[Day 14] International
One hundred and sixty one years ago, a group of women and men drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, stating that "The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman..." Their immediate goal of equal voting rights for women in the United States has long since been met, but this statement still rings with a tragic amount of truth.
Three years ago, when rageprufrock first began the project that would grow into 14 valentines, she spoke about how women are praised and worshiped, torn down and degraded. We live in a world where our bodies are revered for the ability to give life and derided for leaving behind the appearance of adolescence, where we can rise to the highest offices of power in some countries and are deprived of basic rights in others.
We are told to be strong, to stand up for ourselves, told that we can do anything, be anything - but only to a point, always to a point.
Around the world, women die from lack of basic medical attention, from infanticide, from starvation beyond their control, from starvation inflicted upon themselves in a twisted attempt to be beautiful. We are beaten, raped, murdered, told in so many horrifying ways that we are lesser that we don't matter.
Forty years ago we declared that Sisterhood is Powerful, and it still is. We must remember that, must continue moving forward.
It's 2009 and we've come so far, but there is still more work to be done. We deserve better, and we can do more. We're strong. The next fourteen days is meant to remind us of that. It's our time to take back our bodies.
V can stand for vagina, like Eve Ensler's groundbreaking monologues. V can stand for violence, under whose auspices all women continue to make a home.
V can also stand for victory.
International
You can term them the global north, the West, the industrialized nations. You can even term them “developed” (though please don’t). No matter the term used, there are values shared by the people and countries that control most of the world’s wealth, wield most of the world’s political power, and generate most of the world’s waste. One of the most egregious of these shared values is a common view of the global south, the East, the less-industrialized nations as primitive or as helpless.
Though there is much to be said for the most powerful recognizing its power and providing support to organizations and individuals in less powerful countries and regions, there is also a strong tendency toward a charity mindset, one where information or money is “given” to help people “reach our level.”
What if there were something that we could learn from people in these countries? What if it was more than a stereotyped view of their being closer to the earth or more connected to spirituality?
What if what we could learn were an entire way of living?
The Kufunda Learning Village is a community of farmers, craftspeople, intellectuals, and social entrepreneurs located in Zimbabwe. In the last few years, Zimbabwe has experienced some of the most crushing social structural instability and monetary inflation in recorded global history. The value of currency has become so unstable that people spend money as quickly as they receive it, not knowing if their paycheck will be halved in value by the next day. Medicine from foreign aid agencies cannot reach people, hospitals are closing, food is scarce. Recent constitutionally-mandated elections were, very likely, fraudulent, leaving a functional dictator in charge of this country that is so central to the politics of southern Africa.
Yet, in the middle of all of this, the Kufunda Learning Village has thrived. Founded in 2003, Kufundees have been developing systems of sustainable farming, rediscovering traditional healing and herbal methods, and educating their children. While the healthcare, food, and educational systems fall apart in Zimbabwe, Kufundees find themselves with the ability to reach out to their neighbors, to assist where they can.
The premise of Kufunda Learning Village is that we cannot survive without one another, that there is something that we can know intuitively about community that must be valued, must be heard. Founded and held together by Zimbabwean women, the community of Kufunda challenges us to think: What if we are wrong? What if we are missing something important in our rush to get things done? Kufundees call for a return to an awareness of ourselves as connected, critiquing the essentially Western and global northern ideas of independence and individuality with their experiences of interdependence and community.
[Today's essay is courtesy of belladonnalin]