Change starts when someone says “No!”
I first learned about this courageous Maasai girl when our foundation helped fund a film contest for documentaries about people changing the world, and the winner was a film featuring Kakenya.
Kakenya wanted to be a teacher. That meant she couldn’t quit her studies when she hit puberty. She couldn’t get married and cook and clean for her new family. She had to stay in school. I can’t imagine her boldness. I was a good kid in grade school. I wanted everyone’s approval. I was lucky that what I wanted for my life was in line with what my parents and teachers wanted, but if my dreams and theirs had diverged, I don’t know if I could have stood up for myself.
Kakenya apparently didn’t have those doubts. When she turned 13, she offered her father a deal: She would submit to the female genital cutting, but only if he would agree that she could stay single and keep going to school. Kakenya’s father knew that if she didn’t go through with the cutting, he would be shamed in the community. He knew his daughter was tough enough to defy tradition. He took the deal.
On the designated day, Kakenya walked into a cow pen near her home and, as her entire community watched, a local grandmother cut off her clitoris with a rusty knife. She bled profusely and fainted from the pain. Three weeks later, she was back in school, determined to become a teacher. By the time she graduated, she’d won a full scholarship to attend college in the United States.
Unfortunately, the scholarship did not include plane fare, and the people in her village weren’t likely to pay her way. When she told people she got a scholarship and asked for their help, they said, “What a lost opportunity. It should’ve been given to a boy.”
Kakenya had the courage to defy tradition, but she also had the wisdom to make it work in her favor. In the Maasai community, there is a belief that good news comes in the morning. So every morning, Kakenya would knock on the door of one of the influential men in the village. She promised that if they helped her get her education, she would come back and make a difference.
Eventually, she got the village to buy her a plane ticket.
In the US, she not only got her undergraduate degree but earned a PhD in education. She worked for the UN. She learned about the rights of women and girls. Most important, she says, “I learned that I did not have to trade part of my body to get an education. I had a right.”
When she returned home to her village to keep her promise, she asked the elders to help her build a school for girls. “Why not a boys’ school?” they asked. One of the elders said he saw no need for girls to get educated, but he did respect that she’d come back home to support the village. “We have several sons who have gone to the United States for school,” he said. “Kakenya is the only person that I can think of that has come back to help.”
Kakenya saw the opening. If the boys don’t come back to help and the girl does, she told him, it makes more sense to educate the girls. Now, the elder says, “What she tells us, it touches us.… She brought a school and a light and is trying to change old customs to help girls get a better life.”
The elders donated the land for the new school, and in 2009 the doors opened at the Kakenya Center for Excellence. The school reaches girls in the late primary school years, when they’re likely to be pulled from school to be married, and helps them make the transition to secondary school. The Kakenya Center provides uniforms, books, and tutoring. In return, parents must agree that their daughters won’t undergo female genital cutting and won’t be married off while they’re still in school. Some of the center’s students have scored in the top 2 percent of the Kenya National Examinations and have gone to college in Kenya and abroad.
I don’t have any idea how people find the guts to speak up against waves of tradition, but when they do, they always end up with followers who have the same conviction but not quite the same courage. That’s how leaders are born. They say what others want to say, and the others then join them. That’s how a young woman can change not only her life but her culture.
Changing How a Girl Sees Herself
All the women I’ve talked to and all the data I’ve seen convince me that the most transforming force of education for women and girls is changing the self-image of the girl who goes to school. That’s where the lift is. If her self-image doesn’t change, then going to school will not change the culture, because she will be using her skills to serve the social norms that keep her down.
That is the secret of an empowering education: A girl learns she is not who she’s been told she is. She is the equal of anyone, and she has rights she needs to assert and defend. This is how the great movements of social change get traction: when outsiders reject the low self-image society has imposed on them and begin to author a self-image of their own.
Sister Sudha Varghese understands this better than anyone else I know. When Sudha was a young girl attending Catholic school in southwestern India, she read an article about nuns and priests who worked with the poor and knew instantly she’d been called to a life of service. She joined a religious order, became a nun, and began her work. But it didn’t inspire her. The motherhouse was too comfortable. The people she served weren’t poor enough. “I wanted to be with the poor,” she said, “and not just the poor but the very poorest among them. So I went to the Musahar.”
Her faith taught Sudha to go to the people on the margins. She chose the people on the outermost margins. Musahar means “rat eaters.” They are “untouchables” in India—people born into a caste system that sees them as less than human. They can’t enter village temples or use the village path. They can’t eat at the same tables or use the same utensils as others. The Musahar are considered so low that they are looked down on by other “untouchables.”
When Sudha first decided she wanted to work with the Musahar, there was no organized way to do it, nothing set up for her to join. So she traveled alone to a Musahar community in northeast India and asked the people there for a place to stay. She was given space in a grain shed and immediately began working to improve the lives of the lowest of the Musahar—the women and girls.
Sudha told me that she had once asked a group of Musahar women to raise their hands if they had never been struck by their husbands. Not a single woman raised her hand. She thought the question had been misunderstood, so she asked the group, “Raise your hand if your husband has struck you.” Every woman raised her hand. Every woman there had been beaten in her own home.
Outside the home was worse. Musahar women live under constant threat of sexual violence and face a continuous stream of scorn. If the girls walk outside the village, people will hiss “Musahar” at them and remind them they are untouchable. If they laugh or walk too freely, someone will grab them by the arm and tell them their behavior is unacceptable for a Musahar girl.
From the time they are born, society is constantly telling them they are completely worthless.
After working for more than twenty years to improve the lives of Musahar women—facing scorn because she lived with “untouchables” and receiving death threats for her efforts to bring rape cases to trial—Sudha decided in 2005 that the best thing she could do was to open a free boarding school for Musahar girls.
Sister says, “All they have known and heard and seen is ‘You are like dirt.’ They have internalized this. ‘This is my lot. This is where I belong. I don’t belong on the chair. I will sit on the floor, and then no one can tell me to go any lower than that.’ All their lives they are told, ‘You are the last. You are the least. You do not deserve to have.’ They learn very fast to keep quiet, not to expect changes, and don’t ask for more.” The goal of Sister’s school was to turn that self-image around.
One of my favorite lines of scripture is “The last will be first, and the first will be last.” That, to me, captures Sister Sudha’s mission, and she starts by teaching her students that no matter what their society tells them, they should never put themselves last.
She called her new school Prerna, which m
eans “inspiration” in Hindi. When I visited Sister there, she took me by the hand and introduced me to all the students we met, by name. The girls are often homesick when they arrive, and Sister stopped to comfort a young girl who was in tears, stroking her head as they spoke. Sister touched all the girls as she talked to them, putting her hand on a shoulder, patting another on the back, pouring out love to everyone she saw. If the girls get hurt, she bandages them herself—because they aren’t used to having anyone care that they are wounded. Sister wants to undercut their sense that they are untouchable.
She says, “When they get here, they are just looking at the ground all the time. To get their eyes lifted is something.” The girls I met held their heads high and looked me in the eye. They were respectful, curious, bright-eyed, confident—even a bit cheeky. One girl heard I was married to Bill Gates and asked me how much money I had on me. I turned my empty pockets inside out as Sister and I laughed.
The girls at Prerna all take the usual subjects like English and math and music and computers. But Sister also offers a special curriculum, something she’d been trying to teach the Musahar from the moment she arrived. She insists that every girl know her rights—the right to study, the right to play, the right to walk around freely, the right to be safe, the right to speak up for herself.
They’ve been told their whole lives that they are the lowest of the low, but here they are taught “You have the same rights as other people. And you must use your skills to defend your rights.”
Defending yourself is not just an abstract lesson. Sister Sudha makes the girls learn karate. They’re often targets of sexual violence at home or in the field, so Sister wants them to know that they have the right not to be attacked—and they have the power to take on their attacker. (It turns out that teaching physical defense skills is proven to reduce violence against adolescent girls.) Sister told me with pleasure the story of one of her girls delivering a kick to the gut of a drunken man interested in sexual favors. He stumbled off and never came back.
Learning karate—or any form of self-defense—was bewildering to girls who’d been trained to accept abuse. But the girls worked hard, and their progress was so impressive that their karate teacher suggested that Prerna send a team to India’s national karate competition. Sister agreed; she thought it would be a good experience for them to travel. The girls won gold and silver medals in nearly every event they entered. The chief minister of Bihar asked to meet them and offered to pay their way to the world championships in Japan. The last will be first.
Sister got them passports and tickets and travel documents. This seemed like a good opportunity to see the world. The girls came home with seven trophies—and something more: a sense of what it’s like to be in a culture that doesn’t look down on them.
“They were so astonished by how much respect people showed them,” Sister said. “They said, ‘Imagine, bowing to me, speaking to me this way.’”
It was the first time these girls had ever been in a society that didn’t scorn them. It helped them see that in their own country they were treated with low regard not because of a flaw in them, but because of a defect in society.
A low self-image and oppressive social customs are inner and outer versions of the same force. But the link between the two gives outsiders the key to change. If a girl can lift up her view of herself, she can start to change the culture that keeps her down. But this isn’t something most girls can do on their own. They need support. The first defense against a culture that hates you is a person who loves you.
Love is the most powerful and underused force for change in the world. You don’t hear about it in policy discussions or political debates. But Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer, Mohandas Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Desmond Tutu, and Martin Luther King Jr. all did hardheaded, tough-minded work for social justice, and they all put the emphasis on love.
It’s a mark of our culture’s uneasiness with love that political candidates never talk about it as a qualification for holding public office. In my view, love is one of the highest qualifications one can have. As one of my favorite spiritual teachers, Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, says, “Only love can safely handle power.”
For me, love is the effort to help others flourish—and it often begins with lifting up a person’s self-image.
I’ve seen the power of self-image in my colleagues and my classmates, in grade schools and universities, and in the world’s greatest companies. I’ve also seen it in myself. When I was in high school in Dallas, I met with a college guidance counselor I knew who wanted to offer me some advice. After I told her about the schools I was hoping I might attend, she told me I couldn’t get into any of them and should scale back my ambitions. She said I should focus on going somewhere closer to home.
If I had not been surrounded by people who lifted me up, I might have taken her advice and sold myself short. Instead I stormed out of that talk furious with her and twice as determined to reach my goals. That wasn’t my power; it was the power of the people who had shown me my gifts and wanted me to flourish. That’s why I am so passionate about teachers who can embrace girls and lift them up—they change the course of their students’ lives.
A girl who is given love and support can start to break the self-image that keeps her down. As she gains self-confidence, she sees she can learn. As she learns, she sees her own gifts. As she develops her gifts, she sees her own power; she can defend her own rights. That is what happens when you offer girls love, not hate. You lift their gaze. They gain their voice.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Silent Inequality
Unpaid Work
Four or five years ago, before I had begun to focus on the household burdens of the world’s poorest women, I heard the story of Champa.
Champa was a 22-year-old mother from a tribal area in central India, living in a two-room hut with her husband, her in-laws, and her three children. Ashok Alexander, the first head of our India office, paid her a visit one morning with a group of health workers. They had been told that Champa had a 2-year-old girl named Rani who was suffering from severe acute malnutrition, a condition that leads quickly to death if it’s not treated.
As the guests arrived, Champa came out of her home with her child in one arm and a pallu covering her face—a form of dress worn by the most conservative Hindu women to limit their contact with men. Champa was carrying a clutch of medical papers she couldn’t read. She pushed them into Ashok’s hands.
As Ashok took the papers, he looked at Rani. The girl was so malnourished her legs were like sticks, and there was nothing her mother could do about it. Rani could no longer be fed normal food. She required special treatment—a nutrient-heavy diet taken carefully in small doses that could not be given in village conditions. Rani’s only hope was to get to the district Malnutrition Treatment Center; if she made it there, she could be back to health within a few weeks. But the center was two hours away by bus, Rani and Champa would have to stay there for two weeks, and Champa’s father-in-law had said, “She can’t go. She has to stay and cook for the family.”
Champa explained all this to the women health workers there as she kept her face covered, even from the other women. She had offered her father-in-law no resistance, even to save the life of her child.
Ashok asked to see the father-in-law. They found him lying down in a field, drunk on homemade rotgut. Ashok said, “Your granddaughter will die if we don’t get her treatment.”
“She can’t go,” the father-in-law said. “It’s out of the question, leaving for two weeks.” When Ashok said again that Rani would die, the man said, “If God takes away one child, he always gives another one. God is very great and generous in this respect.”
No one had offered to step into Champa’s role and cook. She had no support, no family member willing or able to step in and take on these duties—even in a life-threatening emergency.
Rani’s life was saved because the health workers there intervened, taking her to the treatment center
with them while Champa stayed home to cook. Rani was lucky. There are many others like her whose mothers are so chained down by household duties and social norms that they don’t have the power to protect their children.
Ashok told us later, “This was not an exceptional case. I’ve seen it time and again. The women have no rights, no empowerment. All they do is cook and clean and let their kids die in their arms, and not even show their face.”
The Unequal Balance of Unpaid Work
For women who spend all their hours doing unpaid work, the chores of the day kill the dreams of a lifetime. What do I mean by unpaid work? It’s work performed in the home, like childcare or other forms of caregiving, cooking, cleaning, shopping, and errands, done by a family member who’s not being paid. In many countries, when communities don’t have electricity or running water, unpaid work is also the time and labor women and girls spend collecting water and gathering wood.
This is reality for millions of women, especially in poorer countries, where women do a much higher share of the unpaid work that makes a household run.
On average, women around the world spend more than twice as many hours as men on unpaid work, but the range of the disparity is wide. In India, women spend 6 hours a day doing unpaid work, while men spend less than 1. In the US, women average more than 4 hours of unpaid work every day; men average just 2.5. In Norway, women spend 3.5 hours a day on unpaid work, while men spend about 3. There is no country where the gap is zero. This means that, on average, women do seven years more of unpaid work than men over their lifetimes. That’s about the time it takes to complete a bachelor’s and a master’s degree.
When women can reduce the time they spend on unpaid work, they increase the time they spend on paid work. In fact, cutting women’s unpaid work from five hours a day to three boosts women’s participation in the labor force by about 20 percent.
The Moment of Lift Page 10
