Women of Worth

I was in a women’s meeting where a Christian counselor spoke about self esteem. Basic stuff about how your self esteem is built and how people around you build you up or damage you.

The most telling part of the session came when she said she’d now tell us how she felt about us.
You could hear a pin drop. She went on to speak truth:
‘you are loved’
‘you are beautiful’
‘you are valuable’

It was so quiet in the room, the women were hanging on to her every word. And I realized how starved every woman was to hear this. And how little encouragement these ladies get. Life without encouragement is draining.

Speaking well of someone, giving a compliment or encouraging someone, those words can revive a worn out soul.
The self esteem of those around us depend on our words.

Privileged

I am so privileged. Us Western, educated, working women are so privileged.

An Afghan girl was betrothed to an older guy at age 4. This means that she was promised to him and this promise cannot be broken. He came for her when she was 12. Her father said she’s still too young and that he would have to wait until she was 17-18 years old.

He said he couldn’t wait and went to get another wife. But because the engagement agreement cannot be reversed, once this girl hit 17, she was given as a second wife to this guy.

She was lucky, because at least initially she was allowed to continue in school. But once she would get pregnant schooling would be over for her.

This true story is just one of millions. Hearing this story made me realize again how privileged I am with my freedom to choose.  It  pisses me off that Western Feminist women sit in their comfy chairs philosophizing how unequal they still are compared to men. (I think women will be able find something to complain about until the world ends.)  All the while  millions of women live in seriously tragic circumstances without choice, value,  freedom, education or basic health care.

If the Feminist movement really cared about women they would do something about that, instead picketing for their right to walk around unpestered in their underwear.

Hope for Truly Hopeless Women

“All the stories I know from Afghanistan seem to be sad stories,” said a a relief worker who’s lived there for almost a decade. In our recent conversation she shared how she has had to deal with co-workers being kidnapped and murdered. Not to mention the desperate situations many locals deal with. Death and fear are constant companions to those living in Kabul.

Research published this summer, stated that Afghanistan is the most dangerous country for women. Women face a one in 11 chance of  dying in child birth. Over two thirds of the women are illiterate. And most women, 70-80%, face forced marriages. On top of this there is the regular  physical, emotional and verbal abuse women endure by their husbands, mother-in-laws and other relatives. And to top this there is extreme poverty.

There is no reason for hope. A former relief worker has seen so much suffering among the women in Afghanistan, she is now struggling with serious depression herself. Another relief worker living in Afghanistan said, that even the smallest thing can give hope to an Afghan. When things are that bad, even a bit of good goes a long way.

A growing number of women living in such circumstances are suicidal. In fact self-immolation has become a national epidemic. Most often it is young women who set themselves on fire. Most survive having to live with terrible scars. To combat this problem the government has begun a campaign to teach safety in the kitchen to avoid genuine accidents. They also show the terrible injuries burnt women have to now suffer with and looks at domestic violence issues.

While Afghan women struggle to survive Western women complain about this or that minor detail in gaining equal rights with men. For some women competing with men has become an obsession. Nothing is ever enough. The life we lead in the West as women is so free compared to millions of women who live in truly unequal circumstances. They are not even equal in their right to exist as human beings with the rest of the world, compared to both women and men. Maybe we should do something about that first, before we complain about the 5%  difference in his and hers paycheck.

No Ring, No Tears?

A pop star declared how happy she is with her much-younger-boyfriend. In the same breath she vowed never again to get married.

It is the irony I see in many people’s lives who’ve been burnt by divorce. The myth is, if you refrain from getting married, you can’t get divorced – and heartbroken. The irony is, that if you live in a marriage-like-situation emotionally the break-up will be as bad as a divorce.

Just without the paperwork.

When you take the leap of faith and make a serious commitment in marriage you close the exit door. It is harder to just get up and leave. The embarrassment of letting down the 200 people who witnessed your vows, the deep dissatisfaction that comes with failure, the complication of owning cars, houses not to mention the custody of kids. All of this is glue that in the end makes you work harder at the marriage and at staying together.

So, ironically the casual, loose relationships intended to just be fun and no heartbreak work exactly for the opposite effect. They are easy to walk away from for petty reasons, whereas marriage is hard to walk away from.

It is the flawed logic of no-ring-no-tears, that is the cause of much heartache and severely complicated networks of ex-partners.

President’s Wife Divorces For Power

The first lady of Guatemala is “leaving a loving marriage” in order to run for president. According to Guatemala’s constitution president’s close relatives aren’t allowed to run for president. Therefore the teary-eyed wife says she’s “divorcing to marry her people”. Oh wow. The lady is tired of bossing the hubby and will go for it all.

Sounds like one of those stories where “God said” you should leave your wife and get married to someone else.

Fortunately God isn’t schizophrenic, saying one thing in the Bible and whispering another into your ear.

Dressed As a Boy, An Afghan Girl Has Freedom

Boys are prized and girls despised in the Afghan society. When you give birth to a girl the family weeps over your “failure” to produce a boy. In families with only daughters it is somewhat common to dress a girl as a boy, bacha posh, to gain stature in the eyes of others. Guests won’t have to feel sorry for your family anymore.

In a New York Times article several families with girl-boys are interviewed. The little “boy” has her hair cut short and wears boys clothes. He/she has the freedom to work, help out in the family store for example, run errands, escort his/her sisters in public places, study further and so on. It is common that when the bacha posh reaches puberty he/she will return to being a girl and her marriage will be arranged. When you have lived as a boy through your childhood and then suddenly are expected to be a girl, it can be a huge challenge. Many of the ladies in their 3o´s who have been bacha posh remember those days as the high light of their lives.The apparent reason being; having had more freedom as a boy.

How does this kind of a practice influence a person’s identity? If you’re a girl, grown up as a boy and then changed back to a girl, a woman – how can you have a healthy female identity? In a culture where women are truly ill-treated, being dressed up as a boy is understandable. Interestingly enough in this article it was the wife’s idea to dress up their girl as a boy.

Only men do not need to be educated on the value of women. Women themselves need to understand their value and beauty as women. Easier said than done.

World Population Explosion or Extinction?

We believe certain things are true because a scientist or a textbook said so. We don’t even think to question these “truths”. Population explosion is one of these. Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s we were told how there was a time bomb ticking in rapid population growth and that the world wouldn’t be able to feed all of us. For some reason these doomsday discussions have fallen silent in recent years.

Ironically, this year is the year for awareness about the “fact” that we are overcrowding the planet. This year seems to be also the year for different kinds of research results. The world’s population is aging quickly as a result of higher education for the masses, better living conditions and healthcare for the aging,  the rise in white collar jobs and women focusing on their careers instead of families even in the developing world. In Europe our birthrates are so low that we aren’t even replacing ourselves. In developing countries birthrates are slowing down significantly, even though the population is still growing.

Basically we cannot sustain our standard of living if we aren’t having more babies, who’d in turn work so that we can retire. The implications are fantastically huge. If it has taken a century for the population to age in the global north, the same development is taking place much faster in the global south.

It is going to be the hot topic. Demographic Winter is a documentary that explores the issue. A French study was recently publish on it. And the Economist wrote about in a special in this week’s issue.

Perhaps we are very short-sighted. We look at what is right in front of us, discarding the long term implications of our choices today. Our ideology of working hard to build a career, fame and money at the expense of family, leads to where? What might be a reasonable way for living today, might be simply dumb and self-centered in the long run. That is why we as Christians have a wider perspective on humanity from the Bible. There is nothing new under the sun after all.

Pissed Off By Feminists

Finland is perhaps the world’s most feminist country. Our president is a woman, over half or the ministers in the cabinet are women (highest in the world) and every woman works and gets government sponsored childcare. Women are more often educated than men and are very vocal in protecting and advancing their rights. Women’s rights have extended so far that a  men’s rights movement has sprung up!

Despite the position women hold in the Finnish society, many complain. Women count the pennies they are losing, because men get a “higher” salary. Women whine that there are still more male executives than female. Shockingly, still more women take maternity leave then men paternity leave! The victory march of feminists is far from over, they exclaim.

As a Finnish woman I can do what ever the heck I want to. And it pisses me off that women still complain here about not being equal, when the world is full of women who actually are ostracized and discriminated against.

A friend who works with a native group in Mexico writes about a girl who is the mother of one and in her second marriage at age 13. Another girl at age 22 looks like a 50-year old, is a mother of a small boy and her husband just left her for another woman.

Another friend works in Bangladesh, and she sees daily, how it is completely justified for a man to beat up his wife if the food is 2 minutes late or if he’s just had a bad day. Domestic violence is so pervasive in the society that even when people become Christians, they don’t understand why they should quit beating their wives. One believing man confessed to my friend after a Christian family conference, “I have been a bad man, a very bad man”. He had realized for the first time, that his wife is equal to him, in worth.

The world is full, full, of stories like these. Women truly suffer. And I can’t believe how self-absorbed, childish and petty we, as Western women can be. Let’s stop being ridicilous and do something for the women who honestly don’t believe they are worth a penny.

Mommy’s Dilemma: Career or Baby?

Christina Lamb, a British reporter, has covered stories from various war zones. For 20 years she has pulled her bulletproof vest out of the closet, once the call from the editor came.  Small Wars Permitting chronicles her travels from Pakistan to Brazil.

Her job takes her away from home, sometimes for weeks at a time. And she is the mother of a little boy. In the book she tells how the day after giving birth, she was back at work interviewing the former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet. When her boy was a few years old, she was in Iraq waiting for the war to start, for weeks.

Not many moms make such extreme calls, but the question of career or baby, remains. A recent Sunday Times article is about how fewer British women choose to have children over career. I think many women would like to have babies and to take care of them, but the society respects a career woman, not a mom. Ironically, it is pressure from other women more than men.

In America women are more free to choose to either stay at home or to work. In fact it is common for women to stay at home with their children. In Finland stay-at-home-mothers are extremely rare. Here mothers think they are at home for a long time, when they stay out of the work force for  2-3 years.

Independence and career are respected. (In fact 40% of Finnish households are now made up of people living alone.) Raising children should be left to the professionals. Ironically, mommies don’t think they are the best people in the world to take care of their kids.

Over and over again successful men say their biggest regret, is not spending enough time with their children. I wonder, how many women (and men) regret not having children, when they have to age alone. I wonder, if most women are satisfied with having chosen their career over their children.