Savitri Devi Mandal welcomes us into her home. We sit in a small courtyard surrounded by rooms. Mandal’s sari is vibrantly colourful. Her silver jewellery, part of the local culture, speak of her position as a married woman.
”I am very happy now, especially when working in our restaurant,” she says.
Mandal, 39, lives with her husband, her mother-in-law and her four children in the village of Gonarpura in the Terai region in southeast Nepal. In recent years, the life of the family has taken a major turn for the better.
Life in Gonarpura today is much the same as it has been for hundreds of years. The beautiful houses by the banks of the river are made of a mixture of clay and concrete. The corners of the houses are soft and round, their roofs are made of straw, and no cars would fit to drive on the narrow sand paths between the houses – not that anyone has a car here. Water comes from the well. Big haystacks in the field in front of the village provide food for the cows. Chicken and goats populate the yards.
The region is beautiful but poor. Terai is an underdeveloped region even on the scale of impoverished Nepal.
Savitri and Sankar are cooking, joined by son Saudi. Meat is not part of the restaurant’s menu, because it is too expensive.
Visibly proud, Mandal goes inside into one of the rooms for a gas cylinder and a small gas stove she got as entrepreneurial support that she drags out to show us. They helped her and her husband Sankar to start a ”restaurant.” They prepare and sell food at a small marketplace next to the village by a bridge crossing the river.
Something has changed in the village over the past few years – for the better. Finn Church Aid’s livelihood project has provided women with education and support for agriculture and small-scale entrepreneur activities, for example in the form of a cow or a sewing machine. New skills have brought wellbeing and decreased work migration to neighbouring country India.
”Forget about the dowry!”
”Now we can work together. My husband doesn’t have to leave home to look for work. We all have proper clothes. We are even able to put money away for saving. Our children are all in school, and we can afford to pay for school supplies and remedial education,” says Mandal, herself illiterate.
”Don’t save for the dowry yet, keep your daughter in school for as long as she wants to! It’s going to be long before she needs to marry,” advises Finn Church Aid’s project coordinator Arati Rayamajhi, when Mandal says her only concern is her daughter’s dowry. Daughter Laxmi is 13 years old.
Restaurant open every night
Savitri Devi and Sankar Mandal’s restaurant opens at four in the afternoon. 14-year-old son Chanchal transports the gas cylinder and stove to the marketplace with a push cart. Savitri and Sankar sit behind the stove, next to each other.
There are eggs on the table to make an omelette, with onions, tomatoes and chilli chopped as fillings.
They sit here every day until nine in the evening. ”However, I feel energised in the morning, because I don’t have to worry about something all the time anymore,” says Savitri Devi Mandal.
Text: Ulla Kärki
Photos: Veera Pitkänen
Peace is like an egg. It is delicate and fragile, but in the right conditions, it gives life.
Those are the wise words of the late Deka Ibrahim, who resolved clan conflicts in Wajir County in the early 90’s, and later became instrumental in the peace processes in North Eastern Kenya. She was my role model when I decided to start working for peace.
I developed a passion for peacebuilding coming from a predominantly Somali pastoralist community in North Eastern Kenya. The region experiences intractable violent conflicts within and between different clans and exacerbated by historical marginalisation, insecurity and violent extremism.
The need for peace building was dire, and my experience is that women have a lot to contribute in peace processes. However, in pastoralist communities, women are often excluded from them.
Despite my background, engagement and education, it has never been easy for me to build trust within the communities I worked in. Early in my career, I supported a local organization in a peace dialogue, but the clan and religious leaders did not accept me because I was a young single woman.
Not only men resist the involvement of women in peace processes. I once interviewed a local woman peacebuilder in Wajir County on women’s role in a peace process, and she looked at me and told me “why don’t you ask the men these questions before asking us, they know better, they represent us.”
That does not make sense. Women are a part of the conflict, just like men. In Kenya’s pastoralist areas, women contribute to promoting a culture of violence with the use of proverbs, poems and songs.
I currently work for FCA along the Kerio Valley, amongst the Pokot and Marakwet ethnic groups, where women sing and dance for young men after they return from cattle raiding.
I also vividly remember how women from one clan burned a dead body in Garissa town during a clan conflict. They were carrying machetes on the streets. It was shocking to see women at the forefront of violent clan conflict.
Through my years in this field, I have realized that involving women in peacebuilding requires a deep understanding of the cultural and religious context, and working closely with these communities to identify culturally suitable strategies to bring women on board.
With FCA, we have designed talking circles involving local women from the Pokot and Marakwet. Traditional mechanisms of conflict resolutions among communities are often most effective for building peace. Women have the power to prevent violent conflict for instance with the Leketio, a belt made of cowrie shells worn by women. The belt signifies fertility and motherhood.
When a woman removes the belt during violent conflict, the youth from both ethnic groups immediately stop fighting. This shows the immense role women can play in peacebuilding.
I try to oppose the resistance to involving women in peace processes by building trust and using strategies acceptable to the communities. I work closely with community leaders, as they are connectors to the society.
Deka Ibrahim was a mentor, who inspired me, and I hope in turn to inspire young women at the grassroots level to work for peace. This does not necessarily mean women need to get a seat in the council of elders. I believe there are vast opportunities for women to engage and claim their role in peace building at the local level. This in itself is a gradual process that we should be willing to take.
Aziza Maalim
The writer works for FCA Kenia office as a coordinator for peace work.
Learn more about FCA’s peace work here.
Women and girls learn to read and acquire new skills in the FCA/DCA project in two refugee camps in Bangladesh.
“I feel secure to work in the safe space for women and girls. I enjoy coming to this place and sharing with others,” says a refugee woman volunteering as a teacher. In Myanmar, she taught the national language Burmese and sewing.
Almost a million ethnic Rohingya now live in a cluster of camps in the Cox’s Bazar area in Bangladesh. They have fled Myanmar because of violence described in the recent UN report as mass murder and gang rape. According to the report, the intent of violence was genocide.
Most of the refugees are women and children. The situation of orphans and young women and girls in particular is very difficult.
”My dream is that the women and girls I teach could start to teach others. And that they could make a living for themselves.”
Support after violence
Education and livelihood opportunities are in short supply at the biggest refugee camp in the world. Especially education for young people is sorely needed.
A joint project by Finn Church Aid and DanChurchAid provides psychosocial support and education for women and adolescent girls who have experienced gender-based violence.
”Since the programme started we have reached 169 women and girls with basic literacy & numeracy lessons as well as 179 women and girls with life skills sessions, focusing on topics such as hygiene, nutrition and family planning. In addition, 765 women and girls have received psychosocial support, and our team has visited 1,050 families to tell them about the facilities and services aimed at women and girls,” says FCA education expert Petra Weissengruber who works at Cox’s Bazar.
Information sessions on hygiene, child marriage and disaster risk reduction have reached almost 1,400 women and girls. A questionnaire carried out at the beginning of the project revealed that there is a great deal of need and interest towards education. Also, there is a high number of women and girls that already have tailoring skills and reported that they would enjoy passing their skills on to other female refugees. The opportunity to do this has also been provided, and teaching has begun.
Conditions at the camp are harsh. People live in tiny shacks right next to one another.
”Fortunately, the monsoon rains have not been as hard this year as we feared. On the days it rains a lot, the education team can’t always make it to the camps. The rain that turns the roads at the refugee camps into mud obviously makes it difficult for the women and girls to reach the education facilities as well,” says Weissengruber.
Text: Ulla Kärki / Finn Church Aid
Photo: Tine Sletting Jakobsen / Dan Church Aid
Bunu Rai, 20, from Nepal, is training in Automobile Mechanics. There are very few female workers in the automobile industry in Nepal. But this is about to change.
“I want to change the perception of the society and the people. Women can do this work, even though it has been perceived to be only for men,” Bunu Rai says.
Finn Church Aid’s local partner organisation UCEP Nepal’s Sano Thimi Technical School in Bhaktapur near the capital Kathmandu has started to offer non-traditional vocational education for young women.
Rai has been learning a lot at the school and enjoyed her studies very much.
“When I’ve been studying and working with men, one thing I have learned is courage. I do not feel any awkwardness, I’m very happy. We students help each other.”
”Our society is patriarchal. I want change! I want women to be treated equally and have an equal place in the society.”
Rai says that in the past there was discrimination between daughters and sons in Nepali families. Often boys went to school and girls stayed home doing housework.
However, Rai’s parents always treated her and her sister and brother equally.
“My father used to work as a school helper. Perhaps he learned his good thinking partly from the school.”
At the Sano Thimi Technical School there are students from around the country, many living at the school hostel. Underprivileged youths such as youths from dalit or ex-bonder labour groups and youths from low economic background can get a scholarship for their studies.
After graduating, Bunu Rai wants to find a job or open her own workshop. In Sano Thimi, the training is followed by support to job placement or self-employment.
Text: Ulla Kärki
Photos: Veera Pitkänen
In the Palestinian regions, farming is one of the main sources of income for women, and a gateway to education for young people. Before Finn Church Aid’s (FCA) project, the people of Deir Ballout were on the brink of despair.
Cucumbers, okra, tomatoes, pumpkins, onions and plenty of grains. The fields spread out a long way to the left and right of the asphalt road leading to the village of Deir Ballout. A donkey is braying on 48-year-old Ibtisam Musa’s neighbour’s yard. It’s almost 11 AM, and around this time she usually prepares a meal.
”Normally I’m out in the field from 6 to 10 in the morning, and from 5 to 8 in the evening. When it’s this cloudy, though, the scorching sun doesn’t bother me,” shares Musa while doing some weeding.
Deir Ballout is called the bread basket of Salfit Governorate, home to 65,000 people. In addition to the crops, the farmers prepare and sell products such as couscous, honey, olive oil, cheese and za’atar spice blend.
However, the main product is Armenian cucumber, known among the locals as ‘snake cucumber’. According to Musa, everyone knows Deir Ballout for its snake cucumbers, and every year the village holds a festival to honour the plant.
”In the future, we’re also planning on trying to grow medicinal herbs,” says Musa.
For years, the farmers were unable to dream about the future. Before the collaboration with FCA that started in 2015, the villagers were desperate. Wild pigs had spread out in the area, and before long, destroyed crops were threatening to rob the locals of their work and self-sufficiency in food production.
”The wild pigs destroyed almost everything. Many people left their fields in search of other employment,” she says.
Deir Ballout is known as the bread basket of Salfit Governorate. Here, there’s a total of 1,2 km2 of fields, spreading out on each side of the road to the village. Photo Tatu Blomqvist
The ones to suffer firsthand were the women, who are in charge of most of the farming in the Palestinian regions. Musa is a member of a cooperative of 21 people, almost all of whom are women. Her income plummeted from over 7,000 euros a year to about 1,200 euros.
With support from FCA, the villagers solved the problem by building a fence around the fields last summer. The farmers returned, and one year on, the crop has been spared from the wild pigs. Musa’s income is returning to normal. She also praises the project itself for its effect on the community of 5,000 people.
”The building of the fence was carried out as a volunteer project. The success inspires the community to do more volunteer work, and it has increased our productivity”, says Musa.
With her income, Musa has paid for her children’s education. She has two sons and six daughters. Two of her children have graduated as engineers, one as a lawyer, and one as a teacher.
Musa has worked hard for her children’s education and earned the nickname “iron lady” from the other villagers.
”Our children are highly educated. Deir Ballout has produced doctors, ambassadors and members of parliament, working both here and abroad. It’s all thanks to our perseverance.”
Text: Erik Nyström, Photos: Tatu Blomqvist
Finn Church Aid has helped the village of Deir Ballout to build a fence. Thanks to the fence, the farmers’ income is returning to normal. Photo: Tatu Blomqvist
We have all heard it when the alleged perpetrator of a crime says “I want to make a phone call”. It seems the right thing to say when you have been accused of a crime and you need help from your parents, guardian or a lawyer. We have all got used to hearing these same words used in countless TV shows that we take it for granted.
Finn Church Aid and its partners the Rural Human Rights Activist Program (RHRAP) and the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia (AFELL) are embarking on a two year human rights project. The project is funded by the European Union, and it aims to monitor human rights violations in Liberian prisons and engage in proactive dialogue with authorities. As part of a comprehensive referral system, prisoners are given access to a telephone so that they can talk to their families, and those with issues of wrongful imprisonment can have access to lawyers.
That’s right access to a phone, a simple basic right!
Finn Church Aid and its partners will train Liberian police, prison guards, judges, lawyers and wardens and key people from communities on international human rights and prisoners’ rights standards. Beside the possibility to access phone privileges in the three target national prisons, prisoners will also enjoy pro bono legal assistance from selected lawyers to review their cases of incarceration.
Liberia in the past has gone through a brutal civil war and the latest Ebola epidemic has created a disorder of documentation of who is in prison and why. This practical and systematic project will give the Liberian authorities an overview if due process of incarceration has been followed.
The steps of incarceration should follow six basic steps. Complaint – arrest – court appearance – incarceration pre-trial – trial – release or detention.
According to RHRAP and AFELL, detainees have not been charged, have never seen a court, and have been put straight to jail by someone with power. Others have been on pre-trial detention for years without hope of seeing a court in the near future. This project will address the issue through a comprehensive approach, engaging the right people and institutions in finding long-lasting solutions.
The second part of the project is to strengthen the organisational capacities of partners to maximise their chances for international funding in the future and carry out quality work according to international standards.
Hoslo Jiwa
Country Director Liberia, Finn Church Aid
The project “Providing Access to Justice and Gender Sensitive Legal Awareness at Grassroots Level” contributes to enhance the rule of law and the respect of the fundamental human rights of the most vulnerable prisoners in Liberia, most often women and youth.
The project is implemented in Lofa, Bong and Nimba counties in Liberia in 2017–2018. It’s funded by the European Union – The European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR).
Delegation of the European Union to Liberia
EIDHR: The European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights
Project Fact Page