Program and Development Consultant Beth Turner, on her recent Pangea experience.
The coming of the fall season always makes me feel introspective. Maybe it is the coming of Thanksgiving or the obvious changing of the leaves and the weather that shows an obvious progression of time. In any case, this month I have been thinking a lot about my time working at The Pangea Network. I’ve been working with the passionate people who make up this network for almost two and half years now and this week, one thing in particular has been sticking out to me. It is the simple words, “I now know my rights as a woman.” These words echo in my ears as I work and as I catalogue pictures. I can almost hear the words being said by the women in the photograph.
I remember sitting in a classroom in Shimoni, Kenya on my first trip working with Pangea. It was probably noon as the hot midday sun scorched overhead and into the open windows of the dusty one-story school building. It was two days before yet another group of dozens of determined and excited women graduated from 6-months of Pangea Educational Training. To sum up the 6-months of work Pangea and the Women’s Cooperative had done together, Dorothy, Pangea’s Kenya Country Director went around the room having each woman stand and tell her story of what she learned and how she had changed. In this particular group, many of the women knew only a few words in English and my simple task was to go around the room with a recorder and document for our post-training evaluation.
One-by-one each woman stood, all dressed in beautifully colorful fabrics, and addressed the room. I tried to discretely hold a recorder in shot. One-by-one I saw women stand and say proudly and firmly to her teachers and peers that “I now know my rights as a woman.” Sometimes it would be the only English they would say, making it all the more poignant. Sometimes I would hear the phrase in Swahili, or Luo, or Arabic, and our team members would translate but each time it had the same effect on me. What did that mean, “I now know my rights as a woman?” How could something that seems so simple and intrinsic to me not be fully known here? I imagined what it must mean to learn what your human rights are, a part of Pangea curriculum. The women would go on to say how they now knew they had the right to own property and land. They would say how they now want to send their daughters to school and not marry them at a young age. They would look around the room at the other women with strength, as if something deep had changed inside of them. I now know my rights as a woman.
I cannot count how many times I’ve heard this phrase while traveling with Pangea. It is one of many small building blocks that illustrate the immense change that is happening on the ground in our programs. It is a deep change and empowerment. It’s the words coming from the individual women who are transformed and affected by education and knowledge. It is the individual women who stand to say the simple phrase “I now know my rights as a woman.”
