The Uncultured Project

Earlier this week, I got a letter from a young lady who had interned with an NGO in Bangladesh. With her permission, I am sharing excerpts of her email below:

I’m a female Canadian who spent a summer in Dhaka and it took me over 2 years to regain my ability to think and function like the typical North American female. Even still, it’s a challenge.

Your youtube videos on Eve Teasing & Purdah, especially the conversation with Nirjhar, were all too familiar.  No one prepared me for this aspect of my trip to “volunteer/intern” for [OMITTED] in Dhaka.  I knew I was going to a largely Islamic nation, with a great deal of modesty expectations for females.  I had no idea that because I was young (21), unmarried, and female, (and the coveted white-skinned!), that [OMITTED] would pretty much hide me away in a room for the duration of my 90 day visa because it was too much of a hassle to escort (felt like babysit) me around to go anywhere at all, and it seemed as though they also somehow considered me incapable of doing anything.  At the end of my stay in Dhaka (which felt like a lifetime spending 80% of it in a single room), I was told to come back someday after I was married and maybe they would have work for me.

I returned to [OMITTED] being unable to go out in public places without this overwhelming fear of men staring at me, with vivid memories of males pointing and talking about me in words I couldn’t understand but could sense were not exactly kind-hearted, and taking millions of photos of me with their mobiles. I was unable to bare my shoulders or ankles. To this day, I still wear scarves 75% of the time to add an extra layer of coverage to my front because I otherwise feel so incredibly indecent and ashamed. It is a constant battle to look males in the eye when I talk to them. It took over a year before I actually felt safe while going out after sundown by myself.

The Dhaka experience was incredibly… oppressive. It killed my heart to know that Bangladeshi women live through even worse every single day of their lives. I wish I knew of something I could do. I would go back if I had some sense that I could be of any use; but the result of my last trip gave me the impression that my presence is only a burden and therefore not wanted, only my money. Which as a student, I still have very little of.  So in the meantime I fund a Kiva loan every month, am slowly finishing my education, and ultimately aspire to get a decent enough job so I can give half my money away to the most respectable NGOs/foreign aid organizations I can find. But this plan leaves me feeling like I’m copping out, and just handing over money for other people to do the hands-on work.

Needless to say, I have more respect for Nirjhar the aid worker than words can describe.  And I hope and pray that maybe someday I, too, will have even a small portion of the courage that she has.

I asked for her permission to post this letter because, while I am sure there are tons of women who have had great experiences interning in Bangladesh, this is by no means an outlier.

There is a lot I like about Bangladeshi culture and tradition. For example, I believe local non-NGO ways and approaches to helping the poor are just as valid (if not more so) than foreign institutional and professional methods.

But not every facet of Bangladeshi culture, habits, and tradition need to persist. And this is a prime example.

P.S. Check out my friend (and personal hero) Anika Rabbani. As a guy, I will never fully understand the kind of hurdles she faces in her job.

My dad probably forgets saying this – but I never did. Years back, he confessed to me that one of the reasons he left Bangladesh and settled elsewhere is because he never wanted my mother to be mistreated. Until I heard what these women had to say, I never knew how real my dad’s concern was:

Eve teasing is a euphemism to describe forms of verbal and physical abuse by men against women. Verbally it can range from simple cat calls and overzealous wooing to really nasty and sexually explicit and derogatory comments. Physically it can range from grabbing a girl’s hand to groping and molesting them in public.

What got me is that – despite this being well known amongst aid and development professionals – no one has really done a decent job of covering this issue on YouTube or other “social media”. I don’t mean to say there aren’t videos with tons of views about this issue.

But most of what is online is usually G-rated re-enactments of eve teasing which make it seem like childish flirting. There are also heavy handed PSAs by police and local media which makes it seem like it’s being treated with prejudice and zero-tolerance… which would be nice but doesn’t reflect reality.

Despite all these videos online about eve teasing, I really didn’t find one where women could just talk about this problem and share their opinions. And it’s not like Bangladeshi women are a homogeneous group – as you can see in the video – there is a diversity of thought on this problem.

Right now, this video has about 3,500 views. That may not seem like much but that’s nearly twice the views that UNICEF was able to gather on this issue over the past eight months. Maybe this issue won’t go viral – but at least I could give this issue a slightly bigger platform than it had yesterday.

Do you have 96 minutes to spare this Sunday afternoon? Want to learn about global economics and development? Then watch this video about Marilyn Waring:

You see, only a handful of decades ago, money for aid and development used to skew towards men (well… skew more than it is today). There were a few reasons for this.

Most of the studies on aid and development focused on income and income generation. By this measure, in most poor countries, men were the income earners. So aid and development was focused on what could help men earn more money (more education, better tools to work with, etc).

But what Marilyn Waring started pushing was the idea that a focus on money and income generation ignored women. Women, she argued, were working just as hard (if not harder) than men. Women were being overlooked because what they were doing (child care, food preparation, etc) wasn’t deemed income generating.

She argued that, if you measure things based on time spent working instead of income generated, you’d find a more accurate picture of what was going on. And, guess what? Women were working harder and longer than men were. In fact, in many villages, women (unlike men) were working virtually every waking hour.

Ms. Waring used this to make the case that helping women save time would ultimately help families earn more and pull families out of poverty. For example, women would often spend more than half a day preparing meals. With proper cooking equipment that time could be more than halved. The extra time could be used to let women earn their own income.

I thought I’d share this today because it’s an important reminder that we can invest heavily in studies on and research into poverty, aid, and development and still overlook major factors. I’m no Marilyn Waring, but this is what I feel is the case with what the poor are telling me about 1-to-1 help and overhead.

Many of the aid bloggers who have commented on my previous post (where I talk about charity overhead) insist that aid recipients don’t care whether overhead is covered by donations or through separate and distinct funding. This couldn’t be further from my experience.

When local villagers learn of the approach I’m doing they love it. Not only do they love it but they also compare it to more traditional forms of giving outside of the NGO-system. I wish I got a dime every time some villager, off-camera and just barely in earshot, would be talking to another saying (in Bengali) “for the first time, donations have been spent wisely”.

At the same time, I don’t deny that all the studies on aid recipient satisfaction may have no data on attitudes towards overhead (and whether or not overhead should be collected and raised separately). What I can say, as a sociologist, is that studies can overlook things. This is especially true depending on who’s counting.

Dr. Kathy Ward (University of Southern Illinois – Carbondale) on the roof of the Nari Jibon Project along with those involved with (and helped by) the project.

In this blog, I often mention Dr. Jeffrey Sachs. He was the inspiration that led me to start this project. But, as fate would have it, there has also been another brilliant American professor whose been an inspiration to me since I first heard of her. Her name is Dr. Kathy Ward and she’s a sociology professor at the University of Southern Illinois in Carbondale. I don’t talk about her often enough because… well… a grad student praising one of their favorite professors is just cliché now isn’t it?

But the fact of the matter is that there is a lot to laud about the work Dr. Ward has done here in Bangladesh through her non-profit called the Nari Jibon Project. And while more PR-savvy people in Dhaka seem to be able to market themselves as “the unsung hero of Dhaka” – I got a chance to meet the real McCoy.

All that and more after the jump.

Continue reading ‘What Would Kathy Do?’

Who is Benazir Bhutto and why is she someone who should be remembered even if you’ve never heard of her before? She was a politician and former Prime Minister of Pakistan. But more importantly, she was the first female leader of a Muslim country. She didn’t walk around in a burqa, cover her face, or get bullied/wiped/stoned by any man. In many respects, she was a catalyst for the emergence of progressive Muslim countries which were democratic, progressive, and respectful of both women and female leadership.

Now she’s dead.

And I can’t help but think that those who killed her did so because they hate democracy, progress, and don’t want to respect women or see another female as a leader of a Muslim country ever again.