Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Eugene Yakub currently lives in Italy and retains Kenyan citizenship. A former administrator with UN-HABITAT, she founded a free elementary school for children living in a Nairobi slum and serves as its administrator and fundraiser. Her observations below of the challenges faced by women worldwide are rooted in her first-hand knowledge of the causes and solutions pertaining to those living in poverty.
International Women’s Day is a day of celebration honoring all the women who daily have given, do give, and will always give of themselves to their families, communities, and countries; by the roadside, in the fields and factories, in private homes and public institutions; to commerce, Government, the media, universities and international organisations; informing, healing and comforting, leading and following, participating and contributing, enlightening and creating and encouraging, multi-tasking and loving and guiding, laughing and crying, being tough, gentle, stoical….
However, in their financially impoverished state, women are still far too often living with little or no choice regarding their womanhood. There are still so many millions of girls who reach puberty and see no path before them other than finding a man to ensure their survival. They choose this path because these girls are not able to go to school, certainly not to high school (even in 2010), and do not receive any sort of training which will enable them to earn an independent and dignified income.
What happens when a girl, a woman, has no option but to be financially dependent? It means she will have to abide by any and all discriminatory cultural and/or religious rules. She will serve and submit and know nothing of the world beyond. She will often behave in ways which may seem hypocritical; she will keep her true feelings and needs to herself, suffer illness alone, sacrifice privacy; she will copulate and conceive and give birth often without regard to her health and her feelings, or risk being thrown out of her own home. She will be subjugated to the terrible lifetime effects of female genital mutilation where it is practiced; she will be condemned to wearing clothes which suppress her identity, her ability to express her beauty as a woman.
What are the options for such girls and women? Without a skill, education or even literacy, she will continue to look for a man to take care of her and her children. She may find a man who may be willing to do so, but more often than not he will use her and violate her, most likely leaving her with more children to feed and HIV-AIDS. She will all too often prostitute herself to stay alive, with the same likely conclusion. And so she will die young, very young, painfully and tragically, alone and broken and ashamed, leaving children to their infirm, even more helpless grandmother. Or, if she’s rebelling against religious regulations, she may find sympathetic ears and hands, but she may also find herself being murdered in cold blood by her father, by her brother, assisted by her uncles, with the compliance of her mother who herself is afraid of her husband and male members of the family, and of her society.
We welcome our Day, but we women must also make more effort to help our sisters climb out of the prisons in which they still find themselves. Not in 2020 or 2050, but now, today, and every day.
