a couple more photos

now that i've managed to track them down.


this is october the tenth. it is not that warm any more. but no rain for a long time.



everything i do is important


this is that lovely town, banska stiavnica, which i told you about last time.


i would also appreciate an eye on the observer letters page on sunday, and possibly the IoS, regarding this matter of legislating to approve of faith-based hatred of gay people.

banana and chips

I haven't posted any pictures for a while, largely because I haven't taken any. But there are some I've been meaning to put up.

To start, a few from the visit my parents paid me a couple of weeks ago. There are none from the salsa club, We went to Banksa Stiavnica, a little town three hours away by road. Due to ignorance of Slovak coach conduct (ie, turn up and queue an hour before departure) we'd never have got there without a wonderful deus ex machina involving forty people in front of us realising they were in the wrong line. It was super. The town was lovely also, very full of hills and strange angles, enchanting, I thought.


Here we are at this restaurant, the best (and only) piece of futuristic socialist architecture in Bratislava:

And true to form, wishing to please our absent chef, here is me (entirely unposed) in another restaurant. I am happy with the secession of my hairline. I never liked it anyway.

And finally, another pic from Banska Stiavnica. The region is famous for the contribution of its salamanders to the workers struggle:


Yesterday Amrei and I played with a katzchen, walking somewhere around Devinska Nova Ves. Cats are incredibly lovely when they are so little, and this one was absorbed by the idea of shaking paws. She would have spent all afternoon with us, I'm sure, but we had to save a caterpillar from certain death. It's hard being a superhero, and worse with a hangover.

someone who did a dangerous job is dead

Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist who sent highly critical reports from Chechnya - critical of the Russian conduct there, and critical for letting people know. You can read an example of her journalism here. You can read about the human rights situation in Chechnya here and here.

Maybe I came across her at an impressionable age, maybe it was her memorable Slavic name. Maybe she's a relative celebrity in the pond swum in by human rights fish, but she's someone i think ought to be known about. The following was my initial reaction, in an email to Jessie.

~

this is just so wrong and yet so predictable. at first i felt angry, then i realised this was, given the circumstances, more likely than not - there was no new anger to be had here, everyone involved was already an object of my anger. then i felt hurt, offended by the unfairness that means such a person can be killed. doesn't the world need superheroes? - but then i remembered, as we are told from before we can walk, that Life Isn't Fair, and drily accepted that such objective truths, such mechanical aspects of the universe can be the targets of judgements but are not fit for emotions. then i felt despair, for who is now going to do the work this committed and unrelenting woman did? who will bring the human side of the chechen war to the public consciousness? who will remind the world of the physical victims of this war, not just the arguable victims of ideological partisanship? who now will have the drive and intelligence to even try to hold russian armed forces to account? then i felt hypocrisy - what have i ever done to honour the work this woman did, to help publicise, deter and correct the injustices she devoted herself to? nothing but write a couple of letters several years ago. then i felt superficiality - won't i shed a tear here and promptly forget all about it? then consolation - perhaps this will refocus those who look at this context onto the human rights disaster, drawing them out of the relativism which has grown up around this conflict. then emptiness - who are 'they'? who the fuck is watching this conflict anyway? or any conflict; who with the power has the inclination to use it, who with the inclination has the power?

then - ex nihilo nihil. nothing comes of nothing, so when my internet connection comes back, i will do some research and write to someone a letter which she might have appreciated being written. please hold me to it.

be minor to be major

we have an intern, a new staff member. her name is Katti, and she is entirely nice and probably fun also. the task of giving her anything substantial to do has fallen to me by default, as the only non-administrative member of staff not going to new york for a week. which was a kick in the arse (and the other side too as i feel like she is my replacement)* and got me to realising that i do actually have a good grasp of what we do, of all the gender issues we are working on in our region, and that i have neglected really to talk about this on my blogue.

* apologies for gender non-mainstreamed, insensitive imagery here

perhaps the best way to explain what we do in Unifem, at least in this office, is with a walkthrough:
- i have done some research on the situation of youth (15-24 yo) in albania, bosnia and turkey; out of this, i have come to believe that one of the major problems facing women and girls in turkey is the matter of poor and inconsistent access to education, particularly for girls in rural areas;
- illiteracy and low levels of education tend to, among other things:
- lead to decreased economic status (and therefore increased dependence, on fathers and husbands, say. dependence in itself restricts freedom, decision-making ability, control of own life, and in situations where there is a high incidence of violence against women has further problems associated)
- correlate with higher birth rates and lower use of contraception. this has implications again for women's freedom - it can't be assumed that in the absence of access to and knowledge about contraceptives, women simply bear the number of children they want to; it's more complicated of course, and personal in each case, but education, economic status and lower fertility tend to go together, where women make choices about their lives and the number and spacing of their children. (being better educated also gives women greater ability to negotiate within a relationship with a man.)
- include low levels of knowledge about sexually transmitted infections and HIV/AIDS

- that is not exhaustive, but should give you an idea of the reasons unifem might be interested in helping improve the educational level of girls in turkey.

(bear in mind that turkey is merely the example i am using as it is a country i have been working on - such a walkthrough, of some kind or other, could be produced for any country.)

- to improve overall educational levels, there are several actions which could be pursued - for example, local governments might be encouraged to make provision in their budgets for monitoring and enforcement of girls' attendance in compulsory schooling (eight years in turkey)

- to do this, it would be necessary to identify which are the key groups to be involved. local (and probably national) government educational departments, for sure, but more importantly one or more local non-governmental organisation (ngo) which works to promote girls' education, say, or women's rights in general.
- this is important because it wouldn't be me going to all these turkish towns and promoting gender-responsive budgeting (as it is called) within finance and education departments. the vast majority of our projects are implemented by partner organisations, so having identified the problem and the type of intervention which might work, i would then search for organisations which might be interested in undertaking such work, in collaboration. to cut it short, we would develop the project together, apply for funding to a project approval committee (pac) and the partners (ngos, but also governmental organisations and others) would implement the whole deal. there is obviously a lot more detail to it than that, but it serves as an overview.

- i am particularly interested in sexual and reproductive health and rights, so it might be that i would focus on this particular area of education. again, i would begin by seeking organisations in turkey which work in related areas, and get in contact, talk to them to get a better idea of needs and capacity for action, develop a proposal and budget, apply for funding etc.
- the proposal, a project document so-called, would be a detailed workplan, beginning with a justification related to the goals we have as an organisation, laying out a set of objectives we want to achieve in the project and how we would measure these/determine their success, include more and less specific activities to be completed, and budget the whole thing (about which i have no clue).

there are other things we do - from funding very specific pieces of research in areas where data would be useful, to supporting translation of the Beijing Platform for Action into Serbian and Albanian, to encouraging and facilitating networking among gender equality advocates who share a region.

through my operational and administrative support, proofreading, crisis management, buying biscuits and generally being there to help when needed, i have some knowledge a lot of the work that goes on (also because i am here to learn!). another of my projects is the organisation of a series of lectures on gender issues for students at bratislava universities. but that's stalled for the minute while various people are on holiday.

so that's an outline of what i/we do. i'm not doing much, it seems, but i figure most of what happens to change any situation is little people doing little things. any questions answered more or less satisfactorily. as for why, the simple reason is because gender inequality and the situation of women compared to that of men makes me angry often. maybe more angry than anything else. i don't know. there are numerous examples in all societies, and i don't know in what country or area of women's rights i will end up working, whether i won't move into the sexual and reproductive health-rights area, or indeed whether i'll be doing anything at all related in four, twenty-four or 124 months' time. but that's all then, and the above is now.


right now, however, i am sitting in my kitchen having polished off a christ-what-do-i-have? dinner of lentils, onions, peppers and slovak "english bacon". the soundtrack is the mega-chill cd sam made for me last christmas. nice bit of dalek right there. the pepper has ended up burning my lips and nostril, so i will be awake for a while yet i daresay. prior to the thrown together meal, robert and i saw the budapest orchestra playing a mass in b minor at a concert hall near the river. one half of the hall liked it very much - i kid you not, the ovation was standing from the left side, and sitting from the right. lopsided acoustics, i suppose. being a mass, it was all kyrie eleison-spiritus sanctus-agnus dei or what have you over and over. what with whole claims to universal truth and omnipotence that goes with this sort of music, i thought it high time that someone write a maths in b minor, repeating ad nauseum that e to the i pi minus one equals zero, or even the inchworm song. and more classical music should be performed in thurston road industrial estate and other unlikely places - it needn't just be popular music which gets reinvented by the space it's played in.

robert told me something interesting and potentially important on a decades timescale, which since i am composing this without an internet connection i'll have to look up another time. he said that last week an islamic scholar in cairo said that smoking during ramadan was not forbidden, because it didn't exist at the time the koran was written. i had understood that the door to ishqabat - the ability to evaluate and reinterpret koranic teaching - was closed in the fifteenth century or so, but i'm unsure whether this includes hermeneutic consideration of how the laws laid down are applied today (hermeneutic, to do with how a text was viewed by its author and what was meant).

as with human rights law, say, some islamic scholars take the view that islamic law is 'living' to some degree - that its requirements may change over time. (to give a human rights example, article 2 of the european convention protects the right to life. this has come over time to mean more than just your government not killing you to include your government having to take resonable measures to ensure your safety and being required also to adequately investigate deaths (i'll be well impressed if i can remember the cases...).) other, more conservative scholars view the door to ishqabat as firmly closed. if something couldn't be foreseen by those who wrote the koran, and has become part of accepted islamic teaching since the fifteenth century (such as not smoking during ramadan, say - i'm guessing that since tobacco came east with columbus, there wasn't much chance for it to be banned), then reinterpretation must be sanctioned and there is scope for accepted islamic laws to loosen and adapt over time; if, on the other hand, the smoking ban is taken as something which now falls outside of the requirements of islamic law, that prompts the question of what else wasn't foreseen by those who wrote the koran? how do changed socio-economic circumstances affect the laws - does a law on divorce stand because marriage could be foreseen, or is the form of that law specific to the time it was written and therefore not necessarily applicable now?

i said 'decades timescale' before, because these may not be questions which will be generally asked, let alone answered, for a while. in the meantime, more important determinants of people's particular pieties and behaviours such as political and economic situations or access to information will change the contexts - in cairo, in birmingham, in jakarta - where these religious laws are being applied. for now, it's impressive that someone has said this, and hopefully it will prompt further discussion and reflection on the role of islam in people's lives, societies and the world. in this case it happens to be islam, but reflection and self-evaluation are good things for all religions and ideologies, including, of course, that of we women's rights demagogues.

i bid you goodnight, and salam.