Iraq - The Injustice of Poverty

Like many others around the world, I recently read about the Austrian man who abused his daughter and imprisoned her in a basement for years. I could not imagine what it would be like to live in a basement and never leave the house until today, when I visited a woman named Evan in Baghdad, Iraq. As Women for Women International's assessment team in Baghdad was attempting to identify potential participants for our program, every woman we talked with in the neighborhood told us that we must visit Evan and her family if we were truly looking for the women most excluded from society. When we knocked on the door, Evan answered and immediately welcomed us into her home, following the old Iraqi tradition of hospitality-a tradition that has been impacted severely with the increased insecurity of the country and the fear it reinforces in people's hearts of strangers. That was when I encountered the darkness in which Evan and her family are confined.

Her home is the basement of a building. The visit started with a climb down very dark and steep stairs. It was so pitch black that my Iraqi colleagues and I held hands so we could guide each other's steps. By the time we got downstairs, we saw two small bedrooms illuminated only by light from a sliver of window in one of the rooms. The rooms were full of mattresses, clothes, books, and kitchen supplies: the necessities for a family of six. Evan's sisters and brothers hid in between the mattresses in the midst of the darkness. We could hear them breathe and whisper, but we could not see their faces. Evan, 21 and the eldest, was the only one who was willing to talk to us, and she did not hesitate to tell us about her reality. Her father was kidnapped a few years ago and even now they do not know his whereabouts. Her family was kicked out of the place they rented, and they have been living in this dark basement for four years. Evan shared with me, "My mother now cleans homes. I had to quit school because we could no longer afford the book supplies or the uniforms. Because I have three teenage sisters, my mother refuses to allow us to leave out of fear that we will be kidnapped, and so we stay in this place day and night and we do not leave." Evan and her family get one hour of electricity a day, and for the rest of the day they live in utter darkness. When describing the reasons behind her leaving school, Evan was upset and emotional: "I was one year away from graduating high school. I had to leave because of poverty." She talked with tears in her eyes. In that moment, in that darkness, I was reminded of Nyirakamana, whom I had met exactly a month earlier in Rwanda in Murama Village of the Nyamata sector.

It was raining the day I met Nyirakamana, the same day we visited a church in Nyamata where 6,800 people were massacred 15 years ago in the genocide. I got to know Nyirakamana, 26, after meeting the circle of women she belonged to who had established a cassava and groundnut cooperative in Nyamata. Despite the rain that day, all the women in the cooperative came to greet us and insisted that we visit Nyirakamana, the president of their cooperative, in her home. Her peers had such respect and admiration for her that it was hard to resist their wish; if nothing else, we were curious to meet her just to understand the source of her popularity. When we finally went to Nyirakamana's home, it was very obvious that she was a woman not only respected by her peers in the women's cooperative but also by her husband and her father. Her house of three rooms (one is her bedroom and a kitchen, one is a living room, and the third is for her three goats) was also dark, though there were some tiny windows and it was not in a basement. As she was describing her life, Nyirakamana stopped for a second and said, "I had to drop school in the sixth grade." When I asked her why, she looked down, her father looked down, and then she said with a cracked voice, "poverty." I still have tears in my eyes when I think of this moment. You know, sometimes one does not have to say much for another to understand their feelings. Nyirakamana was angry at the poverty that took her away from school and still wishes today to go back and finish her education.

These two women, both in their twenties, a Rwandan and an Iraqi, join hundreds of thousands of women and girls all over the world who have been forced to abandon their education by the injustice of poverty. They both reminded me that we cannot talk about education, particularly the education of girls, as an issue separate from the economic challenges of their families. We cannot talk about building schools if we do not talk about the student's life at home. Can her family feed her? Provide her with clothes? Buy her books? That is where Women for Women International can help: by investing in, educating, and enabling mothers to earn a decent income to provide better opportunities for and secure the schooling of their children. We can ensure the happiness and futures of children by ensuring the happiness and futures of their mothers.

After I left Evan's house, hoping that she will join the Women for Women International program and that we can find her a sponsor, I attended one session of our educational program provided through the Women in the World curriculum. When I asked the women how they are able to meet their basic economic needs and if they are sending their children to school, one woman looked at me and said, "I wish I was a man." When I asked her why, she said, "So I can have the freedom to work, the freedom to choose from much better opportunities, and to earn a decent living so I can give the best to my family." I looked at her and said, "And our job here is to help you become a full woman and a great mother." I have met women in Afghanistan and other parts of the world who had to disguise themselves as men so that they could work, feed their families, and go to school. The job for us-for every able woman, for every woman who has resources, every woman who has owned her voice-is to help other marginalized and excluded women to live up to their potential while still being WOMEN.