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The Missional Life | In Memory of Her - 5.9.2010
Women hold up half the sky.
- Chinese Proverb
Introduction
In Rich Sterns’ book, The Hole In Our Gospel, he tells the story of a woman he met in Armenia, a country still trying to recover economically from years under Soviet rule. Lida was her name. She had applied for a microfinance loan from World Vision. Rich was there to see what she had done with the money.
Lida was a talented seamstress who took out a loan to start her own business. She purchased a sewing machine to make suits for men and women. Today, she has a factory full of sewing machines, warehouses full of supplies, a shipping room filled with orders, and forty employees. Rich was absolutely amazed at what she had accomplished. As he was leaving, he told her how proud he was of her, she smiled and said, “Not too bad for a woman, eh?”
One of the world’s most influential economists, Jeffrey Sachs, argues that one of the keys to eliminating extreme poverty from the world lies in the hands of women. When countries, communities, cultures, and families empower women to work, it changes everything. Women make up half the population and their contribution to the work force makes a big difference.
However, leaving half of the world’s population without economic and political rights and without education undermines the contribution they can make to eliminating extreme poverty. Studies show that denying women rights and education results in cascading problems.
When a woman’s role is mainly viewed as child bearing and child rearing, and she is refused an education, she is left with little options. Without an education it is difficult for her to enter the labor force. And should she become a widow, she is at an even greater risk of becoming completely impoverished and without hope for improvement.
Unfortunately, because of the way many women are treated in the world, they are often forced into a job market that provides them with little money and even less dignity.
Readings from: Half The Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, by Nicholas Kristoff & Sheryl WuDunn
The red-light district in the town of Forbesgunge does not actually have any red lights. Indeed, there is no electricity. The brothels are simply mud-walled family compounds along a dirt path, with thatch-roof shacks set aside for customers. Children play and scurry along the dirt paths, and a one-room shop on the corner sells cooking oil, rice, and bits of candy. Here, in the impoverished northern Indian state of Bihar, there’s not much else available commercially—except sex.
As Meena Hasina walks down the path, the children pause and stare at her. The adults stop as well, some glowering, and the tension rises. Meena is a lovely, dark-skinned Indian woman in her thirties with warm, crinkly eyes and a stud in her left nostril. She wears a sari and ties her black hair back, and she seems utterly relaxed as she strolls among the people who despise her.
Meena is an Indian Muslim who for years was prostituted in a brothel by the Nutt, a low-caste tribe that controls the local sex trade. The Nutt have traditionally engaged in prostitution and petty crime, and theirs is the world of intergenerational prostitution, in which mothers sell sex and raise their daughters to do the same.
Meena strolls through the brothels to a larger hut that functions as a part-time school, sits down, and makes herself comfortable. Behind her, the villagers gradually resume their activities.
“I was eight or nine years old when I was kidnapped and trafficked,” Meena begins. She is from a poor family on the Nepal border and was sold to a Nutt clan, then taken to a rural house where the brothel owner kept prepubescent girls until they were mature enough to attract customers. When she was twelve—she remembers that it was five months before her first period—she was taken to the brothel.
“They brought in the first client, and they’d taken lots of money from him.” Meena recounted, speaking clinically and without emotion. “I started fighting and crying out, so that he couldn’t succeed,” Meena said. “I resisted so much that they had to return the money to him. And they beat me mercilessly, with a belt, with sticks, and iron rods. The beating was tremendous.” She shook her head to clear the memory. “But even then I resisted. They showed me swords and said they would kill me if I resisted, and they kept beating me. Finally they drugged me: They gave me wine in my drink and got me completely drunk.” Then one of the brothel owners raped her. She awoke, hungover and hurting, and realized what had happened. “Now I am wasted,” she thought, and so she gave in and stopped fighting customers.
There are 2 to 3 million prostitutes in India, and although many of them now sell sex to some degree willingly, and are paid, a significant share of them entered the sex industry unwillingly. One 2008 study of Indian brothels found that of Indian and Nepali prostitutes who started as teenagers, about half said they had been coerced into the brothels; women who began working in their twenties were more likely to have made the choice themselves, often to feed their children. Those who start out enslaved often accept their fate eventually and sell sex willingly, because they know nothing else and are too stigmatized to hold other jobs.
Questions:
• What thoughts do you have after reading Meena’s story?
• Although Lida and Meena both come from poor countries, their stories have very different outcomes. What’s one of the main differences?
• On a scale from 1 to 5, how much awareness do you have on the human sex-trafficking business in the world?
If you answered with a 1 or 2, perhaps you should look up “sex trafficking” on the web to learn more.
• What do you think of Jeffrey Sachs theory that to end extreme poverty impoverished countries have to empower women through education and the right to work?
From Half the Sky, pp. xv-xvii
In wealthy countries of the West, discrimination against women is usually a matter of unequal pay or underfunded sports teams or unwanted touching from a boss. In contrast, in much of the world discrimination against women is lethal.
In India, for example, mothers are less likely to take their daughters to be vaccinated than their sons… on average, girls are brought to the hospital only when they are sicker than boys. Girls in India are 50 percent more likely to die than boys the same age.
A big, bearded Afghan named Sedanshah once told us that his wife and son were sick. He wanted both to survive, he said, but his priorities were clear: A son is an indispensable treasure, while a wife is replaceable. He had purchased medication for the boy alone. “She’s always sick,” he gruffly said of his wife, “so it’s not worth buying medicine for her.”
Modernization and technology can aggravate the discrimination. Since the 1990s, the spread of ultrasound machines has allowed pregnant women to find out the sex of their babies—then get abortions if they are female. In Fujian Province, China, a peasant raved to us about ultrasound: “We don’t have to have daughters anymore.”
The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine “gendercide” in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.
• What stands out to you from this reading?
• If you were asked to recommend two possible solutions to improve the lives of women in impoverished countries, what would you suggest?
Scripture
Read Luke 7:36-50.
• How is the woman referred to in his story?
• Why do you think she approaches Jesus? And why do you think she anoints him with such expensive perfume?
• What do the comments from the Pharisee regarding this woman say about his attitude toward her?
• What does Jesus’ defensive of the woman say about his attitude toward her and women in general?
• From what you’ve read here about Jesus, suppose Jesus were to encounter Meena in the town of Forbesgunge. How do you think he would treat her?
• From what you know about Jesus, how does he treat the women he meets in the Gospels? If you need some help, read these passages:
Matthew 26:6-13 -
Mark 1:29-31 -
Mark 5:21-34 -
Mark 12:41-44 -
Luke 7:11-15 -
Luke 8:1-3 -
John 4:1-42 -
John 8:1-11 –
• How do you think Jesus would want you to think about the struggles so many women face in the world?
• Take a few moments to pray for the women of the world like Meena. Pray that justice and mercy would be demonstrated. Pray also for yourself, that you might have a greater awareness of the oppression and mistreatment of women around the world.