Can the fate of the world depend on the fate of women?

There's a reason that three of the eight U.N. Millennium Goals specifically mention women: In regions where women's lives are the worst, changing their lives means changing the course of entire countries.

Check out this most elegant presentation of staggering data from Potentia Foundation, an organization we'll hear more from in the coming weeks: We live in a world where 1.2 billion people (that's four United States of Americas) live on less than $1 a day, and 11 million kids die each year before age 5. There are 4 million new HIV infections every year. One in three women will be beaten, raped, or killed each year, and 1 million girls will be forced to marry before they're 15 years old.

However: When a girl in a developing country receives six years of school, she cuts her risk of poverty by 60 percent. Her risk of HIV infection halves. She's less likely to be forced to marry, be sold into the sex trade, or stay with an abusive partner. Her children are 40 percent more likely to survive childhood. She's five times more likely to send her own kids to school.

See what I mean? You give a woman the means to change her life, and she ends up drastically changing the lives of everyone around her. Help her build herself up, and she'll build up her whole community. It's an incredibly effective -- not to mention compassionate and loving -- way to change the world.

For the next four weeks, we're going to be profiling people and organizations that are changing the lives of women around the world, pouring their energy and resources into the very core of our shared global quest to heal the world. We start with this interview with Kris Holloway, a former Peace Corps volunteer who wrote about her work with Monique Dembele, a Malian midwife who dramatically improved the health of the women she taught and cared for.

Later in the month, we'll tell you stories about groups like Women for Women International, one of the biggest changemakers on the scene, and about individuals like Lisa Shannon, who started with one small idea and created a massive, rippling change.

Today we're also kicking off HumanKind Challenge #2 (yes, you can definitely still donate a net!), listing concrete ways to help one woman at a time change her life so she can change the world. Tell us what you decide to do, and we'll post your stories. Let's see what's possible.

Here's Liz's interview with Kris Holloway, and a video Kris made.

Mali’s statistics, frankly, make me want to cry and then go find something unrelated to read so I can forget them: One in five children die before the age of 5, and the maternal mortality rate in this West African country is one in 12. Sure, you hear these numbers and feel the sharp longing to do something about it, but where do you even start before despair kicks in?

The answer is: You start where you are. For Monique Dembele, that meant starting in Nampossela, a village of 1,400 with no running water and no electricity. Monique, who had a sixth-grade education, got married as a teenager and was the mother of three by the time she was 24, had ideas about how to keep her fellow Malian women and their children from dying and getting sick. She became a midwife – the only woman in her village to hold a salaried job – in order to help them.

For Kris Holloway, starting where you are meant starting in Nampossela, too, where she was sent by the Peace Corps in 1989. She was supposed to serve as a natural resources manager there, but when she met Monique, she felt such a strong tug to help this vibrant, intelligent woman that she devoted her two-year assignment to working with the midwife instead.

Monique died in childbirth with her fifth child, but Kris, now living in the States with two children of her own (and her husband, John Bidwell, whom she met in the Peace Corps), and Monique’s family keep her work alive. Kris’s book about their story, “Monique and the Mango Rains,” is frank and open about Mali’s suffering, but it’s also brimming with the energy, possibility, and success that comes from not turning away from the desire to help, overwhelmed, but instead, willing that desire into action.

Kris works now for the Center for International Studies in Massachusetts and encourages U.S. college kids to become global citizens by working and living in other countries. She talked to HumanKind Media this fall, and after our conversation I found myself brimming with all the energy Monique inspires, too, excited about the incredible changes that can sweep through our lives when we, like Monique and Kris, ask what’s possible.

You joined the Peace Corps with the intention of making a difference. Did any part of your experience in Mali surprise you?

I really didn’t know the depth of sisterhood I would find there. At first I was shocked at how alone I felt and how different, and I think that propelled me into the relationship I had in Monique because she was sort of an outsider herself. And then it led me into this whole world of women and community life that I didn’t know would be so wonderful.

Also, as Americans we’re told, “Look, we’re the most powerful country in the world. It’s our job to help them.” But I was dependent on them. When I got sick, Monique took care of me. She showed me how to work with women. I wasn’t expecting that reciprocity. And I feel that on the deepest level, that’s the path to peace, when we learn we have to depend on one another.

Monique had very few resources but she made huge changes in her community, didn’t she? Teaching women to make nutritious baby food, to rest after birth to reduce the risk of hemorrhage, to weigh their babies weekly to watch for signs of sickness and malnutrition.

I saw the power of that grassroots level change, just as we know people in our own communities here that are really making a difference. They’re never going to make the national news –  people who aren’t Oprah, who aren’t Bill Gates. They’re not the people we tend to idolize here. They’re not in it for any kind of glory, but they make a huge amount of difference.

I don’t know if I made a difference or not – the role that I was able to play was as a catalyst for some of Monique’s ideas. She had so many ideas of what she wanted to do, and there was nobody in that village who could say, “Yeah, that’s a great idea.”

There are thousands of women across West Africa who are doing the work. And we need to hear their stories and give them the small amount of resources that they need. And that’s true in the States, too.

I think that to work on capacity building – I think that’s the big thing that we can do as Americans, because we are so wealthy compared to other people. It’s not necessarily our ideas that we should be implementing. We should be asking, where are the community members on the ground who know what their communities need? Where are these women, and how do we help them achieve their dreams?

Monique had a sixth-grade education, she was betrothed to her husband at the age of 5, married at 17, and had lost one child by the age of 24. And yet she had so much hope for the world, and I learned everything about being a woman from her.

Monique died in childbirth 10 years after you met her – how is her family carrying on her work after founding Clinique Monique?

They can’t do births, they do prenatal and postnatal consultations and then the women have to go elsewhere to give birth.

We’ve raised $15,000 over the course of the year and have to raise $10,000 more. We’re also sending nine more kids to school this year. Somebody gave me three hundred bucks the other day and I said, “You’re sending Ramata to school!”

I don’t know how to save the world, but I know how to support Monique’s family and her work, so that’s where I’m focused. I don’t ever want to raise more than $25,000 a year. At $25,000 a year I can support this clinic and these children forever.

That’s also how I keep sane, because I can get overwhelmed as well, just at the amount of hurt, the lack of compassion. But if we all just do one thing and do it well and just tell the world about it, imagine!

You don’t have to do anything big. Just pick one thing, and it’s so much more than anyone else is doing.

Now that you're sharing Monique's story in this book, what kind of responses are you getting?

One thing I think is so great about storytelling is I found we all go into writing whatever we're writing, and we have our own vision and our heart energy in it. But we don't know, when somebody warms up to that, what energy is going to come out of it. You don't know what will sing to them.

It's been so amazing for me to get emails from people who read the book: "I lost a friend in childbirth, and this helped me realize that it's a human experience and I'm not alone." Stories can touch people in ways we can't predict, and I love that. It can just keep going. It doesn't have to just stop.

You don't have to just stop, either. To learn more about the book, or to support Clinique Monique, click here.

Comments

[Jenny]

Those are some amazing stats about women and education. I'm going to try to use them for my next What Counts column.