WUNRN
Link to CaucAsia Magazine
- April 2008 - Gender & Village
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Direct Link to CaucAsia Issues:
CaucAsia - International Coalition
of Gender Journalists
ENGLISH, RUSSIAN, &
GEORGIAN TRANSLATIONS
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CaucAsia Gender & Village - Excerpts by WUNRN
GEORGIA - Editor's Note - Galina
Petriashvili
"It is hard to live in an
abandoned and forgotten village. A village like this is extremely
resentful and too exacting. Some people submit to the village's unreasonable
demands and do not think of them, just keep working...Others are afraid of
being 'different;' they want to correspond to the local society's obligations,
being exemplary housewives, gentle mothers, and caring women. And, they have
groundless feelings of guilt for their entire lives.
This kind of village is the champion
of gender hypocrisy. It is always on the alert for your behavior and tries to
make you follow the traditions, particularly those traditions that regulate
women and make them forget about freedom and independence, feel obliged for
doing alot of work, make them accept all the rules, and not allow them to have
free time and enjoy life.
These rules, regulations, and
traditions make women stay at home, but might easily allow them to leave it, if
necessary, to work and bring home money. But even so, a woman can anytime be
suspected of not following the rules, of being a bad mother or a useless
houswife. That's what hypocrisy is about!"
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TURKMENISTAN - Altyn Akhmedova
"Being a country woman is a
mission for the strongest.
I am Kabish, and I am 38. I live in
a remote vilage in the northern part of Turkmenistan. When the weather is bad,
a tractor is the only transport to come here. There are four of us living in
our house on the edge of the village: me, my sister-in-law Mamysh, and our two
sons. Mamysh's husband died one year after she was married. I became a widow
even earlier.
After my husband's parents died,
nobody could help us; and we had to turn into breadwinners, heads of family,
and defenders. We had to do all these roles. At all times, a Turkmen
woman is considered a housewife, and mother of many children, with a man
by her side as a breadwinner and defender. But, things have changed. Many men
became confused, admitted their weaknesses, and stopped earning. But women
found many ways to survive. Sometimes this really surprises me!
Having a shower is a luxury for a
village woman. Not every family has water outside the house. For example, in
our household, we have to go to the neighboring street to bring water. There is
also no sewage system in the house. We cannot do laundry as often as we want.
Any village woman will tell you that she suffers from chronic cystitis and a
number of female disorders; the reason is that toilets are outside, and it is
often very cold."
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GEORGIA - Diana Petriashvili
"Georgian authorities keep
promising to improve standards of life in the villages - at least when
elections are approaching.
Even the basics of life seem to be
luxury for many villagers. Much of the village population often drifts away
searching for job opportunities, in Tbilisi or abroad. Or, their children reach
school age, and there are no schools in many villages. Some villages are so
poor that local residents depend on barter trade as exchanging milk for sugar,
instead of paying."
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AZERBAIJAN - Vafa Saleh
"In Azerbaijan villages, women
are 60-70% of wage laborers, often doing hard and harmful work. We held a
monitoring revealing the problems of women living in Azerbaijani villages. I
could not imagine the situation would be as severe as we found.
One older woman tells her younger
co-villagers that they should do everything to educate their daughters: 'An
uneducated woman will be the slave for her family.'
In most Azerbaijan villages, life is
very hard and like slavery for women. However, a husband can do anything he
wants in his family and elsewhere.
These village women cannot imagine
another life different from the one they live. In one of the villages, women
were offered to promote their own candidate for the local Council. But,
finally all of the potential women candidates refused, because their husbands
disapproved of the idea!"
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