They Will Remind You

I am frequently drawn to the sensational headlines around women's issues. I read about the terrible toll women's rights are taking in Afghanistan, about gang rape in California, about FGM in Africa, about girls in Saudi Arabia burning to death in their locked school because they weren't allowed out into the streets unless they were properly covered up. And I read and think about the small things, mostly the ones that are relevant to me in some way - the rate of AIDS amongst women in DC, for example, or the sociological implications of underweight women's over-representation in advertising.

But if I ever forget that the "small problems" for women transcend race, class and geography, things like this remind me.

In an article on MSNBC titled

Women bear brunt of African hunger crisis (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30412356/)

An aid worker says: "It doesn't matter whether it's a humanitarian crisis or an economic crisis or a food price crisis, women are hardest hit. Women are always hardest hit," said Catherine Bertini, a farming specialist with the Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. A woman "feeds her husband, and then she feeds her children, and then she feeds herself if there's anything left."

It describes a mother in Swaziland: "Phetsile Ndwandwe, short, skinny and 23 years old, accepts an apple from a development worker and nibbles at it, stripping the peel with her teeth before handing the fruit to Siphokazi, her baby daughter.

Siphokazi manages a bite of the apple, the first fruit she has had in months, then thanks her mother with a kiss.

Ndwandwe allows herself only the peel."

I think of my best friend peeling the strawberries for her one year old daughter, too young to eat the seeds, and I know that if there were only enough for the baby, that's who would eat. The aid workers are concerned; these mothers can't function and support their families without enough to eat.

You know what the solution is? Make sure there's enough for the mother AND the children. Because if there's not, Mom is going hungry.

I know families in rural New Hampshire where the kids eat until they're full and mom sits down to eat when everyone is done. If there's nothing left, she has a can of corn or soup. The kids don't notice. Mom says she's just cleaning up and she'll "sit down in a minute."

So it struck me that women's problems are in many ways the same all over because there are shared commonalities among women themselves. I don't mean to generalize my gender, but things like this make me feel more connected to the women I'm going to Rwanda to work for than a genocide I can't begin to understand.