I Am Nujood - Divorced at Age 10

Nujood is a Yemeni girl, and it’s no coincidence that Yemen abounds both in child brides and in terrorists (and now, thanks to Nujood, children who have been divorced). Societies that repress women tend to be prone to violence.

…First, those countries usually have very high birth rates, and that means a youth bulge in the population. One of the factors that most correlates to social conflict is the proportion of young men ages 15 to 24.

Second, those countries also tend to practice polygamy and have higher death rates for girls. That means fewer marriageable women — and more frustrated bachelors to be recruited by extremists.

So educating Nujood and giving her a chance to become a lawyer — her dream — isn’t just a matter of fairness. It’s also a way to help tame the entire country.

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An estimated 120 to 140 million women have been subject to this harmful and dangerous practice and 3 million girls continue to be at risk each year. The practice persists because it is sustained by social perceptions, including that girls and their families will face shame, social exclusion and diminished marriage prospects if they forego cutting. These perceptions can, and must, change.

FGM/C poses immediate and long-term consequences for the health of women and girls, and violates their human rights. More Information

You can watch a video at YouTube where Edna Adan discusses FGM with Voice of America.

Read Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof

For Westerners, the words “gender inequality” are likely to suggest pay differentials and glass ceilings and old-boy networks. For the women and girls Kristof and WuDunn write about, gender inequality is more elemental. It takes the form of sexual slavery and other kinds of bondage; rape and other kinds of physical and mental assaults; and the withholding of medicine, food, and other privations; and it issues from a belief so fixed as to be unimpeachable: women are less human than men. (Not that they are less worthy, but that they are, fundamentally, less human.)

Using examples from the book, Halpern shows that how it really is possible to turn “turn oppression into opportunity.”

It is now pretty much taken for granted that educating girls has an ameliorating effect on almost every social indicator, most especially family income and family size, and that this in turn reduces the violence that stems from resource wars. An education doesn’t necessarily mean book-learning, either: one of the stipulations made by Edna Adan when she was building her hospital was that the brickmakers teach women their trade. Somaliland now has its first women brickmakers; those women now have a marketable skill. As Muhammad Yunus and his colleagues at Grameen have demonstrated, enabling women to enter the workforce itself leads to more education and the spread of literacy. It’s the opposite of a vicious circle.

Edna highly recommends the full article.

But what if we could have known in 1962, the year of its publication, that Silent Spring would contain a message of change necessary to save our very world? My guess is that we would have acted faster to head off what we’re desperately trying to fix today.

So it’s important to try to fathom which books will become the most influential books of our time, in order to add force to their nascent power. In this hazardous task, I hazard a prediction: the most influential book of the decade will be Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.

…The oppression of women is breathtakingly evil, it’s frighteningly pervasive in the developing world, and it is alarmingly consequential in its damage–those messages come across vividly in the able hands of authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

The Edna Adan Hospital has its own chapter in this book. Highly recommended reading!

Read Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof

Watch Nicholas Kristof on Oprah October 1

This Oprah program is tentatively scheduled for broadcast on Thursday, October 1.

The book, and the TV show, profile heroic women in the developing world and also discuss the important – essential – role of women in a country’s development. Nicolas said the program was so moving that one of Oprah’s security guards was brought to tears.

You can keep up with all of his news at his Twitter page: http://twitter.com/nytimeskristof

An obstetric fistula, which is a hole created inside the body by a difficult childbirth, leaves a woman incontinent, smelly, often crippled and shunned by her village — yet it can be repaired for a few hundred dollars. Dr. Lewis Wall, president of the Worldwide Fistula Fund, and Michael Horowitz, a conservative agitator on humanitarian issues, have drafted the 12-year plan — and it’s eminently practical and built on proven methods. Evidence that fistulas can be prevented or repaired comes from impoverished Somaliland, a northern enclave of Somalia, where an extraordinary nurse-midwife named Edna Adan has built her own maternity hospital to save the lives of the women around her. A former first lady of Somalia and World Health Organization official, Adan used her savings to build the hospital, which is supported by a group of admirers in the U.S. who call themselves Friends of Edna Maternity Hospital.

Read more at the blog On the Ground and at the web site created especially for the book, Half the Sky Movement.

Also, there’s this brief article: Do-It-Yourself Foreign Aid:

Find a cause that resonates with you, learn more about it and adopt it. For example, we send checks to support an extraordinary Somali woman, Edna Adan (see above), who has invested her savings and her soul in her own maternity hospital in Somaliland (ednahospital.org).

Finally, Edna is featured some more in this audio slide show, narrated personally by Kristof, about courageous women in the developing world: A Powerful Truth.

A Stoning in Somalia

Incidentally, for anyone interested in Somalia, there is a superb aid project in the northern breakaway republic of Somaliland: a maternity hospital run by Edna Adan, a former U.N. official who used her savings and pension to build the hospital and fight death in childbirth. Edna is truly waging a heroic battle to improve health care and raise the status of women among Somalis, and it’s being supported by various Americans who know Edna and have been moved by her work. I visited her and have this video of her work.

I’ve often recommended that young people go and live abroad for a time, the better to understand the world — and also the better to see their own country. Somaliland is a wonderful little country, and I can’t imagine a more remarkable experience than spending a year teaching at Edna’s hospital.

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Mr. Kristof’s article, When Aid Harms, is written in response to the following message to him from Edna.

I am writing to you in desperation because we have lost ten of our best qualified nurses and midwives to International NGOs who do not support us during the training but who snatch the best from us with salary offers that we cannot match. Somehow, we seem to have become victims of our success because our nurses are the best in the country. We train four times what our hospital needs but still cannot cover the demand for good and responsible nurses. My greatest need is for Nurse/Midwife trainers for the next couple of years so that I can get the current 70 students in training graduated. We would welcome Interns to teach English, basic Sciences, and if possible, Nursing subjects. We are also willing to pay a salary of $800 a month plus food and accommodation to qualified midwife trainers, as well as the air ticket.