The warning didn’t reduce girls’ sexual activity, but they did end up sleeping with boyfriends their own age rather than with older men. The boys were more likely to use condoms—apparently because they were shaken by learning from the school presentation that teenage girls were much more likely than teenage boys to have HIV. This simple program was a huge success: It cost less than $1 per student, and a pregnancy could be averted for only $91. It’s also a reminder of the need for relentless empiricism in developing policies. Conservatives, who have presumed that the key to preventing AIDS is abstinence-only education, and liberals, who have focused on distribution of condoms, should both note that the intervention that has tested most cost-effective in Africa is neither.
Religious conservatives have fought against condom distribution and battled funding for UNFPA, but they have also saved lives in vast numbers by underwriting and operating clinics in some of the neediest parts of Africa and Asia. When you travel in the poorest countries in Africa, you repeatedly find diplomats, UN staff, and aid organizations in the capitals or big cities. And then you go to the remote villages and towns where Western help is most needed, and aid workers are suddenly scarce. Doctors Without Borders works heroically in remote areas, and so do some other secular groups. But the people you almost inevitably encounter are the missionary doctors and church-sponsored aid workers.
Nick’s plane once crashed while he was flying into central Congo, so he decided to drive out. In nearly a week of traversing a vast stretch of this war-torn country, the only foreign presence he encountered was two Catholic missions. The priest in one had just died of malaria, but the other mission was run by an Italian priest who distributed food and clothing and tried to keep a clinic going in the middle of a civil war.
Likewise, Catholic Relief Services fights poverty all over the world—not least by supporting Sunitha’s shelter for former prostitutes in India. All told, some 25 percent of AIDS care worldwide is provided by church-related groups. “In most of Africa, these are the cornerstone of the health system,” Dr. Helene Gayle, the head of CARE, said of the Catholic-run clinics. “In some countries, they serve more people than the government health system.”
Moreover, the Catholic Church as a whole has always been much more sympathetic to condoms than the Vatican has been. Local priests and nuns often ignore Rome and quietly do what they can to save parishioners. In Sonsonate, in the poor southwestern part of El Salvador, the Catholic hospital advises women about IUDs and the Pill, and urges them to use condoms to protect themselves from AIDS. “The bishop is in San Salvador and never comes here,” explained Dr. Martha Alica De Regalada. “So we never get in trouble.” Nor was she worried that she would get into trouble for being quoted speaking so frankly.
Missionaries have been running indispensable health and education networks in some of the poorest countries for decades, and it would be enormously beneficial to bring their schools and clinics into a global movement to empower women and girls. Those missionaries have invaluable on-the-ground experience. Aid workers and diplomats come and go, but missionaries burrow into a society, learn the local language, send their children to local schools, sometimes stay for life. True, some missionaries are hypocritical or sanctimonious—just like any group of people—but many others are like Harper McConnell at the hospital in Congo, struggling to act on a gospel of social justice as well as individual morality.
If there is to be a successful movement on behalf of women in poor countries, it will have to bridge the God Gulf. Secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause. That’s what happened two centuries ago in the abolitionist movement, when liberal deists and conservative evangelicals joined forces to overthrow slavery. And it’s the only way to muster the political will to get now-invisible women onto the international agenda.
It is particularly crucial to incorporate Pentecostalism into a movement for women’s rights around the globe, because it is gaining ground more quickly than any other faith, especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The church with the largest Sunday attendance in all of Europe is now a Pentecostal megachurch in Kiev, Ukraine, founded in 1994 by a charismatic Nigerian, Sunday Adelaja. One person in ten is now a Pentecostal, according to the highest estimates; those estimates may be exaggerated several-fold, but there’s no doubt about Pentecostalism’s spread throughout poor countries. One reason for that is the suggestion made by some of its churches that God will reward adherents with riches in this life. Some also teach variations of faith-healing or claim that Jesus will protect its followers from AIDS.
We thus regard the Pentecostal boom with some suspicion, but without doubt it also has a positive impact on the role of women. Pentecostal churches typically encourage all members of the congregation to speak up and preach during the service. So for the first time, many ordinary women find themselves exercising leadership and declaring their positions on moral and religious matters. On Sundays, women come together and exchange advice on how to apply community pressure to bring wayward husbands back into line. Just as important, Pentecostalism and other conservative evangelical denominations discourage drinking and adultery, and these are both practices that have caused tremendous hardship to African women in particular.
Until the late 1990s, conservative Christians were mostly a force for isolationism, worrying (as Jesse Helms put it) that foreign aid is “money down a rat hole.” But, under the influence of Franklin Graham (Billy Graham’s son, now head of the Samaritan’s Purse aid organization) and Senator Sam Brownback and many others, evangelicals and other conservative Christians have come to focus on issues like AIDS, sex trafficking, and poverty. Now the National Association of Evangelicals is an important force for humanitarian causes and foreign aid. It’s because of encouragement from evangelicals, including Michael Gerson, a former White House chief speech writer, that George W. Bush sponsored his presidential initiative to fight AIDS—the best single thing he ever did, arguably saving more than 9 million lives. Michael Horowitz, an agitator for humanitarian causes based at the Hudson Institute in Washington, has rallied religious conservatives to back an initiative to repair obstetric fistulas. These days bleeding-heart evangelicals are out in front alongside bleeding-heart liberals in fighting for aid money to tackle these problems, as well as malaria. That’s a landmark change from a decade or two ago.
“Poverty and disease just weren’t on my agenda,” Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback megachurch in California and author of The Purpose Driven Life, told us. “I missed the AIDS thing. I had no idea what the big deal was.” Then, in 2003, Warren went to South Africa to train pastors and found a small congregation in a tent, caring for twenty-five AIDS orphans. “I realized that they were doing more for the poor than my entire megachurch,” he said, with cheerful exaggeration. “It was like a knife in the heart.”
Since then Warren has galvanized his church to fight poverty and injustice in sixty-eight countries around the world. More than 7,500 members of the church have paid their own way to volunteer in poor countries—and once they see the poverty up close, they want to do more.
Liberals could emulate the willingness of many evangelicals to tithe—to donate 10 percent of their incomes each year to charity. The Index of Global Philanthropy calculates that U.S. religious organizations give $5.4 billion annually to developing countries, more than twice as much as is given by U.S. foundations. Arthur Brooks, an economist, has found that the one third of Americans who attend worship services at least once a week are “inarguably more charitable in every measurable way” than the two thirds who are less religious. Not only do they donate more, he says, but they also are more likely to volunteer their time for charities. Brooks does find, however, that while liberals are less generous with their own money, they are more likely to favor government funding of humanitarian causes.
Both groups might work harder to ensure that their charitable contributions truly go to the needy. Conservative Christians contribute very generousl
y to humanitarian causes, but a significant share of that money goes to build magnificent churches. Likewise, liberal contributions often go to elite universities or symphonies. These may be good causes, but they are not humanitarian. It would be good to see liberals and conservatives alike expand their range of giving so that more goes to help the truly needy.
It would also be useful if there were better mechanisms for people to donate time. The Peace Corps is a valuable program, but it requires an intimidating commitment of twenty-seven months, and the schedule does not follow the academic year to accommodate those who are trying to delay graduate school. Teach For America has generated enormous interest among public service-minded young people, but it is a domestic program. We need funding for Teach the World, an international version of Teach For America, to send young people abroad for a year, a term that would then be renewable. That would offer an important new channel of foreign assistance to support girls’ education in poor countries, and it would also offer young Americans a potentially life-changing encounter with the developing world.
Jane Roberts and Her 34 Million Friends
When George W. Bush announced early in his first administration that the United States would withhold all $34 million that had been allocated for the UNFPA, many people grumbled about it. But Jane Roberts, a retired French teacher in Redlands, California, grumbled herself into starting a movement. It began with a letter to the editor of her local paper, the San Bernardino Sun:
A week has passed since the Bush Administration decided to deny the $34 million voted by Congress for the United Nations Population Fund. Ho Hum, this is vacation time. Columnists have written about it and newspapers have printed editorials of lament. Ho Hum. More women die in childbirth in a few days than terrorism kills people in a year. Ho Hum. Some little girl is having her genitals cut with a cactus needle. Ho Hum, that’s just a cultural thing.
As an exercise in outraged democracy, would 34 million of my fellow citizens please join me in sending one dollar each to the US Committee for UNFPA? That would right a terrible wrong … and drown out the Ho Hums.
Jane is blue-eyed with short blond hair and carries a hint of the sixties in her dress and manner: a taste for African necklaces and simple clothing like black loafers. She was now on a mission. Jane contacted groups like the Sierra Club and League of Women Voters. After she saw a mention in the newspaper about the National Council of Women’s Organizations, she barraged the council with pestering phone calls and e-mails. A week later its board endorsed her effort.
At the same time, a grandmother in New Mexico named Lois Abraham was thinking along the same lines as Jane. She had read a column Nick had written from Khartoum, Sudan, about a teenage girl with an obstetric fistula, noting that the administration was now crippling one of the few organizations helping such girls. Lois angrily drafted a chain letter about the UNFPA and the funding cutoff. It ended:
Jane Roberts (courtesy of Jane Roberts)
If 34,000,000 American women send one dollar each to the UN Population Fund, we can help the Fund continue its “invaluable work” and at the same time confirm that providing family planning and reproductive health services to women who would otherwise have none is a humanitarian issue, not a political one.
PLEASE, NOW: Put a dollar, wrapped in a plain sheet of paper, in an envelope marked “34 Million Friends.” … Then mail it today. EVEN MORE IMPORTANT: Send this letter on to at least ten friends—more would be better!—who may join in this message.
Lois had cold-called the UNFPA and told an official she was sending out the e-mail. UNFPA didn’t have much of a public image and rarely received contributions.
“Some in UNFPA were doubtful about such a grassroots effort,” recalled Stirling Scruggs, a former senior official in the agency. “They thought it would last a few weeks and that the two women would tire and it would end quickly. That is, until bags of mail started piling up at UNFPA’s mail room.”
The deluge of dollar bills triggered by Lois and Jane soon caused a problem. UNFPA had pledged that all the money would go to programs, but somebody had to handle all the mail. At first, staff members devoted their lunch hours to opening envelopes. Then supporters of the U.S. Committee for UNFPA volunteered their help. Finally, the UN Foundation gave grants to hire staff to handle the mail.
Most of the money consisted of $1 bills from women—and some men—all across the country. Some sent larger amounts. “This $5 is in honor of the women in my life: my mother, my wife, my two daughters, and my granddaughter,” one man wrote. UNFPA informed Lois and Jane about each other, and they joined forces, formalizing their campaign as 34 Million Friends of UNFPA (www.34millionfriends.org). They began going on speaking tours, and the movement gained steam. People around the country were exasperated by the social conservatives’ campaigns against reproductive health—the defunding of UNFPA, the denunciations of condoms and comprehensive sex education, the attempts to cut off support for family planning by aid groups like Marie Stopes International—and they were eager to do something concrete to help. Sending in a dollar bill wasn’t a panacea, but it was very easy to do.
“No one can say I can’t give a dollar,” Jane noted. “We’re even getting donations from college students and high school students. You can take a stand for the women of the world for just the price of a soda.”
Both Ellen Goodman and Molly Ivins wrote columns praising Jane and Lois and their work, and donations reached two thousand a day. Jane traveled with UNFPA to Mali and Senegal—her first visit to Africa—and began speaking and campaigning nonstop.
“From that time on, I have given my life to this,” she told Sheryl. “I’m going to follow this to the ends of the earth to further this cause…. Forty women every minute seek unsafe abortions—to me this is just a crime against humanity.”
After President Obama announced in January 2009 that he would restore funding for UNFPA, the question arose: Is 34 Million Friends still necessary? Should it fade away? But by then the group started by two indignant women had raised a total of $4 million, and they saw vast needs remaining—so they decided to continue their work as a supplement to American government funding of UNFPA. “There is a huge unmet demand for family planning in the world today,” Jane said. “There is huge need for fistula prevention and treatment. With population pressures and environmental pressures, and economic pressures in much of the world, women will bear the brunt of gender-based violence even more than now. So for me 34 Million Friends is my work. It is my passion. I don’t think any cause is greater for the long term for people, the planet, and peace. So for me, on we go!”
CHAPTER NINE
Is Islam Misogynistic?
A majority of the dwellers of hell will be women, who curse too much and are ungrateful to their spouses.
—MUHAMMAD IMRAN, Ideal Woman in Islam
On Nick’s first trip to Afghanistan, he employed an interpreter who had studied English in university. He was a very brave man and seemed very modern until one particular discussion.
“My mother has never been to a doctor,” the interpreter said, “and she never will go.”
“Why not?” Nick asked.
“There are no female doctors here now, and I cannot allow her to go to a male doctor. That would be against Islam. And since my father died, I’m in charge of her. She cannot leave the house without my permission.”
“But what if your mother were dying, and the only way to save her would be to take her to a doctor?”
“That would be a terrible thing,” the interpreter said gravely. “I would mourn my mother.”
A politically incorrect point must be noted here. Of the countries where women are held back and subjected to systematic abuses such as honor killings and genital cutting, a very large proportion are predominantly Muslim. Most Muslims worldwide don’t believe in such practices, and some Christians do—but the fact remains that the countries where girls are cut, killed for honor, or kept out of school or the workplace typically have large
Muslim populations.
Hinduism has similar problems, not to mention vicious burnings of brides by their new families, but Hindu women in India are more autonomous and more likely to be educated than their Muslim women neighbors. To look at one broad gauge of well-being, of 128 countries rated by the World Economic Forum according to the status of women, 10 of the bottom 12 were majority Muslim. Yemen was in last place.
We tend to think of Latin America, with its legacy of machismo, as a man’s world. But Mexico and other Latin countries actually do pretty well at educating girls and keeping them alive. Most Latin nations have populations that are majority female. Maternity hospitals even in poor neighborhoods of South American cities such as Bogotá and Quito provide free prenatal care and delivery, because saving women’s lives is considered by society to be a priority.
In contrast, opinion polls underscore that Muslims in some countries just don’t believe in equality. Only 25 percent of Egyptians believe that a woman should have the right to become president. More than 34 percent of Moroccans approve of polygamy. Some 54 percent of Afghan women say that women should wear the burka outside the house. Conservative Muslims often side with the top religious authority in Saudi Arabia, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz, who declared in 2004: “Allowing women to mix with men is the root of every evil and catastrophe.”
Muslims sometimes note that such conservative attitudes have little to do with the Koran and arise from culture more than religion. That’s true: In these places, even religious minorities and irreligious people are often deeply repressive toward women. In Pakistan, we met a young woman from the Christian minority who insisted on choosing her own husband; infuriated at this breach of family honor, her brothers bickered over whether they should kill her or just sell her to a brothel. While they argued, she escaped. After the Taliban was ousted in Afghanistan, banditry spread and Amnesty International quoted an aid worker as saying: “During the Taliban era, if a woman went to market and showed an inch of flesh, she would have been flogged; now, she’s raped.” In short, often we blame a region’s religion when the oppresion instead may be rooted in its culture. Yet, that acknowledged, it’s also true that one reason religion is blamed is that it is often cited by the oppressors. In the Muslim world, for example, misogynists routinely quote Muhammad to justify themselves.
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