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.
* 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.
posted by chris at 11:46 AM
3 Comments:
At least, something about your actual job!
Why oh why Chris does it take three days for someone to email me back about something, or in fact, for anyone to do anything? What happened to providing up to date data instantaneously.
On the plus, a tiny quantity of Malawi gin is now enough to allow me and Anna to entirely forget a UN radio check -which happened last night. Whoops.
I spent a good deal of my birthday wading through that and it was pretty interesting.
You're just so god damn humane, its sickening (and also inspiring in equal measure.)
It is raining like fuck outside my window and I can only hope the water won't get in again. Alex is on his way to my house and I am stuck here waiting for Parcel Force to bring my birthday present (anytime from 8am to 7pm is a very stupid state of delivery affairs.) Alex want me to meet him at the station when he gets here but I have just realised that I can't if the parcel hasn't been delivered, I'm not waiting all this time just to miss it!
Why on earth winter had to wait till my birthday to come along, and to come along with such a blustery, thundery fury is beyond me. I think it may have something to do with the fundemental law that birthdays will never be as good as you hoped. I tend to ignore them all together, but the one year I try and do something and...
Well I'm sure it'll get better, alex is coming and he'll brighten up even the cloudiest day!?!? and then at 11.30pm Owain is coming along and the band will be reunited for a little bit...
it could be very good and the chemicals will no doubt make it all work... but it could be disasterous as Owain is bringing his girlfriend who is pretty anti-drugs and weirded out by the whole idea and alex is being funny about things (surprisingly) and Jen has a cold and so do I (but I don't care about mine)
Anyway everything seems like its so disasterous that it'll probably all go great!
x
recently seen on a bus in bratislava: pack of teenage lite-metallers (aluminum, perhaps) take up about twelve seats. oldish man gets on, and is offered her seat by the girl sitting mext to me. he refuses, instead launching into a semi-muted tirade against the state of bratislavan youth. i am interpreting all this though my babel fish. when everyone gets off at koliba, another old man makes some evidently ill-advised comment in the direction of one of these kids, who pushes him, the old man pushes back (this guy is properly old, frail and made of ashes, but plucky. and the first guy beats everyone else around to intervening, breaks it up, is deterrant enough and everyone parts in a flurry of slovak words i am far too christian to understand.
youthful tails somewhat betwen legs, nobody hurt, aggression made to look silly.
smoking on buses, or indeed using those crappy little mobile phone music player machines are dares to everyone around to object. it is not a matter of live and let live, it's a matter of i can do this and dare you to call my aggressive, masculine (if not male) bluff and risk an argument ( or getting stabbed, as has happened more than once in london). it's sad that it should be left to some brave indvidual. more often than not (and i'm not innocent of this by any means) the person brave enough to say something has to overcome the extra obstacle of knowing most likely nobody else will give any support. that's my experience in london, anyway. i'm sure it's better in less impersonal settings (how about sydney? or malawi?). nothing can really beat the superman moment when the overcoat comes off though. a good image. (funny how some examples of socail restriction are championed by the same people who decry them elsewhere...)
--
hazel, what can i say, i was prompted in part by your unveiled remark beneath the dilbert strip....
--
dave, it was lovely to talk to you on friday. i hope the come-down is alright. you are sickened only by yourself, although i daresay you are (rightly) bored by unglamourous good-doers (anna politkovskaya being an exception...). everyone is motivated by the same things beneath their specifics. nobody can be done without. it's sunny, i'm going outside.
Post a Comment
<< Home