Glass Half-full: Half The Sky

Somalia, Eritrea, Latvia, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Iraq, Kurdistan, Palestine, Iran, Pakistan, India ... we’ve had women from all these places coming to ‘Your Learning' over the past two years at Coventry Jesus Centre. They usually come in with smiles but every life carries a story with it ... sometimes I’m told a little, I never probe. Sometimes the story is left untold.

I’m reading ‘Half the Sky’ at the moment (authors: Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn). Shocking in its revelation of the extent of the suppression, oppression and abuse of women globally, it offers a persuasive call to empower women through education and micro-financing projects - among other things. The empowering of women in such ways, the writers tell us, is a sure way to better the prospects of societies generally that are struggling with poverty in the developing world. A new breed of ‘social entrepreneurs’ has/is arising to arrest the problem of gender inequality worldwide - described by Kristof as the ‘paramount moral challenge’ of this century.

It’s one of those must-reads for women (indeed, men as well) that care; it’s greatly changed my understanding of just what women throughout the world suffer. Now when they come and take their place in class I wonder ...

Recently two female students from Kurdistan introduced me to one of their heroes, Hapsa Khani Naqib, a twentieth century Kurdish social entrepreneur. With their help I wrote out the story of her life and I asked one of them to lead a group involving reading and talking about her life. After reading ‘Half the Sky’, I can understand a little more why she is their hero. 

My friends, Ro and Mim, are starting a new project ‘Glass Half Full’. Their aim is to encourage small scale manufacturing in the developing world (starting with Bangladeshi women) by finding a market for their goods in the UK.

Glass half-full? A situation (such as a woman’s prospects in the developing world) can be a cause of optimism (a glass half-full as opposed to empty) or pessimism (only half-full or half–empty).

Personally I find such projects exciting; they’re providing new opportunities for people with little prospect; they’re doing something and every little something is better than nothing.

Meanwhile, these women are also on our soil, actually down the road, next door, in our class. It’s an opportunity...
   
 The empowering of women, enlarging the often narrow visor of their life-possibilities, is a must. As the Chinese saying goes, ‘women hold up half the sky.’