V-Day Blog Archive

Eve Ensler on Sarah Palin (The Joy Beher Show – CNN)

http://joybehar.blogs.cnn.com/2010/02/08/eve-ensler-on-sarah-palin/

Girl Power Can Save the World by Eve Ensler (CNN)

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/02/02/ensler.TED.talk.girl.power/index.h…

Editor’s note:

Eve Ensler wrote the play “The Vagina Monologues” and founded V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls. V-Day has funded more than 11,000 community-based anti-violence programs and launched safe houses in the Congo, Haiti, Kenya, South Dakota, Egypt and Iraq. Ensler’s book, “I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World,” will be released February 9 by Villard/Random House. Ensler spoke at the TED India conference in November 2009. For more TED Talks, click here.

(CNN) — The future is “girl.” Imagine girl is a cell that each of us — boys and girls — are born with. Imagine this girl cell is central to the evolution of our species and an assurance of the continuation of the human race.

Now imagine that a few powerful people, invested in owning this world, understood that the oppression of this cell was key to retaining their power, so they reinterpreted this cell, undermining its value and making us believe that it is weak. They initiated a process to crush, eradicate, annihilate, humiliate, belittle, censor, reduce and kill off the girl cell.

This was called patriarchy.

Imagine girl is a chip in the huge microcosm of our collective consciousness, which is essential to the balance, wisdom and future of humanity.

Imagine that girl is the part of each of us that feels compassion, empathy, passion, intensity, association, relationship, emotion, play, resistance, vulnerability, intuitive intelligence, vision.

Imagine that compassion informs wisdom. That vulnerability is our greatest strength. That emotions have inherent logic and lead to radical saving action.

Now remember that those in power essentially taught us and conditioned us to believe the opposite:

Compassion clouds your thinking.

Vulnerability is weakness.

Emotions are not to be trusted.

Don’t take things personally.

To be a boy means not to be a girl.

To be a man means not to be a girl.

To be strong means not to be a girl.

To be a woman means not to be a girl.

To be a leader means not to be a girl.

It must be very powerful to be a girl if everyone Is taught not to be one.

Having traveled the planet for 12 years, visiting more than 60 countries and living in the rape mines of the world, I have been with girls. I have witnessed their realities.

I have seen girls with knife wounds and cigarette burns, treated like garbage, beaten by their brothers and fathers and boyfriends and mothers, starving themselves to death to look the way they are supposed to look — which is close to invisible.

We are so accustomed to prohibiting girls from being the subjects of their own life that we have turned them into objects: commodities in the marketplace, bodies to be bought and sold and plundered and married off or raped in war. Buying a girl is cheaper than buying a cow in many places.

I have been with boys as well, watched as they have been ridiculed, censored and abused for their tenderness, their doubts, their grief, their need for comfort and protection. I have seen how the tyranny of masculinity has forced boys and then men to cut off their hearts and cast them into a brutal, lonely state of disassociation and isolation.

The state of girl, the condition of girl — in the world and in us — will determine if this species survives.

I believe unleashing the intensity of girl, the outrage of girl, the passion of girl, is the only way to chip away the thick sludge of denial, oppression and indifference that has led to our insane acceptance of a world spinning us toward our end.

What I have witnessed across this planet is the wild natural resiliency, fierceness, grace and nobility of girl.

The girl cell is our greatest resource, a renewable, untapped energy field like the wind. It is there for us, if we activate it and allow it to resist, dare, challenge, feel and connect.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Eve Ensler.

How One Man Gave Congo’s Women Hope (The Times of London)

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article7004898.e…

By KAREN BARTLETT

Why are the lives of African women worthless? It’s a question that Denis Mukwege asks every day that he works with the raped and mutilated women of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As a young doctor he treated women in far-flung villages who would otherwise have had little chance of survival. He had wanted to deliver babies. Instead, he saw things he had never expected: the women who came to him had untreatable conditions, caused by torture and rape. There were old women, young girls, babies. The villages he visited had been devastated by planned outbreaks of sexual violence; the men murdered and the women made outcasts for ever. He saw his country plundered in an endless conflict, and his own life turned upside down by stories too horrible for nightmares.

Dr Mukwege found that he was now working in the worst place in the world for women — and virtually no one was interested in their plight.

For the 13 years of war that have plagued his country, he has never stopped treating the stream of raped women who have walked hundreds of miles to his base at Bukavo’s Panzi hospital in the South Kivu province of the DRC.

“I am not a saint,” Dr Mukwege says. He is often embarrassed by the praise heaped upon him. Walking through Panzi hospital, he sees a poster celebrating the UN Human Rights award he won in 2008, and tears it down. Mukwege is a special man, though — not only because his surgical skills are saving the women from traumatic conditions that would otherwise kill them, but also because he is taking the women on the next stage of their journey by helping them to build a unique place of recovery: the “City of Joy”.

On a plot close to the hospital, dozens of workers are measuring, hammering and mixing cement in the final stages of constructing homes, classrooms and workshops for up to 100 women survivors at a time. When it opens in the spring the City of Joy will be a refuge for women; a town in its own right where they can heal, rebuild and learn new skills to take out into the world again.

The City of Joy also reflects the circumstances of its creation. Sheltered in the hills of Bukavu, the sounds of the call to prayer echo from the nearby UN camp housing Pakistani peacekeeping soldiers, while squatters and refugees jostle for space in the shacks next door.

Unusually, men and women are working on the construction together and one woman rushes forward to announce that for the first time in her life she is wearing trousers. Another asks Dr Mukwege for work as a cleaner. He tells her that she should have higher ambitions, and that women should aim for the same kind of qualified work as men. As he speaks, a large group of workers gather around to listen, balancing plastic containers of cement on their heads. At Dr Mukwege’s urging, the woman agrees to visit his office to discuss further education.

“You see the women working on this building,” Mukwege points out, “They are saying: I protest. I won’t take what is happening to me any more. I want freedom. The war goes on, but their attitudes are changing, and it is the start of a revolution.”

Christine Schuler Deschryver, an imposing Congolese activist and the new director of the City of Joy, is visiting the site with Eve Ensler, the writer of The Vagina Monologues. They agree that the women of DRC are transforming themselves from victims into survivors. “There’s an underlying movement of Congolese women who are ready to take their power,” says Ensler, whose V-Day movement to end violence against women has been instrumental in the concept and funding of the project. “They are no longer just passive recipients of violence, and the City of Joy is a cementing of that.”

The women of the DRC do need a place of hope, and a vision for the future. Twelve months ago Dr Mukwege went to the UN with a sense of optimism that the worst of the violence had passed. One year later in Bukavu, that optimism has vanished.

Although his office is full of awards from the humanitarian community, neither gold-plated trophies, nor talks with the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, have prevented another outbreak of fighting that brings around 15 new women a day to the clinic.

“It’s getting worse,” Mukwege says, peering over his glasses in between brief consultations with the women who line up on the low wall outside, and then present themselves at his desk unannounced. “We are now seeing cases again of women who have been raped for 24 hours, 48 hours. If the fighting continues there is no solution for our women.”

Since the mid-1990s more than five million people have been killed in a conflict fuelled by warring militias, ethnic tensions and opportunistic neighbouring countries fighting over the country’s gold reserves and vast mineral wealth. Women have paid the highest price. According to the UN, sexual violence is higher in the DRC than in any other country.

Conservative estimates report that more than half a million women have been raped overall, with an average of more than 40 a day in South Kivu. A new offensive by the DRC army and UN forces in March to rid the area of Rwandan FDLR fighters set off a fresh wave of killing and human rights abuses. In the first nine months of 2009, more than 7,000 rape cases were recorded in Kivu. A Human Rights Watch report on the offensive states: “Most of the women and girls were gang raped, some so violently that they later died.”

“The indifference the world has shown to the Congo is repulsive,” says Dr Mukwege. “This is an economic war driven by rape. People say that it is complicated, but how hard can it be to send a few thousand troops to stop a relatively small number of fighters who have killed millions?”

In a recent visit to the area Hillary Clinton listened to victims’ stories with tears in her eyes, but the aid she promised has yet to materialise, and the Secretary of State warned Dr Mukwege that she “could not work miracles”.

The surgical work that Dr Mukwege performs in reconstructing raped women is highly specialised but, as he points out, it is the nature of their ordeal that has made it so. Ruth was 13 when she arrived at his clinic. When one of the groups of armed rebels came to her village they rounded up her family, raping both Ruth and her mother before proceeding to kill both her parents in front of her.

Like many girls, Ruth was held in the forest as a sex slave where she was tied to a tree and raped by passing soldiers for several days at a time. Months passed, but eventually Ruth was released and allowed to begin the arduous journey to Panzi hospital. She was pregnant.

“It was tragic,” Dr Mukwege says. “The baby was stillborn. But her internal injuries were too severe to repair. As her doctor I am pleased that I could restore urinary continence and fit her with a colostomy. But she does not have a vagina, she will never have a period. In her own eyes she is no longer a woman.”

Dr Mukwege is the man who puts women back together, performing up to ten operations a day in a hospital that has only one ultrasound machine and survives on charitable funding.

The most inoperable are often little girls, some of whom remain incontinent. “When I come to work on reconstruction, there is nothing left to work on.” Mukwege throws up his hands to symbolise the hopelessness of some of his cases. “This is not rape as people in the West understand it. This is a weapon of war, a deliberate strategy designed to destroy our communities by leaving our women disabled and ostracised from their families and neighbours.”

Until work began on the City of Joy, even the women who made their way to Panzi found that they had few options for the future. “I was valueless,” said Erisa, another young victim. “I escaped and went back to my village, but my neighbours said I smelt. I couldn’t work. They said I was a Rwandan rebel prostitute. I was pregnant by my rapist, but it was a great shame.”

Now she lives with her little girl and a community of other survivors in a half-built house close to the site of the City of Joy. The women sleep on wooden boards and rags, and exist on what they can make from selling home-made soap and clothes pieced together on sewing machines donated by V-Day.

All the girls were taken from their homes and held as sex slaves in the bush. One young woman, Nyamgoma, takes off her sock to show a mutilated leg, cut away by the rebels who tried to stop her escaping. She is in constant pain but cannot afford an operation — even so, she says that she is pleased to be with other women survivors. Their group is called “I Will Not Kill Myself Today”.

On a drive out of town the City of Joy team visits the “Green Survivor Mommas” — a group of older women who meet to learn agricultural skills and farm a small plot with cabbage, sweet potatoes and goats. The scene seems tranquil, but in the forested hills beyond rebel fighters are holding other women hostage. A motorcade sweeps past, ferrying dignitaries to a meeting with President Kabila to discuss the security situation. It is a war in which horror, beauty and politics occupy the same space.

“Women in the Congo have been humiliated, and men have been destroyed too,” Dr Mukwege says. “How you can watch your mother being tortured and raped and not see her with different eyes? This is not about feminism, this is a crisis for humanity.” In particular, he believes, the international community should exert greater pressure on Rwanda to control the FDLR fighters. In the UK, campaign groups including Congo Now and V-Day UK hope to make the DRC’s conflict minerals as unacceptable as blood diamonds.

Working at the heart of such issues is dangerous, but although he is often threatened, Mukwege says that his religious convictions and his wife, Madeleine, give him the support to keep going. “Having four daughters and a wife is like having a female backbone,” he says, spreading his fingers to indicate a spine. Of his wife he shyly adds, “she is beautiful, and we are still lovebirds”. His children call him “doctor without borders” because he treats patients who turn up at their house at all hours.

“Women in Africa already have the answers,” Mukwege says, “I am just here to help them on their way. Life will start for these women when we have peace and they realise what they have lost. When they see that they don’t have a community any more. They don’t have a family any more. What they once had doesn’t exist any more. Then the hardest part of my job will begin.”

Back at the City of Joy, Eve Ensler and Christine Schuler Deschryver are admiring the work of the group I Will Not Kill Myself Today and sharing stories. In a lighter moment they tease each other about who is the brawniest when one of the women steps forward, grins, and flexes her formidable arms: “Look at my muscles,” she says, “I am so strong.”

For more information about the City of Joy, visit www.vday.org

V-Day Activist/Philanthropist Suzanne Skees”A Wise Investment:From Haitian Earthquake to Schools in Sri Lanka” (Huffington Post)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/suzanne-skees/a-wise-investment-from-th_b_…

By SUZANNE SKEES

When those already afflicted by centuries of racism and poverty suffer a natural disaster such as the January 12 Haiti earthquake, we in the United States sit up and take notice as the news coverage runs 24/7 in the immediate aftermath.

We have become far more aware of global matters and more creative in our reflexive reactions, as we reach out to send checks, and now even texts.

Witnessing the widespread death and wake of destruction left by the Haitian earthquake may feel almost unbearable, but so far we Americans have done something about it, to the tune of over $22M via cell phone donations alone — ten dollars at a time.

The brain-boost of giving, as noted a week ago in the New York Times by columnist Nicholas Kristof, will get us just as high as a great meal or shuddering sex.

And sometimes, too, it even works.

Halfway around the world from Haiti, the 20 million residents of Sri Lanka brace themselves for a what’s rumored to be a rigged presidential election Tuesday, in a land torn for 26 years by a civil war whose racial tensions between the Singhalese majority and Tamil minority have not eased. Meanwhile, a small ragtag group of students are striving not just to make it through the outbreaks of violence occurring throughout their country this week: They think they can rebuild the tropical island country, ground up, in a way that never did occur after the shattering tsunami of 2005.

They will begin with books.

And being a lifelong lover of books, I get on Skype today with a scholarship program based in Sri Lanka’s busy metropolis of Colombo, and I listen.

One of the star students of the program — called the Buddhi Balika Charitable Trust — has traveled 111 kilometers by bus, stopped at roadside police checkpoints three times, from her rural village on the southwest coast, Seenigama, to talk to me. Her name is Chamari Thushara Dilhani. She is 23, and she is one of the lucky ones — she is now a student at Rajarata University, steadily moving toward her goal of earning a degree and procuring a professional job as an accountant.

Twice orphaned, Chamari remembers her father simply walking away one day and never returning; later, her mother died of cancer. “I loved my mother,” she tells me. “I didn’t know she was suffering.” Later, she lost her second set of parents, the aunt and uncle who adopted her, in the Indian Ocean tsunami.

I listen from my laptop in California, where I juggle a family of three teens and a tiny kitchen-table nonprofit that connects kids like Chamari with scholarships and other families with microloans. It has been four years that I have funded Chamari through my support of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls founded by playwright and activist Eve Ensler in 1998. Through V-Day’s V-Peace Scholarship fund, I am able to support girls and young women survivors of violence who are seeking education as a way to advance their lives and, ultimately, give back to their communities by working to build peace.

It only costs me U.S.$800 per year to support Chamari. The return on my investment? That feeling you get when you know that you got lucky in life to be born in a relatively comfortable life in Ohio rather than poverty-stricken Haiti; that you cobbled together an education from jobs and fellowships and now you have the power to pass it on.

Without the possibility of schooling, a bright young person like Chamari would have ended up coerced into drugs and prostitution, or at the very least, “…would have been nothing more than a housemaid” earning next to nothing serving others in the village, as she points out. But instead, given a few dollars, Chamari will earn a degree in her chosen field and land a job that will place her solidly in the middle class. She will marry, have a family, buy a home, and contribute to the GDP.

She will have the freedom to believe in what she thinks.

Chamari plans to get out and cast her vote tomorrow, but will not say for which candidate: the incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is credited for bringing an end to the 26-year civil war last May; or his contender, Sarath Fonseka, the army general who led forces to succeed in that effort.

She has come a long way, but she recognizes that many other young people deserve a shot at schooling too.

“When Pam met me, she saw me,” Chamari tells me. Pam Schmoll is the American anthropologist who conceived the Buddhi Balika scholarship program, in conjunction with Eve Ensler and V-Day in 2005. Initially, they hoped to help with international rescue efforts after the Indian Ocean tsunami … Sort of like our efforts to aid Haiti right now.

Except that, once their scholarships had been established, the founders and their local staff began to see something they’d suspected: The chance to advance changed everything.

“It’s such a small amount of money, really,” Colombo administrator Vasanthi Harasgama said. What matters far more is that someone cares.

“I don’t even want to imagine what Chamari’s life would be like without school,” she shudders. “Right on her doorstep” are the social problems Chamari has sidestepped — and not just a tragic fate, either, but one of banal exclusion from the 21st century and the world she now clamors to see.

“I want to travel — everywhere,” Chamari laughs, “maybe first — your country.”
I tell her that I am lucky, that I too attended college on scholarship, and that I only wish every girl and boy could have access to education, in my country and hers and everywhere.

Chamari, an only child to begin with, has lost all of her family except the cousin she now stays with when home on college holidays. She has lived nearly her entire life in a war zone — the civil war began before she was born and, although officially over last May, has aftershocks that continue today. Her village, wiped out in the storm, did not have electricity or plumbing before or since. She did not know what the word “relax” meant until she became a coed, living in a house on-campus with 19 other girls, listening to music while they cook, watching television and reading books, checking out the cute guys in class and laughing, finally.

Chamari knows that I have funded her school fees, and we spend most of two hours trying to get past the strangeness of that. I keep asking what she believes, insistently, and gradually she talks to me. Like one of my nieces would do.

“Can I ask you one thing?” she queries shyly, in her impressive English.

“Yes, of course,” I reply.

“Have you ever known war?”

I tell Chamari about where I was on September 11, we talk about the suffering of that day, and the suffering her people have experienced over 26 years. We also talk about our own South-coast hurricanes, and how we as a country have failed but resilient residents of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi have rebuilt and continue to rebuild since then.

Ambition to rebuild: that is what drove Chamari to risk political violence to travel so far today, to talk about her life in hopes not just for her own continued funding (which I’ve already happily pledged to V-Day in support of their V-Peace Scholarship program, which supports survivors of violence like Chamari in their educational pursuits), but that other kids may share such freedom of opportunity.

The Centre for Monitoring Election Violence reports five murders and 752 acts of violence related to tomorrow’s election, yet Chamari proves dauntless in coming to the city anyway. Their office, held in the living room of Vasanthi’s house, blacked out for two hours earlier and “my heart was in my mouth,” says Vasanthi. “And they say it will get much worse tomorrow, after the election.”

Still, she keeps on. Professionally, Vasanthi wishes to extend scholarships to far more than the 47 girls she currently supports. “There is so much talent” among the children of the rural poor, she muses. “Chamari is one of the chosen few–the lucky ones–but so many get left behind.” Personally, Vasanthi lives the peace she envisions for Sri Lanka. Herself a Hindu Tamil, she fell in love with and married a Buddhist Singhalese man, their marriage a union of the factions still fighting today. And she works daily side-by-side with her Singhalese assistant, who “is very easy to love,” Hiranthi Siriwardene. They both work second jobs to supplement this effort, and they both say they simply cannot stop.

“If all kids had the chance to go to school,” Chamari chimes in, “I think there would be no problems or violence in my country. People would be more intelligent; they would earn more money, be safe, and have an enjoyable life.”

Having seen what a difference a few school fees can make, V-Day (a US 501c3) hopes to lobby more donations to support young women who have survived violence in pursuing education. And if they get the funds, even in increments of $10 and $20, we will see the sort of impact we have proved elsewhere, when compassion turns to action.

We may not be able to bring back the victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, or easily remedy our education system here at home, but we can, one by one, impact the lives of such young idealists as Chamari, who dare to believe that they can build the life they imagine and turn their world into a place of safety and freedom.

To my mind, that’s a wise investment.

If you’d like to donate to V-Day, click here

Questions for Eve Ensler: The V Generation (New York Times Magazine)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/magazine/24FOB-Q4-t.html?scp=2&sq=eve%…

By DEBORAH SOLOMON

Your new book, “I Am an Emotional Creature,” is a collection of 30-plus fictional monologues in which you assume the confiding, often plaintive, voices of teenage girls — from a Chinese factory worker to a sex slave in Africa to a schoolgirl in suburban America bemoaning her lack of purple Ugg boots. Why do you see yourself as a spokeswoman for teenage girls?
I don’t feel like I’m a spokesperson at all for girls. I just feel like, O.K., in the way that “The Vagina Monologues” was an attempt to communicate stories of women and their vaginas, this is an attempt to communicate the stories of girls on the planet right now.

That sounds so Girl Scout-ish.
I never was a scout. But maybe we can start thinking about creating a new radical troop. Troop V-Girl.

Why do you think you favor the form of the monologue? Do you see it as an emblem of the times — everyone yakking, no one listening?
I feel that monologues come naturally to me. I think often women are not listened to, and the monologue forces you to listen.

In that case, do you think of the monologue as a form of coercion or even abuse?
No, I don’t mean force as in controlling someone. I think the monologue allows one to take up space.

V-Day, your foundation, has raised some $70 million since 1998, largely through benefit productions of “The Vagina Monologues.”
I don’t think of it as a foundation, but a movement. V-Day exists in 130 countries now. This year there will be about 5,000 performances in places from Paris to Brest, France, to Greece to Tanzania.

What is the played called in French?
“Les Monologues du Vagin.” In Italian, it’s “I Monologhi della Vagina.”

What does the V in V-Day stand for?
For vagina and victory-over-violence and Valentine’s Day. A lot of beautiful words begin with V — voluptuous, vulva, volcanic, vulnerability.

What about vulture?
Vultures serve a positive function. They clean up the dead.

As a self-described activist, you’ve made many visits to Congo.
On May 25, we’re opening the City of Joy, a facility for 90 women who are survivors of gender violence. It’s a small pastoral city in Eastern Congo.

The City of Joy sounds like the name of a church.
The desire was to create a name that was not about women’s victimization, but about claiming their future. We’ll have a radio station (we hope). We’ll have a huge field that women will plant to grow their own crops; we’ll have therapy; we’ll have dance; we’ll have theater; and women will come for six months, everything paid.

How does a dance workshop help someone in the midst of a civil war?
Dance has a transformative effect on bodily trauma. When you’ve been raped, the trauma lodges itself in your being. Dance is a surefire way to release it.

You treat everything as a problem of self-esteem, as opposed to a complex set of political and economic problems.
The City of Joy is not going to end the war. But if enough leaders come out of it, maybe they’ll end the war.

Where are you from?
I was born in Manhattan and grew up in Scarsdale. Scarsdale didn’t work for me as a place at all.

Are you married?
No. I’m a nomad. I have a place in New York in the Flatiron District, and I have a place in Paris in Île Saint-Louis, and I spend a lot of time in Congo.

Do you ever yearn for security now that you’re 56?
Thank you for putting my age right out there! Security isn’t what I hunger for. I hunger for change. I hunger for connection. I hunger for good sex.

What if you just want somebody to help you find a ladder in the basement?
I don’t have a basement. And actually it turns out I’m fully capable of changing a light bulb all by myself.

INTERVIEW HAS BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED.

REVIEW: I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life Of Girls Around The World by Eve Ensler [Villard]

By Bette Bentley
BUST Magazine
http://www.bust.com/

When I encounter “teenage girl” stories, whether in novel, play, or film form, I tend to change the channel. Participating in pop culture’s clichéd teen experience is like recalling “simpler times.” It is remembering a past we can never get back, because it never existed. I can’t think of a time when my life was less defined–popularity was a murky concept, rules were rubber, and perfection was always just out of reach.

Leave it to Eve Ensler to get it right. Her new book, I Am an Emotional Creature, made me want to vomit from its emotional power. Ensler does not coddle the reader; instead she forces us to realize that teenage girls possess the largest untapped energy source in the world. Written in a similar format as her groundbreaking 1996 feminist theatrical work, The Vagina Monologues, Emotional Creature is a disjointed roller coaster of poems, fictional monologues, and scenes inspired by real girls around the world. Much like a quilt, the seams–the disparity between each piece–draw them closer together, even when the girls the stories describe live on opposite sides of the globe.

Ensler’s world is a place where one high-school girl is tortured for her Ugg boots and another is mutilated for having a vagina, and she manages to tell both sides with equal degrees of honesty, courage, and heartache. Ultimately about all girls, this is a tale about dreams, nightmares, realities, boyfriends, fathers, body image, sports, friendship, popularity, mothers, piercings, and poetry. It’s the God’s honest truth, as my mother would say.

Women’s Movement Mourns Death of 3 Haitian Leaders (CNN)

http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/01/20/haitian.womens.movement.mourns/inde…

(CNN) — One returned to her Haitian roots, to give voice to women, honor their stories and shape their futures.

Another urged women to pack a courtroom in Haiti, where she succeeded in getting a guilty verdict against a man who battered his wife.

A third joined the others and helped change the law to make rape, long a political weapon in Haiti, a punishable crime.

Myriam Merlet, Magalie Marcelin and Anne Marie Coriolan, founders of three of the country’s most important advocacy organizations working on behalf of women and girls, are confirmed dead — victims of last week’s 7.0 earthquake.

And their deaths have left members of the women’s movement, Haitian and otherwise, reeling.

“Words are missing for me. I lost a large chunk of my personal, political and social life,” Carolle Charles wrote in an e-mail to colleagues. The Haitian-born sociology professor at Baruch College in New York is chair of Dwa Fanm (meaning “Women’s Rights” in Creole), a Brooklyn-based advocacy group. These women “were my friends, my colleagues and my associates. I cannot envision going to Haiti without seeing them.”

Myriam Merlet was until recently the chief of staff of Haiti’s Ministry for Gender and the Rights of Women, established in 1995, and still served as a top adviser. She died after being trapped beneath her collapsed Port-au-Prince home, Charles said. She was 53.

Merlet, an author as well as an activist, fled Haiti in the 1970s. She studied in Canada, steeping herself in economics, women’s issues, feminist theory and political sociology.

In the mid-1980s, she returned to her homeland. In “Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance,” published in 2001, she contributed an essay, “The More People Dream,” in which she described what brought her back.

“While I was abroad I felt the need to find out who I was and where my soul was. I chose to be a Haitian woman,” she wrote. “We’re a country in which three-fourths of the people can’t read and don’t eat properly. I’m an integral part of the situation. I am not in Canada in a black ghetto, or an extraterrestrial from outer space. I am a Haitian woman. I don’t mean to say that I am responsible for the problems. But still, as a Haitian woman, I must make an effort so that all together we can extricate ourselves from them.”
I felt the need to find out who I was and where my soul was. I chose to be a Haitian woman.
–Myriam Merlet, in her essay “The More People Dream”

She was a founder of Enfofamn, an organization that raises awareness about women through media, collects stories and works to honor their names. Among her efforts, she set out to get streets named after Haitian women who came before her, Charles said.

Dubbed a “Vagina Warrior,” she was remembered Tuesday by her friend Eve Ensler, the award-winning playwright and force behind V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls.

“She was very bold,” said Ensler, who at Merlet’s insistence brought her play “The Vagina Monologues” to Haiti and helped establish safe houses for women in Port-au-Prince and Cap Hatien. “She had an incredible vision of what was possible for Haitian women, and she lifted their spirits. … And we had such a wonderful time. I remember her dancing in the streets of New Orleans and just being so alive.”

Magalie Marcelin, a lawyer and actress who appeared in films and on stage, established Kay Fanm, a women’s rights organization that deals with domestic violence, offers services and shelter to women and makes microcredits, or loans, available to women working in markets, said Charles, the chair of Dwa Fanm.

Charles remembered a visit to Haiti about two years ago when Marcelin, believed to be in her mid-50s, called seeking help. Hoping to deflect the political clout of a defendant in court, she asked for women to come out in droves and pack the courtroom. Charles watched as the man on trial was convicted for battering his wife.

Her death has been reported through various media outlets, and was confirmed to CNN by Carribbean Radio Television based in Port-au-Prince. Her own daughter helped dig her body out from rubble in the aftermath of the quake, Charles said she learned when she got the call from Marcelin’s cousin.

In an interview last year with the Haitian Times, Marcelin spoke of the image of a drum that adorned public awareness stickers.

“It’s very symbolic in the Haitian cultural imagination,” Marcelin said, according to the Haitian Times report. “The sound of the drum is the sound of freedom, it’s the sound of slaves breaking with slavery.”

With Merlet, Anne Marie Coriolan, 53, served as a top adviser to the women’s rights ministry.

Coriolan, who died when her boyfriend’s home collapsed, was the founder of Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen (Solidarity with Haitian Women, or SOFA), which Charles described as an advocacy and services organization.

Her daughter, Wani Thelusmon Coriolan, said in Haiti children bear only their father’s surname, but her mother insisted on keeping her maiden name and making sure her two children shared it, too.

“She said my dad was not the only one who created me. She was involved, too,” her 24-year-old daughter, who lives and is studying in Montreal, Quebec, said with a laugh.

Even though Wani and her brother no longer live in Haiti (he is in Paris, France), she said her mother was determined to make sure they were proud of their homeland.

“She loved her country. She never stopped believing in Haiti. She said that when you have a dream you have to fight for it,” Wani said. “She wanted women to have equal rights. She wanted women to hold their heads high.”

Coriolan was a political organizer who helped bring rape — “an instrument of terror and war,” Charles said — to the forefront of Haitian courts.

Before 2005, rapes in Haiti were treated as nothing more than “crimes of passion,” Charles explained. That changed because of the collective efforts of these women activists — and others they inspired.
She had an incredible vision of what was possible for Haitian women, and she lifted their spirits.

With the three leaders gone, there is concern about the future of Haiti’s women and girls. Even with all that’s been achieved, the struggle for equality and against violence remains enormous.

The chaos that’s taken over the devastated nation heightens those worries, said Taina Bien-Aimé, the executive director of Equality Now, a human rights organization dedicated to women.

Before the disaster struck last week, a survey of Haitian women and girls showed an estimated 72 percent had been raped, according to study done by Kay Fanm. And at least 40 percent of the women surveyed were victims of domestic violence, Bien-Aimé said.

And humanitarian emergencies have been linked to increased violence and exploitation in the past, she said.

“From where we stand,” Bien-Aimé wrote in an e-mail, “the most critical and urgent issue is what, if any, contingencies the relief/humanitarian agencies are putting in place not only to ensure that women have easy access to food, water and medical care, but to guarantee their protection.”

Concerned women in the New York area plan to gather Wednesday to strategize their next steps, Ensler said.

And while they will certainly keep mourning, she and the others are hopeful that Haitian women, inspired by these fallen heros and leaders, will forge ahead — keeping their fight and legacies alive.

Read Eve’s Latest Huffington Post Piece: “TEN RADICAL ACTS FOR CONGO IN THE NEW YEAR”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eve-ensler/ten-radical-acts-for-cong_b_418…

By Eve Ensler

Having just been in the Congo for the last month, it is evident that the more than 12 year economic war in the Democratic Republic of Congo rages on. Almost 6 million dead. Almost 500 thousand raped. Here is what I propose:

1. PLEASE STOP ENDLESSLY REPEATING THESE PHRASES:

• “The Congo has been like this forever.”

• “There is nothing we can do.”

• “It’s too complicated. I just don’t understand.”

• “It’s a cultural thing.”

A. Violence against women and girls is rampant across the entire planet.

B. Sexual terrorism was imported into the DRC like a plague about 12 years ago, after a 1996 military operation known as Operation Turquoise – a plan supported and implemented by the international community which allowed murdering Hutu militias of Rwanda (FDLR) into Eastern Congo. Since then, this sexual terrorism has been sustained by these and other parties interested in the minerals, (coltan, gold, tin), that are serving you. Like a plague, this rape and sexual violence has spread infecting the Congolese Army and even the UN peacekeepers who are there to “protect” the women. Put pressure on the international community to remove all outside militias. They brought them there, they are responsible for getting them out.

2. STOP ASKING WOMEN SURVIVORS IN THE CONGO TO TELL THEIR STORIES OVER AND OVER

A woman activist told me yesterday they were going to shut up now.
“There is no reason to keep telling the story or paying expats lots of money
to research the story of women and girls in the Congo. We all know the story”.

Read the latest U.N. human rights reports:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/13/world/africa/13iht-congo.1.18648435.ht…)

Visits these sites:

AFEM
http://englishafemsk.blogspot.com/

Friends of Congo
http://www.friendsofthecongo.org/

Read the recent Human Rights Watch reports:

http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/12/14/you-will-be-punished-0

Read the history:

http://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905

We know what is happening in the DRC. Now is the time for action.

3.DECONSTRUCT AND ABOLISH SUBTERRANEAN AND LEARNED RACISM

Deconstruct and abolish subterranean and learned racism that lies at the bedrock of human consciousness and arranges and expects and accepts the doom of black and brown people. Undo the brutal and evil indifference to the suffering of the people of Congo, the women in particular.

4. SHOES, SHOES FOR EVERYONE WHO NEEDS THEM.

5. INSIST ON SUPPORT FOR THOUSANDS OF TRAINED CONGOLESE WOMEN POLICE OFFICERS

Insist on support for thousands of trained Congolese women police officers who can protect their sisters in the bush. Don’t let Security Council resolutions 1820 and 1325 continue to be random insider numbers UN policy bureaucrats refer to when they are trying to prove they are doing something about sexual violence. Insist they be resolutions with grit that get applied regularly with sincerity and substance. Begin application by insisting that the UN not collaborate with rapists and former warlords in military operations.

Write to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and ask her to allocate funding for a women’s police force in the Congo:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
US Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520

6. SERVE THE CONGOLESE AND TAKE THEIR LEAD

Support their initiatives. Get out of the way. Support the local groups and campaigns that already exist, that have existed. They need your support to continue to exist. Fight to make sure the money headed for Eastern Congo actually gets to the women on the ground – the grassroots groups who need it most. Believe in grassroots women and men. Send them your confidence, your solidarity, and your money.

Give to V-Day’s STOP RAPING OUR GREATEST RESOURCE campaign as it continues to support local groups on the ground like AFEM, the South Kivu Women’s Media Association, Panzi Hospital in Bukavu and Heal Africa Hospital in Goma, women’s collectives like I Will Not Kill Myself Today and AFECOD, and the Women’s Ministry and Laissez l’Afrique Vivre.

Visit https://secure.ga4.org/01/drcongo to donate.

7. TELL PRESIDENT OBAMA TO STEP UP TO FEMICIDE

Insist that as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, President Obama ask questions about the history of the conflict in the Congo. Ask him to find out how and when this war began. Ask him to put his attention to what’s happening to the women in the Congo, to femicide – the destruction of the female species that is spreading to other countries and will continue to spread if he, himself does not make this a front and center issue. The Congo needs to be more than a phrase reference in one of his speeches. He needs to come to the Congo. He needs to meet the women and bring them to the table with himself and leaders of Rwanda and Uganda and Burundi. He needs to help facilitate a diplomatic plan for peace that does not involve more violence.

Write to President Obama and ask him to make finding a non-military solution to the war in Congo a priority in his foreign policy agenda:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/

8. ACKNOWLEDGE WHAT’S FUELING THIS WAR AND YOUR PART IN IT

Educate yourself about how conflict minerals are illegally and inhumanely pillaged from the Congo and make their way into your cell phones and the computer you are using to read this post right now. Demand that electronics companies alter their mining and trade policies so that conflict-free minerals are used in our electronics. Until this happens, we all literally have blood on our hands.

Investigate where and how your electronics companies are purchasing their materials. As a consumer, demand that they use conflict-free minerals in their parts.

9. TALK ABOUT CONGO EVERYWHERE YOU GO

Be a pain in the ass. Ruin cocktail parties. Stop traffic. Give sermons. Insert facts about Congo in every possible occasion, i.e., in response to “How are you today?,” you might say: “Well, I would be okay if women weren’t being raped in the DRC….”

Host teach-ins and screen V-Day’s film Turning Pain to Power. Visit www.vday.org to access both.

10. GET ANGRY AND STOP BEING POLITE

Feel what your sister, mother, grandmother, daughter, wife, girlfriend would be feeling if she were being gang raped or held as a sex slave for years or if her insides were destroyed by sticks and guns and she could never have another baby.

Feel feel feel.

Open yourself to feeling.

Eve Ensler, a playwright and activist, is the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls.

As 2009 Ends, Women in the Congo and Everywhere Need Your Support! Read Eve’s Updates from Congo

Eve is currently in Congo where the violence and brutal rapes continue. Don’t miss her recent update from Bukavu and her hot off the presses Huffington Post piece “The Four Months Since Hillary.”

Both provide up to the minute stories from on the ground — where your help continues to be needed.

Pickering woman wins YMCA peace prize (newsdurhamregion.com)

http://newsdurhamregion.com/news/article/142159

By Kristen Calis

PICKERING — When Nerissa Carino began volunteering in the music industry around 15 years ago, she saw the negativity that’s often projected toward women.
“I found a lot of the lyrics were very derogative toward women,” she said in an interview squeezed in tightly between studying for exams.
So, the mother of four and University of Toronto student chose to relay a message to try to make violence stop.

The Pickering resident decided to participate in the V-Day initiative, a global movement to raise awareness about and end violence against women and children.

She helped create initiatives at U of T’s Scarborough campus to create awareness on the topic and raise funds to support programs to help women and children escape abuse. Between last February and April, she oversaw five events in total, including: the screening of the documentary Until the Violence Stops, which is about V-Day founder Eve Ensler’s work; a night of reading, memory, monologue, rant and prayer; an art exhibit and silent auction; a production of the Vagina Monologues, also created by Ms. Ensler; and an open mike showcase event.

All told, Ms. Carino raised $2,500 that fueled programs such as the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre, Springtide Resources, the University of Toronto community, and individuals in and around the Greater Toronto Area.

“It benefitted women here, and also in Africa,” she said.

This work earned Ms. Carino a YMCA Durham Peace Medallion for building peace in the community and inspiring others. She was recognized at an awards ceremony held at the YMCA in Durham. This year marked the 25th anniversary of YMCA’s Peace Week, a time when the organization promotes activities to help people explore peace from a personal, community and international perspective.

Ms. Carino was shocked when she learned she’d receive the award but felt very honoured.

“I just kind of do what I have to do or what I think needs to be done,” she said.
She was also recognized for forming the low-cost Scarborough Mystics volleyball club that runs out of east Scarborough. Originally a competitive team, it naturally progressed into a social environment.

“We would help newcomers to Canada, help them get medical care, educational information, that kind of thing,” she said.

Once school settles down, Ms. Carino plans to see how she can help out with the YMCA.