Betty Makoni, fighting against a silent genocide

The true worth of a nation must be measured by the empowerment of its girls!

Hazviperi Betty Makoni is a beautiful radiant woman with powerful eyes, which can be full of compassion and fierce with indignation and determination.I meet her two weeks ago on Thursday April 8^th at the Soka Gakkai Culture Center in New York at a lecture where she spoke about her life and she presented the organization, the Girl Child Network, started in 1998, of which she is the director and founder. On Sunday April 10^th she held a meeting with women at the same location, that I had the privilege to attend and I appreciated even more her amazing energy, compassion and intelligence.

See her in a video, appropriately called Tapestry of Hope:

Betty Makoni is from Zimbabwe, a country where human rights are systematically violated and aids is rampant.  Betty pointed out the disturbing belief that the blood of a virgin prevents and cures aids, which is sadly diffused in sub-Saharan Africa, and is responsible for infant rape. In addition sexual terror is a common practice in the Mugabe’s regime.

Betty herself was raped by a local shopkeeper when she was six. At the age of nine, she saw her mother beaten to death by her father at nine.

It was not only my mother or I who suffered, but virtually every girl and woman who saw abuse perpetrated against her swept under the carpet. It was the norm.

Betty earned a university degree and became a secondary school teacher. She could see the relentless abuse young girls went through and experienced the frustration of seeing her students drop out of school every new season. In 1998 she organized a girls’ club to share stories, ideas, and to find solace and solution to their problems.

Today, there are 500 girls’ clubs in 49 of Zimbabwe’s 58 districts and a full-blown Girl Child Network (GCN) that serves 30,000 girls, raises community awareness and lobbies government to protect girls. Our goal is to dismantle the link between culture and violence against the girls and enable them to take charge of their own destiny.

Ten girls per day report rape cases. Most of the time they also get infected with hiv. Betty has helped thousands of girls and taught them to believe in themselves. She wants them all to become future leaders.

Girls coming together in solidarity to build the spaces where they can be valued… this is how we transform victims into survivors.

See the site of GCN

After having been arrested several times in Zimbabwe, Betty now lives in exile in London, with her husband and three sons (“I don’t hate men any more”, she joked). She has received numerous prizes for her activity, and she is indefatigable in her work to protect girls and children and to help them feel valuable and become future leaders.

So each time a girl smiles I actually score a point emotionally myself and I tell myself that it is getting better so I also heal through the girls and I enjoy doing it.

Leyman Gbowee, a woman who weaves peace

“Women are the ones that bear the greatest burden,” Leyman Gbowee says. “We are also the ones who nurture societies.”

By the age of 17, Leyman Gbowee had come to realize that “if any changes were to be made in society it had to be by the mothers.”

Leyman Gbowee was one of the founders and organizers of the Women in Peacebuilding Program / West African Network for Peacebuilding, and in March 2003 she became the spoke-person and leader of the movement.

Liberia had been ravaged by a decade long civil war: on a daily basis the country underwent violence, rapes, murders. Children soldiers were used by both sides, the depotic president Charles taylor and his opponents.

The courage and determination of about 3,000 ordinary women, Christian and Muslim working together, brought the civil war to an end. Lead by Leyman Gbowee women initially held workshops and devised slogans such as  “Women as strategic thinkers”, and “Women building bridges for reconciliation”. They stopped consulting their men and joined beyond their differences to establish peace.

Women dressed in white held signs saying: “We want peace”, organized sit-ins and other forms of resistance , went together to talk to warring leaders, until they brought the president Charles Taylor to meet with the rebels in Ghana, barricading them in a conference room. They used all sort of strategies, from declining to have sex with their men, to threatening to get naked in public, an act that would bring shame to their men, according to the Liberian mores.

“We stepped out and did the unimaginable” she says, “No one thought that we could sustain a protest fro two and a half years. No one thought that with all of the problems we had and little education we could challenge structures.” Thanks to their effort a peace accord was signed in the summer of 2003.

Listen to Leyman Gbowee speaking at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008, about the award-winning documentary Pray the devil back to hell that depicts the Liberian women’s struggle. Hear the strength these women were able to summon.

After the war the women’s movement was active in the demilitarization efforts and in supporting Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who became  the president of Liberia, the first female president of an African country.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, President of Liberia and Lyeman Gbowee

In 2005 Leyman Gbowee earned an M.A. in Conflict Transformation from Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

I think that Africa is a country rich in natural resources, but its most precious resource are the women. In spite of all the insults and the violence they had to undergo (in Liberia alone, 40% of the women had been raped in the course of the civil war), African women, represent the hope and the strength of the continent.

Leymah Gbowee’s remarks of on accepting the 2009 Profile in Courage Award, May 18, 2009.

Close your eyes and imagine a mother leaving her baby half dead by the roadside because she can’t stand to see that child died of hunger. Close your eyes and imagine a mother brutally raped and several objects inserted in her privates. Close your eyes and imagine a group of fighters with guns, betting on the sex of the child of a pregnant woman, and in order to find out who wins the bet, cutting her and taking the child out. Close your eyes and imagine a group of women in white, no shoes, … under heavy rain trying to push a group of world leaders with a statement that, “We too have a stake in this peace process,” being pushed back by security because they were security threats to these world leaders.

Open your eyes and then close your eyes and dream of a world where babies no longer die by the roadside, where women are no longer brutally raped with impunity, where the U.N. is going into villages to find women from rural areas to sit at the peace table, where President Obama goes to Liberia and says, “I want to consult with the rural women first.” Do you see that future?