“‘If you cry out, we will kill you,’ one of the told Dina. So she kept quiet as, one by one, the five men raped her. Then they held her down as one of them shoved the stick inside her.
When Dina didn’t come home, her father and friends bravely went out to the fields, and there they found her, half dead in the grass. They covered her and carried her back to her home. There was a health center in Kindu, but Dina’s family couldn’t afford to take her there to be treated, so she was cared for only at home. She lay paralyzed in her bed, unable to walk. The stick had broken into her bladder and rectum, causing a fistula, or hole, in the tissues. As a result, urine and feces trickled constantly through her vagina and down her legs. These injuries, rectovaginal and vesicovaginal fistulas, are common in Congo because of sexual violence….[where] everyone knows that rape is routine…it is the troops’ right to rape women.”
This is but one part of one of the stories that come from this book. It will open your eyes, change your mind, and inspire you. Of course most of us here in the West agree violence against women is wrong, even though rape is prevalent in our own society. But this book not only chronicles the stories of extraordinary women, it changes how we see these problems and what solutions are available and achievable. Most require less money in foreign aid, not more.
Here is just a snapshot of a handful of the things I have learned in reading this book:
- The “Girl Effect”: giving women equal rights and access to education can raise GNP and national savings rates as well as cure a whole wealth of social ills from poverty to malnutrition to terrorism. Yes, terrorism. Because security experts have noticed the countries that breed terrorism are also the ones which marginalize women.
- The modern global slave trade is larger in absolute terms than the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was. (citing Foreign Affairs)
- Rescuing girls is the easy part. Combating poverty and shame is the hard part in keeping girls from seeing they have options other and deserve more than to go back to the brothels. Because it’s not about shame. It’s about basic human rights everyone is entitled to, no matter their past.
- Violence against women has mutated into new forms: hurling acid into the faces of women and girls, burning brides, and throwing chili powder and lit cigarettes into…well, you can imagine where.
- Over and over again, the saving grace? Education. Education in a multitude of ways and for a million different reasons. So women know what their rights are. So women and girls know they are not alone in their suffering. So they know it is possible to speak out and to demand better. So they have the tools they need to achieve better.
- What prevents them from getting an education or having better lives? More often than not, the answer does not lie in sending more money. The answer lies in looking at the individual community or situation and innovating better, more efficient solutions.
- Usually these solutions are stupidly, stupidly simple and cheap. Solutions like putting a girls’ toilet in schools and giving the girls maxi pads so they can privately change and keep clean instead of skipping school for being humiliated one week each moth. Solutions like iodized salt to eradicate health problems associated with iodine deficiency. Solutions like allowing women to work from their homes so they don’t have to face potential rape and violence on the streets of dangerous, war-torn cities.
I think what prevents most of us from acting is the feeling overwhelmed by such huge problems. That we don’t know where to begin and we feel we face forces much larger than ourselves. What this book shows is a different story: solutions aren’t easy, but they’re not so difficult as we might imagine. It’s not about making men the enemy. It’s not about making Islam the enemy. It’s about re-envisioning approaches and showing how easing the oppression off women not only save the life of the individual women, but it can save nations and eradicate problems that affect everyone.
Reading this book will transform you. It’s the only nonfiction book I’ve ever stayed up half the night reading, and I owe my mother-in-law a credit for drawing my attention to it.
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Their Eyes Were Watching God is a seminal piece in African American literature. In this novel, Zora Neale Hurston chronicles the story of Janie, an African American women who is pushed by her family into a marriage she doesn’t want, escapes it, only to land in another marriage with a man who did not live up to the fairytale vision he portrayed during their courtship. Under his authoritarian nature, Janie begins to understand herself just a little bit better. When she is forced to reign herself in, she begins to understand precisely what it is she wishes to say. After his death, Janie begins to demand freedom. Though society tries to hem her in, she falls in love with Tea Cake: a risk, a gamble, but a man she well and truly loves, and who loves her in return. She has learned to push off the shackles others place on her, but in the end, finds the shackle that remains is one of her own making: her fears. Now that she has learned to love, she understands the fear of losing her beloved.
