“In general,” say Kristoff and WuDunn, “the best clue to a nation’s growth and development potential is the status and role of women.”15 “Investment in girls’ education,” says Lawrence Summers, former chief economist of the World Bank, “may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world.”16
Women aren’t the problem. They are the solution.
The impact of the words reverberated through my thoughts and dreams for months, generating a strange mix of anger and hope that calcified into resolve. These are my sisters who are being abused, silenced, neglected, raped, and sold as slaves. These are my sisters who struggle each day to survive. These are my sisters who, if given the chance, can change the world.
Catholic activist Dorothy Day once said that the “greatest challenge of the day is how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us.”
I knew somewhere deep in my bones that a revolution was afoot, that the women of this earth were rising up, and that, in some way, great or small, I was going to be a part of it.
“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”
(LUKE 6:20–21)
The terrain of Cochabamba, Bolivia, is both beautiful and rugged. In the shadow of its snow-covered mountains lie hundreds of arid, rocky hills, where horses and cows perch as skillfully as mountain goats upon the steep slopes where people too make their homes. The high altitude—around 9,000 feet above sea level—leaves even the most skilled climbers breathless. It takes most children over an hour to walk the winding gravel roads to school, and women who live close enough to a health facility to deliver their babies there face a three-mile walk while in labor. The average income is $450 a year.
It’s tough land to farm, so many men leave their families to migrate to Santa Cruz in hopes of harvesting better crops and sending money home. This leaves women and children vulnerable to poverty, malnutrition, dangerous living, and sexual exploitation. Our Bolivian guide told us of children left behind to fend for themselves while their mothers work in the fields, only to fall prey to sexual abuses by relatives and neighbors. Sometimes the fathers return. Sometimes they never do. Sometimes the money suddenly stops coming.
Cinda, a soft-spoken woman with earnest eyes, who like most women in the country wears her long, black hair in two braids down her back, had three little girls and several acres of land to tend when her husband abandoned the family without warning. Although she had the skills she needed to harvest potatoes and beans, her planting time, yield, and variety were severely limited due to a lack of irrigation to her property. It would be difficult for her family to survive with only one adult tending the fields.
Cinda wasn’t the only one facing a water problem. She and her neighbors lived beneath the snow-capped mountain called Hanu. To catch the runoff from melted snow, residents had built a dam, but it was inefficient, providing water for only a few dozen families, and stirring up strife between neighbors desperate for its lifesaving waters. Fortunately, Cinda and her family are part of a World Vision ADP (area development program). Her three girls have sponsors, whose contributions are not only used to purchase school supplies and meals, but are also pooled together with other contributions to help solve community problems.
Partnering with local leaders, World Vision helped the community build and maintain a better dam—a beautiful reservoir of deep blue beneath Hanu, capable of providing irrigation to more than 170 families and stocked with fish for extra protein. The dam and irrigation system were designed by Bolivian engineers, built by local farmers, and are so well maintained by Cinda’s community that they have become self-sustaining, with no additional funding from World Vision necessary.
When I met Cinda, I was heaving from the steep climb through thin air to the mud hut she and her children called home. I’d arrived with three other bloggers, a translator, and Luciano, the World Vision staff member who oversaw the reservoir project. On our way up the hill, we passed a flock of sheep, a couple of llamas, and a very noisy pig—all of whom now belonged to Cinda. Luciano pointed to the small stream flowing through the property and explained it came from the Hanu dam. Three little girls ran out to greet us, a mix of curiosity and shyness on their faces.
“Before the water, I could only grow one kind of potato,” Cinda explained once we’d caught our breath. “Now I have three varieties, and beans too. I sell the extra at the market and use the money to buy sheep.”
The addition of livestock has dramatically improved Cinda’s standard of living. Her daughters are in school. She puts healthy food on the table each day. She can afford basic health care.
Cinda not only cares for her own property but for her mother’s property as well. She is known throughout the area as one of its most successful and generous farmers. Her mother, wrinkled and bent over and browned by the sun, stood behind Cinda and beamed, pride visible in her sunken eyes.
It was all I could do to keep myself from throwing my arms around Cinda and shouting, “Eshet chayil! Woman of valor!”
I met so many women of valor in Bolivia that there is not the space to tell their stories. Each morning, our team of eleven—most of us bloggers—would rise early and climb into our fifteen-passenger van to rumble up and down the steep gravel roads that lead to the isolated towns of rural Bolivia. There we would listen mostly, scribbling in our notepads the stories of mothers and fathers, grandparents and children, schoolteachers and aid workers, in hopes that they might inspire our readers to act. We learned about how poor Bolivian women are often forced to work in the potato fields from sunup to sundown, leaving their young children vulnerable to accident and exploitation; how alcoholism and drug abuse plague the teenage population, resulting in school dropouts and domestic abuse; how proper irrigation can turn a deflated community into a thriving one; and how guinea pigs offer more protein than beef and less fat than chicken, making them a highly valuable food source among Bolivia’s malnourished and a worthy income-producing venture for those who farm them.
In a town called Viloma, we met Marta. Now in her forties, Marta was once one of World Vision’s sponsored children. She grew up in a rural area west of Cochabamba, where most girls dropped out of school, married young, and worked in the fields to support their families. As soon as she hit puberty, Marta’s parents tried to convince her to marry a man from Viloma, but Marta loved school and begged to continue. With the help of a teacher, she escaped to the city, where she learned a trade by day and attended school at night.
“I did not oppose getting married and having children,” she told us, “but the women here work in the fields from the moment the sun rises to when it sets. They leave their little ones to play in dangerous places, and are exhausted each night. I wanted something different—for my future children and for myself.”
Marta became such a skilled seamstress that when she married and moved back to Viloma, the area development program sponsored by World Vision employed her. Now Marta manages ten other seamstresses—all mothers of sponsored children—who make blankets, purses, and satchels for World Vision as well as several local clients. The sewing station is located right next to the local school, so Marta can keep an eye on her three children. Mothers of younger children are allowed to care for their toddlers while they work, and their wages far surpass those they would earn by working in the fields.
When we visited the ADP, Marta’s sewing crew had just finished making more than two hundred colorful winter blankets to hand out to every sponsored child in Viloma, enough to fill two rooms, floor to ceiling! As Marta brought us from room to room, I grasped her hand in mine and told her that she reminded me of Tabitha from the Bible, the disciple who made clothing for orphans and widows.
Women aren’t the problem; they are the solution.
In a dusty neighborhood nearby, we met Elena. Though Elena’s home is located right in the
middle of a village outside of Cochabamba, to get there, we had to cross a muddy ravine by walking across a plank. A brood of chickens guarded the other side, clucking nervously at our arrival. We must have been a sight, inching our way across that narrow beam, most of us women with cameras and notepads and giant sunglasses. As soon as we crossed the ravine, we passed through a tall fence made of branches and brush, where we were greeted by the distinct stench of a pig farm, the unmistakable sound of oinks and squeals issuing from two rows of covered pig stalls, and giggles.
A six-year-old girl welcomed us at the gate and led us down the dusty path between the stalls. She served as our official guide through the small, enclosed family farm that, in the space of about fifteen hundred square feet, included more than thirty sows, twenty piglets, several chickens and a rooster, and a brand-new World Vision–sponsored guinea pig module housing dozens of guinea pigs and their babies. When we asked where she lived, she pointed to a heap of blankets and crude kitchen in one corner of the flimsy metal structure that covered the pig stalls.
In spite of the mess around her, the little girl wore a pristine plaid jumper over a light-pink shirt. Her face and hands were clean and her tennis shoes in good shape. No doubt this was the work of her mother, who emerged from the kitchen area to welcome us to her home.
Elena bears all the marks of rural poverty—a weathered face, missing teeth, a curved back—and yet she carries herself with the confidence and ease of a beautiful woman. With full lips, high cheekbones, and kind eyes, Elena is indeed beautiful, and she, too, had worn her best clothes that day, a light-blue top and dusty purple skirt, covered by an embroidered apron. She rested her hands affectionately on the little girl, named Arminda, and told us her story.
Five years before, Elena’s husband had suffered a minor stroke. He waited years before going to a doctor, and Elena had no idea what might be wrong with him. The farm fell into disrepair. Food became scarce. Like a quarter of the Bolivian population, the family began to suffer from malnutrition.
It was in the midst of all of this that Elena took Arminda in. Arminda had been abandoned by her own poverty-stricken family at the age of two, left to live on a street corner, where she ate dirty noodles off the ground. When Elena saw the little girl, her heart was moved with compassion. She took Arminda home with her, inquired after her family, and when Arminda’s mother said she didn’t want the child anymore, filed papers to officially adopt her.
When Arminda and her brothers got World Vision sponsors, the World Vision staff finally convinced Elena’s husband to see a doctor. His condition is improving, and with the addition of the guinea pig farm, the family hopes to earn enough money to build a house, a prospect that fills Elena’s eyes with hopeful tears. It would only cost around fifteen hundred dollars for Elena to have a real home.
When we marveled at her generosity for adopting Arminda despite her own difficult circumstances, Elena shrugged like it was nothing, looked down at Arminda, and smiled. In that moment I officially ran out of excuses for not caring for children in need.
Women aren’t the problem; they are the solution.
In the rural region of Colomi, we met a brave group of women who, together, changed their community’s esteem for children with special needs. When World Vision first began working in Colomi just two years ago, aid workers began by asking the women there what they most wanted to change about their community. The answer surprised the aid workers. The women said that, more than anything, they wanted to learn how to care for children with special needs.
In countries like Bolivia, children with special needs are so stigmatized and misunderstood that their mothers are often blamed for their illnesses.
“They told me that I must have been drinking while I carried the baby,” one mother told us, weeping openly. “But I was not drinking. I took care of my child, like any mother would. When he was born, I carried him on my back, even when I was working in the fields.”
“Some [special needs] children were being totally neglected,” another mother said. “They had to drag themselves across the floor because they could not walk. Some were simply left for dead.”
We heard stories of children who had been locked in rooms for weeks without being bathed or cared for, others who had been beaten nearly to death, and still more who had been abandoned because of fear and superstition.
Before World Vision came to Colomi, the mothers tried to organize. They formed a support group, where they exchanged stories and ideas, but they lacked basic information about how to care for their children with special needs and faced nearly constant ridicule from neighbors who said they were wasting their time.
So at these mothers’ request, the first major project undertaken by World Vision in Colomi was to establish a special needs center in its most populous community. There, children receive hearing aids, prosthetics, access to lifesaving surgery, and an education. Mothers gather each week to learn more about their children’s conditions and to offer support to one another. The facility still needs additional funding (when we were there, they had to lift children in wheelchairs up and down the stairs), but the sound of laughter echoes continually off the cement walls.
Women aren’t the problem; they are the solution.
In Bolivia I understood in a way I hadn’t before that women are capable of changing the world. Sometimes, all they need are the right tools. Cinda needed water. Marta need a sewing machine. Elena needed a few dozen guinea pigs. The women of Colomi needed only to be heard.
But I needed things too. I needed to be blessed by these women,
to be challenged by them, to be embraced and made uncomfortable by them.
What I love about the ministry of Jesus is that he identified the poor as blessed and the rich as needy . . . and then he went and ministered to them both. This, I think, is the difference between charity and justice. Justice means moving beyond the dichotomy between those who need and those who supply and confronting the frightening and beautiful reality that we desperately need one another.
That’s what I love about the Kingdom: For the poor, there is food. For the rich, there is joy. For all of us, there is grace.
READ MORE ONLINE:
“Greenlife”— http://rachelheldevans.com/greenlife
JUNIA, THE APOSTLE
It’s not what you call me, but what I answer to.
—AFRICAN PROVERB
Although her name appears just once in Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, Junia the Apostle is perhaps the most silenced woman of the Bible.
“Greet Andronicus and Junia,” Paul wrote in Romans 16:7, “my fellow Jews who have been in prison with me. They are outstanding among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was” (UPDATED NIV).
Junia is one of nine women mentioned by Paul in this correspondence. Others include Phoebe, a deacon; Priscilla, a teacher and church planter who along with her husband was described as “co-workers” in the Church (UPDATED NIV); Mary; Persis; Tryphena; and Tryphosa. But Junia stands out among all of these women because she is the first and only woman in Scripture to be explicitly identified as an apostle.
Apostles in the New Testament were disciples of Jesus devoted to spreading his teachings abroad. In addition to the original twelve apostles, the Bible speaks of apostles who served as traveling missionaries, teaching and leading the early church as it endured persecution and struggled through religious growing pains. Paul, Timothy, Barnabas Silas and Apollos were all apostles, as were Andronicus and Junia. The fourth-century bishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, said of Junia, “To be an apostle is something great. But to be outstanding among the apostles—just think what a wonderful song of praise that is! . . . Indeed how great the wisdom of this woman must have been that she was even deemed worthy of the title of apostle.”
But as time went on, the mention of a female apostle in Scripture became inconvenient for the increasingly hierarchal Church, so a medieval theologian found a creative solution to the problem: he turned Junia into a
man.17
Andronicus and Junia became Andronicus and Junias.
This was no small error. The masculine name Junias does not occur in a single inscription, letterhead, work of literature, or epitaph in the Greco-Roman world, while the feminine name Junia is everywhere. None of the Greek manuscripts suggests that a masculine form of this name should be used, and for the first thousand years of church history, Christian theologians ranging from Chrysostom to Origen to Jerome all identified the apostle Junia as a woman. But the myth caught on, especially after Martin Luther used Junias, rather than Junia, in his German translation of the Bible and identified the pair of former prisoners as male. To this day, one can find English translations of the Bible that turn the apostle Junia into a man.
How could this happen?
“The answer,” says Wheaton College professor Lynn Cohick, “lies in the [translation] committees’ convictions that a female apostle was unlikely, and so the name Junias—unknown throughout the Greco-Roman world—was created ex nihilo to match their presuppositions.” Or, as Bernadette Booten put it, “Because a woman could not have been an apostle, the woman who is here called an apostle could not have been a woman.”
Confronted with the mounting evidence against the claim that Junia was a man, some contemporary theologians have begun arguing that the phrase “outstanding among the apostles” should instead read “esteemed by the apostles,” thus allowing Junia to be female so long as she is not actually an apostle.
If Dan Brown needs inspiration for his next religious cover-up story, he need only look to the tale of Junia to see the lengths to which some will go to try and silence a strong woman.
August: Silence
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I Am Woman, Hear Me No More
A Year of Biblical Womanhood Page 25