by Aimee Molloy
A lot of her doubt stemmed from the confusing and often contradictory messages she had learned growing up in Danville, illinois, in the 1960s. While Molly’s mother, Ann, certainly believed in education and economic independence for women and was one of the few mothers Molly knew who worked after she and Diane started going to school, she’d also instilled in her girls her own ideas of the limited capabilities of women. “My mom lived with very specific social norms around gender,” Molly’s sister, Diane, recalls. “She wanted us to be good at school and economically independent, but she’d been shaped by the idea that girls have very clear limits. Women weren’t expected to be good in science or math, for instance. We could only hope to go so far.” Many of Molly’s female classmates at Danville High School (where the girls’ basketball team was relegated to playing half-court games) had the same idea. They seemed to believe that a girl’s best opportunity for happiness was to grow up and marry well. Even by the time Molly entered college, women were encouraged to pursue typically female jobs—as a secretary, social worker, or nurse—and with her interest in foreign languages and cultures, Molly had always believed her ultimate career choice was to become a translator. “Wouldn’t it be fun to be the wife of somebody doing something important and exciting, and with whom you could travel?” a friend once asked her. Molly didn’t think anything of this at the time and never would have dreamed of asking, “Well, why wouldn’t we be the ones with the important and exciting jobs?”
Which is why, in 1990, when she was confronted with the idea of starting her own organization, she was terrified. Despite her accomplishments, despite her incontrovertible intelligence and fierce sense of independence, she still hadn’t resolved these inner contradictions, and she deeply doubted her ability to lead an organization. As far as she understood it, her natural talents lay in her ability to bring innovative ways of learning to people who had never been to school, through creating materials and activities based on dance, theater, song, and storytelling. Those things she hadn’t had to learn. They were second nature to her. But the idea of managing and hiring staff, writing budgets, running an office … not only were these tasks that didn’t interest her, they were also skills she felt she didn’t have and didn’t want to spend time developing. She’d always considered herself to be the visionary, with decisions around day-to-day management best left to others. And she certainly didn’t have any role models to look to for guidance, women who successfully sat at the helm of their own organizations.
“Coming from a childhood where the women’s role was to support men, I didn’t even think it was possible for a woman to become a director of an NGO. But I had no other choice,” she says.
The UNICEF Senegal funding she’d been receiving was critical to her work, but according to UNICEF protocol, she needed to be part of an official organization in order for the funding to continue. Left with no other choice, she gathered every ounce of her courage and, in December 1990, returned to the United States to begin the process of incorporating her new organization, which she named Tostan to honor the memory of Cheikh Anta Diop. She would receive the documentation making Tostan an official NGO two months later, on February 7, 1991, the fifth anniversary of Cheikh Anta’s death. Over the next few months, she hired more than twenty staff members, every one of them an African. In fact, Molly would remain the only American on the Tostan staff for the next fifteen years.
By the time she received the call that Alaaji Njaay was ill, Tostan had been in operation for nearly one year. It had been a hectic and, at times, anxious period for Molly. The Tostan offices were located in three crowded rooms in the front part of the house where she and Zoé lived with their pet monkey, Zita, a dog named Dalva, a rabbit, and a swan they called Charlie, who spent most of his time in a small pond Molly had dug in the front yard. Every day, as Zoé (five at this time and fluent in English, French, and Wolof) gathered with her friends in the small yard, the house was abuzz with activity—dozens of people coming in and out for meetings, volunteers searching for a space to work, and others from the neighborhood who stopped by just in time for the communal lunch of fish and rice that Tostan provided each afternoon at one, served Senegalese style from a shared bowl on the floor. At the center of everything was Molly, forty-one years old, a single mom, the head of an NGO, and trying to manage it all on her own.
The program was doing well—Tostan classes were in place in forty-four villages—but Molly’s confidence was wavering. She struggled as a manager, often allowing her emotions to get the best of her and viewing her staff more as friends than employees. As her sister, Diane, remembers, “Molly has always been open and trusting of others—a characteristic, perhaps, of having been raised in a Midwest town at a time when there was little crime and she was free to play and wander throughout our neighborhood without many restrictions. She’d never given up her trusting nature, even in the face of interactions where her best interests were not in the mix.”
In his position with UNICEF Dakar, Samir Sobhy got to know Molly well. “She is a fantastic thinker,” he says. “She’s a true visionary with an incredible imagination and heart. But she’s also extremely emotional, which never helped her as a manager. She’d cry if she had to fire someone, and at times her emotions caused her to be a terrible judge of character.”
Molly is quick to admit her failings as a manager in these early days. “I felt as if I had just been thrown into things, and I never really owned the fact that I was the director,” she says. “If there was a mistake to be made, I can assure you that I likely made it.”
ALAAJI MUSTAAFA NJAAY WAS lying on a mattress in his hut when she arrived. One of his sons, Magueye, was sitting beside him.
“I’ll give you some time alone with him,” he said to Molly. As Magueye left, Molly sat down on the bed beside Alaaji. She took his gnarled hand, so thin that she could feel his bones. A light breeze drifted through the open window of his cluttered room, delivering the scents of smoky firewood and smoldering incense, which had been set on the verandah outside.
“I’m glad you came to see me,” Alaaji said in a voice just above a whisper. “I needed to speak with you.”
“What is it, baay?”
“I’m preparing to leave soon. I am not long for this life.”
“Don’t say that,” Molly said, feeling her throat tighten with his words.
“We all have our time, and mine is coming soon. But I want you to know, even after I am gone, I will be with you.” He paused, sinking farther into the thin, foam mattress, taking in a long, difficult breath. “You are trying to accomplish great things, but nothing is going to come easy for you. You will have problems along the way, many problems in life. You will need to experience these problems in order to get to a better place, the place you are meant to be.”
Molly gently fanned the air around his face with the soft end of her scarf.
“I have blessed you many, many times, and in the end, you will find your way,” he said. “Your work will be like electricity: it has a beginning, but no end. Continue to listen and learn from the people, and you will move forward together.” He closed his eyes and his breathing deepened. Molly gently placed his hand on the mattress, thinking he had fallen asleep, but after a few moments, he spoke again.
“Sukkéyna Njaay, things will become even more difficult for you. But always remember my words and never lose hope.” She leaned closer to hear him better. “Lu guddi gi yàgg yàgg, jent bi dina fenk,” he said. “However long the night, the sun will rise.”
13
Sañ-Sañi Doom Aadama (Human Rights)
Tostan continued to grow. By 1994, what had begun three years earlier in forty-four communities was now in place in more than three hundred and fifty villages, reaching fifteen thousand participants in five national languages. At the center of Tostan’s approach was the Community Empowerment Program (CEP)—a three-year curriculum with classes meeting three times a week. Initially the CEP covered six learning modules: problem-solving skills, health an
d hygiene, preventing child mortality caused by diarrhea or lack of vaccination, financial management of village projects, leadership and group dynamics, and, finally, conducting feasibility studies for proposed income-generating projects. Literacy and numeracy sessions were integrated into each module so that by the time the program was complete, participants had acquired basic reading and math skills to support the projects that arose from class discussions and decisions.
From the beginning, Tostan’s philosophy was in stark contrast to the authoritarian pedagogy prevalent in traditional school systems in Senegal. Teachers in Tostan were called “facilitators” and students “participants.” Almost always of the same ethnic group as the participants, facilitators—all of whom were required to have at least four years of primary school or be literate in national languages—were trained to unlearn the typical idea of teacher as “master” and student as passive recipient. Young men and women flocked to apply for the positions, and once hired, they lived in the villages in which they taught, used the language of the villagers, and earned the same salary as other literacy teachers in the country, approximately fifty dollars a month. All villages participating in the CEP agreed to provide housing for the facilitator and a place for the classes to meet. They also agreed to establish a Community Management Committee, comprised of seventeen members—at least half of them women—who would coordinate activities with the class and manage any development projects started by participants.
According to several external evaluations, the Tostan classes were successful in teaching villagers to read and write and to implement and manage their own projects. The rate of vaccination increased, and participants were found to have a better understanding of the causes, consequences, and preventative measures of the most common childhood illnesses. Participants were also able to apply problem-solving methods to resolve real issues affecting their villages and initiate changes in the dynamics of their communities. Many participants reported an increased sense of self-confidence, greater participation in community activities, and a greater ability to assume responsibility. In 1993, just two years after Tostan classes were established, UNESCO selected the organization as “one of the most innovative nonformal education programs in the world.”
Due to the early success of the program, Molly was eager to further expand Tostan’s offerings, and in 1994 she received funding through the American Jewish World Service (AJWS), a New York—based social justice organization, to develop a new module on early childhood development. This seventh module would be implemented in villages that had already completed the eighteen-month CEP, offering information specifically designed to help women understand how to improve the health and development of their children.
Before writing the module, Molly and five Senegalese staff members—all women—embarked on an intensive period of participatory research, interviewing thousands of women throughout rural Senegal in five national languages. Their aim was to gain an understanding of the types of information women wanted to know about the health and well-being of their children, which would form the cornerstone of the new module. But what Molly came to discover through this research was something she hadn’t expected. While women were interested in learning more about the health of their children, they felt they first required knowledge about something else: their own health.
Perhaps it was because many of the women being interviewed had completed the Tostan program and had, through that experience, grown more accustomed to speaking their minds and sharing their honest opinions, but Molly and the other researchers were stunned, and often moved to tears, by the stories women shared about their health problems—problems, Molly knew, they had likely never publicly discussed before.
“They talked about how much violence they endured, often as part of their daily existence,” Molly explains. “And not just physical violence at the hands of their husbands—which was certainly a common complaint—but violence that came in many other forms: Being ignored by their husbands. Not being given enough money to buy food for their children. The long and strenuous work days, and the toll they felt this took on their health.”
They also shared how little they understood about the workings of their bodies, especially when it came to reproductive health. They didn’t know about family planning or menstruation—when it started and why or when it stopped. In one local language, the word for menopause is translated as “getting down from the bed” and, as women had come to understand, to stop menstruating often marked the time in a woman’s life when her husband stopped having sex with her and took a younger wife. The women had never been taught about healthy sexuality, didn’t understand anatomy, and had never seen pictures of sexual organs. Many admitted they wanted to be able to better educate their daughters about these issues, but how could they when they didn’t understand their own bodies, when they knew so little themselves?
Without this knowledge, they faced problems when accessing health care, and it was the stories around these experiences that upset Molly the most. Women shyly confessed that when they went to the health center—often having to walk an entire day to get there, sometimes even being transported on the back of a bicycle or, if they were very ill, carried there on a stretcher—they were often treated very poorly.
One young woman named Soxna from a village in northern Senegal explained that soon after her husband returned after a two-month visit to Dakar, she began to experience “Itching and pain down below.” When she finally decided to be examined at the health center, the doctor looked at her disapprovingly and questioned if she had been unfaithful to her husband. “I will never go to a health center again,” Soxna said. “It is too humiliating.”
Issues around childbirth were particularly jarring. Women were culturally forbidden from crying out or complaining during childbirth and would often be hit by a midwife for doing so. Molly thought back to her own labor with Zoé—several painful hours without any pain medication—and was so shocked to hear this that she arranged to have a researcher spend time observing births at a public hospital. When the researcher reported back to Molly, she was very upset. She’d witnessed women being hit or ridiculed while in the midst of labor and had seen one particularly difficult birth, after which the doctor had to stitch the woman where she had torn. When he instructed the new mother to move down and she didn’t hear him, he jerked on the thread, causing the woman to cry out in pain. “Move down!” he yelled. The Tostan researcher returned to the hospital to further interview the midwives and doctors and was told that this behavior was justified and was even in a woman’s best interest. Were she anything but stoic during birth, a woman would lose the respect of her community.
Like Soxna, many women admitted that they had stopped seeking health care, believing it was simply better to try to manage their pain or illness—or that of their children—on their own or solely through the prayers or medicinal herbs of a traditional healer, rather than suffer the humiliation and shame to which they had been subjected. This reality was certainly reflected in some pretty stark statistics. In 1990, 750 out of every 100,000 women died in childbirth; and 139 out of every 1,000 children in Senegal died before the age of five, 70 before their first birthday.
After a full year of conducting these interviews, Molly became obsessed with trying to fully understand what was at the heart of what she was learning. While she’d once believed the main problem with health care in the villages was what she had witnessed during her previous work and her time living in Saam Njaay—mainly, how difficult it was to access and the costs associated with it—she was beginning to understand that the issue was far more complex.
“Women were so accustomed to being mistreated and so often the victims of discrimination that they didn’t believe they were worthy of any other type of treatment,” she says. “What they needed was not just closer hospitals or better trained medical workers, but a way of envisioning an alternative existence in which they understood their right to be treated with dignity. Only if they believed they were
entitled to better treatment could they demand it and bring an end to these harmful customs.”
She knew, also, that these behaviors and beliefs were so deeply entrenched in the culture that Tostan facilitators could not simply appear in a village and instruct women to demand better. She needed to find a strategy that would take into account the basis of the behavior, the social norms that perpetuated it—something that could do no less than shift a woman’s thinking, to help her begin to understand that all people, women included, had the legal and God-given right to dignity.
ON DECEMBER 10, 1948, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt stood before the United Nations General Assembly in her role as chairman of the Human Rights Commission, created two years earlier after the unspeakable atrocities committed during World War ii. Unlike the other members of the commission, Eleanor Roosevelt was considered neither a scholar nor an expert on international law, but with her deep commitment to human dignity for all people, a belief that every individual should be allowed the opportunity to flourish, and a distinctive intelligence and sense of compassion, she was chosen by the other delegates to serve as the chairman of the commission. For the next two years, she would expend an extraordinary amount of energy working toward the adoption of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, writing parts of the text herself, envisioning a document whose enduring principles would be perpetually recognized by all nations. “We stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind,” Mrs. Roosevelt stated in front of the General Assembly, as she submitted the final declaration for official review. “This declaration may well become the international Magna Carta for all men everywhere. We hope its proclamation by the General Assembly will be an event comparable to the [French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen] in 1789 and the adoption of the Bill of Rights by the people of the United States.” The declaration, which was adopted by the UN that day—an event Mrs. Roosevelt would later describe as one of the most important accomplishments of her life—stipulated that all people were legally entitled to full equality before the law and mandated that everyone, regardless of sex, had the right to property, that couples had the right to marry, and that people had the right to thought, conscience, and religion.