by Jennie S. Bev
- USA / Indonesia -

• A man adds extra cuts to the lumps of meat ready for distribution to the less fortunate in the nearby community. 250g of red meat is a luxury for the poor in Jakarta. Photograph by Danumurthi Mahendra •

While homelessness is an ongoing and often stagnant issue in downtown San Francisco, 8,675 miles across the Pacific Ocean in Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, 23 million people live packed into 290 square miles - extreme poverty is an everyday sight. Amongst Jalan Thamrin skyscrapers, slums weave through the city with their cardboard huts, stinky sewers, and annual floods. The haves and have-nots live side-by-side, oftentimes even sharing the same wall. A few of the privileged dine at five-star hotels, while those selling cigarettes and magazines on foot must live with a mere $2 USD per day, or even less.

What a contrast. What a divided world we live in.

by Beena Sarwar
- Pakistan -

It was painful to think of Rehmat Shah Afridi on death row, haggard and ill.

I had worked with him at the English language daily paper he launched from Lahore in 1989, The Frontier Post, originally started from Peshawar, capital of his native North West Frontier Province (NWFP) in the mid-1980s. He was not highly educated but he had a liberal, progressive vision of independent media and had brought one of the country’s finest journalists, Aziz Siddiqui, on board as the editor.

• Rehmat Shah Afridi celebrates his release from prison with his sons. Photograph by Rahat Dar, The News on Sunday. •

Aziz Siddiqui had by then joined the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) as co-director along with his close friend and fellow journalist I.A. Rehman who was Director of HRCP. The organization was among those that protested Afridi’s arrest in 1999 on what most journalists believe to be trumped up charges of drug trafficking. After a district court on June 27, 2001 condemned Afridi to death by hanging, he spent the next three years on death row. There was sporadic news of him once he was convicted. One of his lawyers told me that he was terribly ill at one point and had lost much weight. The Lahore High Court on June 3, 2004 commuted his death sentence on the grounds that trafficking in hashish is not a capital crime. Still, he remained in Lahore’s notorious Kot Lakhpat Jail for nearly a decade, with courts periodically turning down his bail applications, pleas to move him to a prison in Peshawar closer to his family and appeals for proper medical care. He was finally released on bail in May this year.

by Nadia Gouy
- Morocco -

The results of the September 2007 elections were no landmark victory for female representation in the Moroccan legislature – apart from the 30 female lawmakers elected through a 2002-instituted quota system, only four women were able to squeak into the lower house. Yet, for a country that is determined to lead the Arab pack in gender equality, the executive is a good counterbalance. And the new government counts five female ministers along with two undersecretaries, accounting for 19.2 percent of the total ministerial posts – a percentage that earns Morocco the 39th rank, second to no other Arab country, in the 2008 Women in Politics Report jointly prepared by the United Nations and the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU).

• Anti-corruption crusader, Yasmina Badou has met with resistance by what many have referred to as her “inflexibility and refusal to negotiate” in her attempt to improve Morocco's health care system. Photograph by Houda Andaloussi. •

Just like any Moroccan, I took a deep interest in Yasmina’s proclaimed crusade for reforming the health sector. Born to a family that could pay the doctor’s bill in a city that has the lion’s share of clinics and hospitals, I was under the delusion that high maternal and infant mortality rates were ancient history. Yet, pursuing a Master’s in international development showed me the bitter reality. An ever-ailing health sector, all the more blighted by the flagrant inequalities between the up-to-date private clinics and hospitals and their dilapidated public counterparts, is a good enough reason for Morocco to rank 126th out of 177 countries according to the UNDP-commissioned Human Development Report 2007-08 – this time behind most Arab countries. Among the disquieting facts and figures: the number of physicians per 100,000 people stands at 51 with an extremely disproportionate concentration in the urban areas; among the poorest 20 percent, only 30 percent of births are attended by skilled health personnel compared to 95 percent among the richest 20 percent; the infant mortality rate stands at 62 per 1,000 live births against 24 for the richest 20 percent; and the mortality rate for five years and under stands at 74 per 1,000 infants compared to 26.

by Diane Solomon
- USA -

Like Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. before them, when Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez organized California’s exploited and marginalized farm workers into the United Farmworkers of America (UFW) in the 1960s they built a nonviolent movement that empowered poor and disenfranchised people to help themselves.

• Dolores Huerta, circa 1968. Photograph courtesy of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. •

During her career with the UFW, Huerta organized field strikes, directed boycotts, and negotiated and administered agreements. Huerta also was one of the first to speak out against pesticides that harm farm workers, consumers, and the environment. Five years ago she left the UFW and started the Dolores Huerta Foundation to teach community organizing. She still works as an advocate for farmworkers, whose pay and working conditions have worsened in recent years.

I spoke with Huerta at Mexican Heritage Plaza in San Jose, California.

by Afsana Rashid
– Indian-administered Kashmir -

While the world has progressed by leaps and bounds in technological advancement, the Kashmir valley remains rooted in cultural tradition. The state of Kashmir abounds in ancient literature, language, religion, arts, crafts, dance, and music. Its culture is steeped in story telling, philosophy and folklore, even when it comes to medicine. In the Kashmir valley there are hundreds of families who turn to faith healers for solutions to their problems, especially those with psychiatric issues. Researchers Dr. Mushtaq Ahmad Margoob, a leading psychiatrist of the valley, and Huda Mushtaq, point to the decades long conflict in Kashmir for the phenomenal increase in the region’s psychological problems.

“My family, including my children, treated me like a lunatic a few years back when I could not cope up with certain problems. Consequently, I tried many doctors, including psychiatrists, but nothing worked,” says Hajra, a woman in her mid-forties.

by Eva Sohlman
- Sweden -

In Haiti people eat cakes baked with mud for lack of flour. In Bangladesh, Indonesia and across Africa, riots are spreading among the hungry. And in the world’s richest country, the United States, the breadlines are growing.

• Photograph by Bruce Gilbert, courtesy of The Earth Institute. •

by Zubeida Mustafa
- Pakistan -

Anil is now a young man of 19, studying for his high school examinations at Bahria College. He is also working a summer job with a cell phone company to earn a few extra rupees for his family.

• Shabina (standing at left) and her first group of students at the original Garage School site. •

Coming from a poor family – his father works as a part-time cleaner – Anil’s chances of improving his life were indeed bleak until his mother sent him to Shabina. In a country that spends barely two percent of its GDP on education, Pakistan has only scarce resources to provide a decent education to 60 million or so children under 15; not all can hope to be educated. According to Pakistan’s 2007-2008 Economic Survey, only 57 percent of children (age 10 years and above) are enrolled in school.

by Emily Rose Herzlin
- USA -

On July 1st, the top post on the ID Project’s Blog proclaimed: No More Plastic Bags Y’all! We are going Back to the Sack!

Where’s your plastic bag stash? Everyone has one. It’s a kitchen cabinet or a drawer stuffed to the gills. It’s a corner of the hallway closet. Better yet, it’s a plastic bag filled with plastic bags. One New York City meditation center, The Interdependence Project (ID Project), has taken on the environmental issue of plastic bags as part of their ongoing effort to connect their meditation practice to their everyday lives. July 1st marked the start of their Low Impact Consumption Month and “Back to the Sack” initiative to eradicate plastic bag usage in New York City.

by Maria H. Lewytzkyj
- USA -

I keep a blog on MySpace devoted to coverage of the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan. By giving life to this blog, my initial goal was to bring together a network of people from civil society who would become involved and stay informed. Early on, I posted an op-ed about China's role in Darfur and how the world was more interested in technological advances than the worsening human conditions in Darfur. A few of my friends on MySpace showed interest. One turned it into a podcast, and another started to correspond with me regularly. Soon we were adding people to our blogs who were genuinely interested in what was happening in Darfur, and though they felt completely helpless, they still wanted to stay informed. My experience in keeping this blog demonstrates the advantage bloggers have over the mainstream media - free press. Bloggers have the freedom to include perspectives and ideas that are often not included in mainstream coverage. This article is a jumping-off point for me to begin sharing my blog with readers of The WIP by cross-posting my Darfur coverage on The WIP's TALK blog.

by Susan Enuogbope Majekodunmi
- USA -

As a child growing up in Nigeria, I was familiar with military coups. I would wake up in the morning and on TV a new President in military uniform would state that there had been a coup and he was now our new leader. He would order everyone to stay home until the situation stabilized. Later that night, on the 9pm news, he would reappear to tell us how he was the person to rescue the country from the clutches of the one he seized power from. However, time would show our new leader repeating exactly what he accused his predecessor of doing, many times to an even higher degree. As time passed, it would also become obvious that our new president had no intention of leaving office, ever.

• Despite widespread criticism, Robert Mugabe attended the global food summit in Rome in early June. Photograph by Malcom M. •

In Nigeria, military dictator Sani Abacha, who seized power from his fellow military predecessor, annulled the June 12th, 1993 democratic election of Chief Moshood Abiola, a civilian businessman who, by all accounts, won the election. Abacha refused to give up power and Abiola fled abroad for his safety. However, he was lured back to supposedly take what was rightfully his, only to be swiftly charged with treason and killed while in Abacha's custody. Since I lived close to Abiola's residence at the time, I witnessed the chaos and violence his death caused as many people took to the streets to protest.

by Riane Eisler
- USA -

There’s an invisible elephant in today’s political debates: a major issue that’s getting no attention. Sure, there’s some recognition that behind many attacks on Hillary Clinton lie virulent traditions of sexism. But so devalued is anything stereotypically associated with women that crucial matters that directly impact our lives and our families aren’t even mentioned.

• Women's issues take a backseat in American politics. Photograph by Rebecca DeLisle. •

This relegation of “women’s issues” to a secondary place is obviously terrible for half of America (actually the majority, since women are 52 percent). But it’s also terrible for the political and family health of our entire nation.

Let’s start with politics. For both the mullahs in Iran and the rightist-fundamentalist alliance in the United States, “getting women back into their traditional place” in a “traditional family” has been a top priority. There’s a basic reason for this. Rigidly male-dominated societies are also authoritarian and violent. Along with the imposition of a brutal dictatorship by the Nazis, their mantra was returning women to their "traditional" roles in a male-dominated family. Nor is it coincidental that the 9-11 terrorists came from cultures where women are terrorized into submission. Or that regressive fundamentalists in the United States (who also believe in top-down rule and “holy wars”) first organized as a powerful political block around a “women’s issue”: the defeat during the 1970s of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

by Imelda V. Abaño
- Philippines -

Hunger is the most crucial manifestation of poverty. In many parts of the world, the soaring prices of food, fuel and other basic goods have triggered social unrest and a growing sense of urgency.

• In Haiti, an estimated 46% of all children under five are severely or moderately stunted in growth due to malnutrition. Photograph by Imelda V. Abaño. •

Witnessing the realities of the devastating consequences of poverty and rising food prices up close reminded me of my first visit to Haiti, one of the world's poorest countries.

In June, I went to Haiti with five other journalists for an experience unlike any of my previous trips abroad. The abject poverty and despair I witnessed there is far more extreme than in my own country. Never before have I seen such deprivation than that which I saw in Haiti; the human suffering is all too real and heart-rending.

Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, is plagued by violence, hunger, unrelenting extreme poverty, disease, high unemployment rates, low life expectancy and crumbling health and educational systems.

by Parul Sharma
- Sweden -

“The truth, however, is that the male is the enjoyer and female a thing to be enjoyed…” - Manu Smiriti

Social and psychological discrimination appeared in an Indian courtroom on April 3rd, 2005, when minutes before sentencing was due, a convicted rapist offered his victim a marriage proposal. The man, who said he was offering to marry the woman because the stigma of rape in India meant no one else would, was convicted of raping and seriously injuring a 22-year-old nurse in September 2003 at the hospital where they both worked. The survivor was asked in court whether she would accept the proposal from her attacker, who had hoped it might lower his sentence. The judge postponed sentencing until the next day, when the rape victim told the court she had rejected his petition.

So many questions come to any sane person’s mind, most importantly: did the court, as a “law-making” institution, even consider the dangers such a precedent would pose to women?

by Melissa Hahn
- USA -

Just before Christmas, we locked up our apartment in Krakow and walked across the Rynek towards the train station. Crossing the main square in the early morning drizzle, overburdened by our luggage and breathless from our brisk pace, I was about to turn the corner onto ulica Floriańska when something pulled at my reins. For a moment, I looked back at Kościół Mariacki (St. Mary’s Cathedral), and found myself frozen in place, unable to continue. Sparkling in the silence, it captivated me as if I was seeing its red brick and uneven turrets for the last time.

by Katharine Daniels & Sarah McGowan
- USA -

Sunday’s news that opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai had withdrawn from the Zimbabwean runoff race spurred international media coverage and outrage on a crisis that has been raging for years. According to the opposition’s Movement for Democratic Change, "some 86 of its supporters have been killed and 200,000 forced from their homes by militias loyal to the ruling Zanu-PF party."

• An image from last year's violent police crackdown on Zimbabwean activists. Photograph courtesy of The Zimbabwean. •

WIP Contributors Constance Manika and Lelety Mabasa, along with Sharon Njobo, Grace Kwinjeh and Sandra Nyaira, have published article after article over the past year, outlining the methodical behavior of a political despot who is both cunning and ruthless, and who will stop at nothing to preserve his power.

In our second week of publication, Sharon Njobo (living in exile in Canada) wrote about women in her country taking the lead to protest against Mugabe's economic policies. In this early article we first learned of Zimbabwe's skyrocketing inflation rates (currently at 355,000 percent), and the rising price of basic foodstuffs - putting cooking oil, cornmeal, bread, and milk beyond the reach of many families in a country that was once considered the 'food basket' of Africa. The deteriorating Zimbabwean economy has now earned the country the dubious distinction of having the lowest life expectancy in the world for women. At just 34 years, a woman's life span (37 years for a man) is now half of what it was only 18 years ago.

by Suad Hamada
- Bahrain -

Most of them came by sea through tough journeys, seeking better lives. They loved their new homelands both before and after the oil era that brought wealth beyond anyone’s expectations. Many of them fought for independence and development in their new countries. But what did they get in return?

They didn’t get awards or national recognition, instead they were just marked with an unbearable word for the rest of their lives: Bidoon or stateless. Even their children and grandchildren, who have never known another homeland, are counted as stateless. Most of the young men who came to the Gulf states in the 1920s and 1930s are long dead and buried under the soil of countries that never accepted them as citizens.

by Sara Terry
- USA -

It all goes back, I think, to the day I was standing in a mass grave, hating the fact that I was there, balanced precariously on a mound of bones, camera reluctantly in hand. I’d been asked to make a photo of a partly-preserved pair of hands, the remains of a teenage boy who along with thousands of other Bosnian Muslim men and boys had been murdered by Bosnian Serb forces seven years earlier during the Srebrenica massacre.

• Forensic anthropologists Ewa Klonowski (right) and Piotr Drukier examine the partially preserved hands of a teenage boy, found in a mass grave of victims of the 1995 massacre of some 7,000 to 8,000 Muslim men and boys at the hands of Serb forces who overran the U.N. "safe haven" of Srebrenica. The grave, which contained more than 150 intact bodies and some 350 partial remains, was one of the largest mass graves uncovered in Bosnia since the end of the war. Photograph © Sara Terry. •

by Kimberly N. Chase
- USA -

After hearing the family history of her adventurous great-grandmother, a free African American woman who lived in New Orleans during the Civil War, community activist Pam Dashiell knew she wanted to live in the legendary southern city.

• Community activist Pam Dashiell doesn't flinch in the face of New Orleans' challenges. Photograph courtesy of Kimberly Chase. •

Three generations later, Dashiell brought her family history full circle. Since moving from Massachusetts, she has come to call New Orleans home, and is now a well-known organizer; Dashiell's work in the Holy Cross neighborhood in the city's Lower Ninth Ward took on added urgency after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Trying to bring the area back to life, she now helps evacuated families decide whether they can make the move back to their city and rebuild their homes.

by S. Jean
- Gaza City -

Boom! I can feel a rumble under my feet and hear the windows clatter lightly in our two-bedroom apartment. My husband and I live on the third floor of an apartment building in Rimal, regarded as a safe neighborhood in Gaza City. The Gaza Strip is tiny, only 140 square miles, and we can easily hear explosions, even those a couple towns away.

• This building is part of a government complex that the Israeli Air Force bombed using an F-16. Ten children from nearby homes were wounded in this attack, launched in the middle of the night in the Tel Al Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City. •

You name it… it's all a normal part of our lives here in Gaza. And little stops us, and everyone else, from going about our day-to-day activities. After all, it's only 7:30 in the morning and we are getting ready to go to work. We don't even check the TV for news about the blast.

by Yu Sun
- China -

The earthquake that struck Sichuan recently has shown China’s capacity to mobilize resources, cope with emergency situations and handle crisis. China conducted its own prompt media coverage and provided unprecedented access to foreign media on the quake-hit area. China has demonstrated its preparedness and ability to hold the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games.

The So-Called Boycott Won’t Affect the Olympic Games

• Olympic torchbearers were met with widespread protest around the world. Photograph by Steve Punter. •

The Olympic flame does not belong to China, but to the whole world and carries a message of global peace. Disrupting the Olympic torch relay is not only contrary to the Olympic spirit, but endangers the personal safety of torchbearers and violates the rights of those who welcomed its arrival.

A few countries’ leaders have pondered not attending the opening ceremony of the 29th Olympic Games in Beijing. I’m amazed to read this kind of the news.

What is China going to lose from this possible boycott? After all, tens of thousands of athletes from different countries will still compete in Beijing, and that's what matters.

by Glory Mushinge
- UK -

In much of the world, life for an eight year old is considered just started, but in Colombia, girls that age are dying, fighting in the military.

“As soon as they said they were going to kill us, we grabbed a change of clothes and anything else we could carry and took off running. We got in a boat and didn’t look back. We left our animals, crops, land and home behind… they came looking for us, to kill us and we weren’t there. Now we really need help because they tell us there are no resources.”

• A Colombian schoolgirl particpates in a peace march. Photograph by CAFOD/Annie Bungeroth. •

Recently, members of the Catholic Church in Colombia visited the UK to seek help for the country’s conflict, something they refer to as a ‘forgotten crisis’ because the international community has ignored Colombia’s issues.

Archbishop Reuben Salazar and Monsignor Héctor Fabio Henao, President and Director of the Social Department of the Catholic CARITAS Colombia, said during their visit that they travelled to England and Wales to raise awareness of the problems in Colombia and to bolster support for the church’s vital peace-building work.

by Jozefina Cutura
- USA -

With Hillary Clinton’s recent campaign for the presidency in the United States at its end and women leaders taking charge in countries from Chile to Liberia, women’s advances in politics are making headlines. But in countries around the world, especially those recovering from conflict like Bosnia and Herzegovina, women are making strides in the business arena too.

• Women entrepreneurs in Bosnia are helping rebuild the country's economy. Photograph courtesy of MI BOSPO. •

“In Skelani I saw a kiosk that was in a fairly good shape, so I decided to invest in opening it,” she says in an interview. Skelani is in a remote region of Bosnia that is poorly accessible by roads and has seen a large number of people emigrate elsewhere since the war. Despite the town’s remoteness and its shrinking population, Ružica remained undeterred. Initially, as people continued to move away, her profits were low. But she persevered and today Ružica’s convenience store has an excellent reputation in the community, steadily attracting customers from across the region. She employs four female workers and has created a stable source of income for her family.

by Elena Ilina
- USA -

There are five nuclear-weapon-free zones (NWFZ) in the world, comprised of more than 100 countries. Significant tools for disarmament and nonproliferation, such zones assist in strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and contribute to the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. They also promote trust, cooperation and security in the region establishing such a zone.

• As more countries in the Middle East express interest in developing nuclear capability, NWFZs have never been more important. Photograph by Omid Tavallai. •

Key disarmament experts participated in our project, including UN Secretary General High Representative for Disarmament Affairs Ambassador Sergio Duarte, Permanent Representative of the Arab Republic of Egypt to the United Nations, Ambassador Maged A. Abdelaziz, and former diplomat Richard Butler, who served as UNSCOM Chairman. Our class spent the entire semester negotiating the treaty, studying the positions of relevant countries and gathering after class in the school cafeteria to conduct secret meetings to figure out each other’s positions. Our work was guided by the general rules of international forums, with two elected chairmen and representatives of various agencies observing our negotiations. At the last meeting of the semester, we were unable to conclude the treaty – our national positions and interests could not be reconciled.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

American slave trading is a human rights atrocity forever associated with the Confederacy of the Southern United States. Northerners are stereotypically portrayed as benevolent abolitionists fighting the South’s slave labor plantations. But history is rarely that cut and dried.

by Cathy Oerter
- USA -

I ran through the Iowa countryside, young and carefree, unaware of the life I had been richly blessed with. It was just me and the breeze and the green methodical cornfields. The gravel roads, loose with sand and oversized rocks, could easily sprain an ankle yet were gladly accepted in lieu of a track that did not exist. Small towns in Iowa could not afford that luxury and I knew I wanted to run. The gravel became my path into another world.

• Al Oerter at the 1960 Olympic Trials in California. •

Al was tall and muscular and boyishly handsome; he was a gentle giant. No loud bravado, just a common man who had unusually large muscles and monstrous hands that made mine disappear completely in their grasp.

by Cheery Zahau
- Burma / India -

In the devastating aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, international scrutiny highlights the military junta that rules Burma, a Southeast Asian country that shares borders with China, India, Bangladesh, Thailand and Laos. Adding greatly to the number of victims claimed by the storm, the Burmese government prevented aid from entering the country until pressured by the international community. Burma’s notorious military regime seems to enjoy watching its people suffer, turning deaf ears to victims in need, denying entrance of international aid groups and failing to properly prepare the region, despite prior warning from regional weather centers.

• The author interviews a woman who was raped by Burmese soldiers. •

With a population of over 50 million people, Burma is comprised of eight major ethnic nationalities: Burman, Shan, Karen, Karenni, Mon, Chin, Kachin and Arakan. Burma’s ethnic groups demand equality, autonomy and self-determination, but are systematically denied their rights by the junta. Instead, they are met with human rights violations: forced labor, forced relocation, religious persecution, arbitrary arrest and detention, destruction of thousands of ethnic villages, the driving out of hundreds of thousands of ethnic civilians to neighboring countries, and the forced internal displacement of an estimated one million people.

by Lelety Mabasa
- Zimbabwe -

Always faithful in shocking the world, Zimbabwe has scored yet another first, and as usual, for all the wrong reasons.

• Basket case: A fruit seller in Harare hunts for change. •

"The latest innovation seeks to bring convenience to our farmers who, starting this year's marketing season, are receiving competitive prices for their produce," said acting RBZ Governor Charity Dhliwayo last week.

The RBZ also launched a new Z$500 million bank note for the general public.

What baffled most people, however, was that bearers can use Agro Cheques to purchase goods in supermarkets, just like we do with ordinary notes.

"Either the people at the central bank are now confused or they were too embarrassed to say we are launching such high denominated notes for the public," speculates Noleen Moyo, an employee with a Zimbabwean bank. "To them, that would mean admitting failure in running the economy."

by Bia Assevero
- USA / France -

Justine Henin was on top of the tennis world. Literally.

The 25 year old Belgian was number one in the Women’s Tennis Association rankings and despite her less than stellar form of late, she was still a serious contender for the French Open which began this week. It’s a tournament close to Henin’s heart as she’s won it four times. She is, in fact, the three time defending champion.

• Justine Henin at the 2007 US Open. Photograph by Ian Gampon. •

But Henin has and will continue to fiercely deny those speculations; at the press conference where she announced her departure, she admitted that she’d been considering retirement for nearly a year. There’s a strong probability that the troubles in her personal life (Henin divorced from her husband in 2007) haven’t helped, but Henin’s retirement is actually a sign of a different trend.

by Carrie R. Sparrevohn
- USA -

In 2005 I traveled to Uganda, East Africa, for the first time. I met Margaret Nangobi on that trip, in Mwanyangiri, a tiny village about an hour’s drive from the capitol. What transpired between us broke my privileged self in pieces and I became the receiver one hundred fold of what I was to give.

• Margaret and her granddaughter Loi with their kitchen and home in the background. •

For every mother that dies in the US of pregnancy, Uganda loses 50. Around the world, each minute, we lose one mother as a direct result of her pregnancy. Improving women’s access to experienced care providers, antibiotics and medication to prevent or stop hemorrhaging would prevent over half of these deaths.

As I prepared to spend November 2005 in Uganda, a wonderful friend and mentor, Jan McNabb, began to tell her friends what I was planning to do. People began handing her money for the needy in Uganda. As a result, the Sally Clinic Project of With Woman was born.

by Binalakshmi Nepram Mentschel
- India -

Our world is hovering at the edge of an abyss, driven there by man’s unreason. One crisis is cresting on top of another… The sinister developments in the advance towards the brink of disaster all interact, worsened by the calamitous threat - namely the arms race and militarization. These essentially ethical problems of wars, weapons, and tools of violence have existed since time immemorial, but in the present era they have been deeply aggravated and will continue to be aggravated if a halt is not called for. – Nobel Peace Laureate Alva Myrdal

May 24th is celebrated globally as International Women’s Day for Peace and Disarmament. This article was written in honor of the many women who have campaigned tirelessly for global peace.

by Suad Hamada
- Bahrain -

“The land that I grew to love, hates my babies.” This is sadly what many Bahraini women of stateless children think to themselves every single day of their lives.

Like outcasts, they feel helplessly pulled between a country they call home and their children who should be recognized as citizens but aren’t, only because they decided to marry foreigners.

by Pilirani Semu-Banda
- Malawi -

Sixty-three year old Gladys Kasito, in Malawi’s capital city, Lilongwe, only has one wish – to die peacefully, preferably in her sleep. Kasito says she feels trapped and threatened in her own country. Her community, including her own family, has disowned her. She says everyone is baying for her blood. Kasito has been labeled a witch.

Her face is heavily scarred, she walks with a limp, and has no front teeth. Kasito is recovering from the wounds she sustained when her neighbors demolished her house early one February morning and beat her up. A few passers-by rescued her and took her to hospital.

“All I want is to die, but peacefully. I no longer want to go through the mental and physical ordeal that I was subjected to. They call me a witch just because I am old and no longer pretty,” worries Kasito.

by Anna Clark
- USA -

Who talks about prisoners these days? Certainly not the US presidential candidates or most others up for election in 2008, unless it’s in tangential “get tough on crime” rhetoric. In the media, quality coverage such as Jeff Gerritt’s Pulitzer-nominated series on medical care in Michigan prisons, which appeared last year in The Detroit Free Press, is overshadowed by courtroom dramas and legal thrillers. MSNBC has built something of a franchise in its “To Catch a Predator” series, which lures people to a Dateline set, humiliates them by reading their chat room transcripts with someone they thought was underage, and then calls on a police crew to rather unnecessarily tackle them in an arrest sequence right out of a summer blockbuster.

Authentic communication from and about prisoners exists, but it’s relegated to a niche market outside of most print and online news sources, of influential political blogs, of the catalogues of big publishers, and of the speeches of election year candidates. Presumably, its minimal share of attention is justified because decision makers think their audiences don’t care much about prisons and the people in them.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

Last year Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told an audience at Columbia University, “In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country.” His characteristically outrageous comment was met with laughter and boos; discrimination is no laughing matter in a country where homosexuality is punishable by death.

But after seeing the documentary film Be Like Others Ahmadinejad’s statement may be technically true. The 76 minute documentary by Iranian-American filmmaker Tanaz Eshaghian, whose previous film Love Iranian-American Style documented her Iranian family’s involvement in her love life, profiles Iran’s leading gender reassignment doctor Dr. Bahram Mehrjalali (also spelled as Dr. Bahram Mir Jalai) and his patients.

by Rose-Anne Clermont
- Germany -

Around the time little girls become preoccupied with their own reflections, I remember scanning the various jars of creams and tonics on my mother’s make-up table. I couldn’t yet read so well, but I noticed on the labels that the word AGE was always belittled by a hyphen and another word that “combated,” “defied” or “anti’d” it in some way. Once I started playing with make-up samples in drugstores, I’d see row upon row of these labels: anti-wrinkle; anti-aging; age-defying. Before I reached puberty, I had learned that aging was something to protest.

by Marianne Taflinger
- USA -

In Sweden, a doctor delivers Sari, and her family celebrates what will be the beginning of a long life, probably 83 years or more. She’ll attend at least 17 years of school and if she chooses to have children, they’ll be born when she wants them to be born, thanks to convenient and cheap contraceptives. If she has a baby, she’ll take off 15 weeks of work and still earn 80% of her salary. Sari is virtually guaranteed to make it to age 5 without any health complications and enroll in secondary school. Swedish society provides great health care and education that eases both mothers’ and girls’ lives.

By contrast, Adame will live a far more perilous life. Having been born in Niger, she has a high probability of dying before age 5. Like two thirds of all children born in Niger, no “skilled birth attendant” was present at her delivery. It’s likely that Adame will attend only 3 grades in school, and that she will die by age 45, living a life half as long than if she had been born in Sweden. Adame’s mother is practically guaranteed to lose at least one child and has a nine out of ten probability that she will lose 2 children in her lifetime. Due to the lack of contraception, Adame will likely have more siblings than her family can afford. And there’s a strong chance that Adame will suffer from malnutrition and lack a sufficient supply of water.

by Bia Assevero
- USA / France -

Ruud Gullit knows his soccer.

He’s Dutch for one thing, and the Dutch have produced some of the most spectacular talents that the modern era of the game has ever seen. From Van Basten to Bergkamp, from Rijkaard to Gullit himself, the Dutch have redefined the game more than once.

by Sarah Wyatt
- USA -

Years of hardship and backbreaking labor in the riot-stricken slums of Kibera in south Kenya have worn 18 year old Eshe Koome to the bone. A single mother of two, she walked out on her abusive husband and survived for two years as a daily wage laborer, loading vegetables and other goods for sale.

• Eshe is now able to earn a living wage at Kazuri. Photograph by Sarah Wyatt. •

Eshe's story captures in a nutshell how a group of formerly indigent, urban women operates a business for themselves. The Kazuri Bead Factory, located in the Nairobi suburb of Karen, is unique in that it is Kenya’s first visitors’ attraction of its kind, created for and by women. Founded by Lady Susan Wood in 1975, the company is known for its beautiful, hand-painted beads made from the authentic clay from the Mt. Kenya area. Kazuri (Swahili for “small and beautiful”), also produces a number of other goods popular with tourists including pottery, hand-beaded sandals and purses. The beads are often featured on three-dimensional art cards and can also be found in shadowboxes.

by Nancy Van Ness
- USA -

I knew it was bad, but I didn't know just how bad. Colonel Ann Wright, retired US Army, grabbed the audience’s attention at a panel called Women in the Military, hosted last month by Women Center Stage in New York City, when she said that one in three women in the military is sexually abused by her male colleagues. Ann wants to see huge signs displaying this statistic in every recruiting office, to let young women know what to expect if they sign up.