who included what my part of the family called “Yankees” who all gathered for a week or so in the summer. Meals were the time for discussion—and loud disagreements. Aunt Roberta, whose spirit was not particularly conciliatory or irenic, would take her weapon of choice, the fly swatter and wave it around the table and say: “Okay everyone, we are going to have a nice quiet meal.” It wasn’t quiet, but it was nice and we all stayed together continuing to state our particular viewpoints. Women have always been charged as peacemakers in families and communities.

Women whose lives have been shaped by the care and nurture of children have claimed relationship as the priority for their lives and only secondarily have they insisted on autonomy, increasing authority or my way or the highway. Any of you who has read psychologist Carol Gilligan know of her work in this area. Segolene Royal, a candidate for President of France knew this well. It didn’t get her the election but here is what Patrick Jarreau of Le Monde said about her as quoted in a recent New Yorker (April 23, 2007) article: “You have to realize that she has strong convictions, it’s just that they aren’t about the usual political subjects. She talks about family, the relations between generations. She worries about the media, about pornography and violence. Her style is very different from Sarko’s. She has the ability to listen, to focus on the daily lives of people—the people who feel that “politics’, for all its details, never really took them into account before. Royal is a feminist and French politics has been a male preserve for so long that “daily life” and “family” had all but disappeared from the discourse until she came along. Her manifesto and web site title is: desirsdavinir.org or “wishes for the future.”

The priority of relationship—women’s ways of knowing and speaking--- offers us a language which is different from Meet the Press. It offers us the possibility of a word –indeed a language --which does not diminish the other but makes connections. It is a language which science fiction writer Ursula Leguin, who has been working in word and language for a long time, describes in a graduation address to Bryn Mawr College in 1986. Here is what she says: Our first language is what she calls the Mother tongue. Whether spoken by men or women, it is the language of early caring and nurture: Eat your vegetables; I love you precious one; Don’t forget your umbrella; DON’T HIT YOUR BROTHER. The Father tongue is the one we all learned when we went to school and especially college. It is the language of objectivity, the one that allows us to observe from the outside, see the big picture and analyze what is going on. It is the language of science. Most of us learned that well too.

The language Leguin searches for, desires us all to learn, brings both together. She calls it the native tongue, one that lies deep within our cosmic and organic memory but which most of us have forgotten. It is the language that lets us know that not hitting your brother suggests that not hitting another country could have a relationship to each other. Or that the combination of eating your vegetables and the science of gardening and climate change are connected. It is the Word made Flesh—incarnational language—every day living in the world language - that connects the dinner table to alleviating the causes of hunger around the world. Most of all it breaks the boundaries between public and private as it lives out the adage that the personal is political. It claims, like Paul in the Book of Acts at Pentecost that diversity is a requirement for true community; that conformity is not an ingredient of unity and we do not have to all agree to stay together. This is the voice that women can offer to the church and to the world. The intimate language of love and caring becomes the public language of caring for the world.

The women of AWE who came to the UN are a vivid example. One delegate was Amelia Ward, of Liberia—where young boys were abducted as child soldiers to take the place of too many men killed in civil warfare. Tired of her friends’ children being kidnapped for battle, Amelia and other women formed the Mano River Peace Initiative. They gathered the women and went out into the bush to find the boys of 8 and 10 or 12. Basically they said to them as only a mother can, “You don’t belong here. Go home to dinner and to your family.” And amazingly they did. Today there is a fragile peace in Liberia and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is a President with a different voice.

This year the theme of the UN Commission on the Status of Women meeting was “The Elimination of Discrimination and Violence against the Girl Child”. In addition to the women who came we also hosted 11 girls who engaged in work at the UN and with each other. The DVD clip at http://www.trinitywallstreet.org/welcome/?article&id=860 is part of an event we sponsored at Trinity Church Wall Street , with panelists and the girls engaging each other on the question of hopes and dreams for girls. Notice in particular the conversation between Chantelle, an Australian indigenous girl, and the Presiding Bishop.

These young Anglican girls are learning to have a public voice---a different voice, not one devoid of feeling and intimacy—but not sentimental either. A change the world voice. And the dialogue between Chantelle and the Presiding Bishop is one of both deep intimacy and pastoral care alongside boundless public importance It asks the hard questions: Where were you –where was the church when the abuse was happening? How can the church respond to families like mine? And then the Presiding Bishop’s Response as she looked her in the eye, “The church can only stand in solidarity with you.”

What does it mean for us, for the church to stand in solidarity? What does it mean for us who claim to be disciples of Christ who hear this word and can speak and act? Solidarity is a political word—a call to action. The personal IS the political. The public and private boundaries here are broken, yet still respect the dignity of every human being.

Katharine and Chantelle’s moment is a moment of native language---neither the public objective language of the father tongue nor the private intimate language of the mother tongue but the one we seek to speak in the church will also be the language which makes a difference in our world if we have the courage to act on it. Speaking the native language will move us beyond infighting, polarization and the power struggles which insist that only one way is right.

Women have this gift to offer the church and the world at this moment. It is, I believe, the disciple’s vocation of the 21^st century. We have been quiet too long. Now is the time for us to join together –women and men-- not just for service projects as valuable as they are, but for remaking the dialogue, remaking the discourse to claim the conversation that moves us as disciples of Christ to action---not just far away but in our own cities. How can the church be in solidarity with girls who are abused? What are the ways we seek to work together for the common good? What do we do which leads to the full flourishing of the public good? One tool from the Office for Women’s Ministries is Beijing Circles. This action reflection model gathers women for bible study, education, reflection and action on the issues of the Beijing Platform for Action connecting local issues with the global context.

So much of this work is already happening around the church. Many of us have been at it a long time and like the widow who kept pestering Jesus, we have persisted. When we look at the future and the road ahead seems too long or too rocky or steep, I call on all of you and on those in heaven who never gave up—even when they did not see the fruits of their labors. They encourage us to carry on, to hang on to our faith, to the biblical witness of our ancestors and a whole host of uppity women saints who are praying for us and cheering in heaven!!

For more info about Beijing Circles go to http://www.episcopalchurch.org/41685_73656_ENG_HTM.htm?menupage=73689

For more on Women’s Public Vision go to http://www.iwpr.org/Politics_Religion_PublicVision/index.htm