Catégorie : 1000 women Peace Nobel 2005

Linked with Mothers and Daughters of Sri Lanka.

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: “The most important thing actually is to give time for every one to participate in the discussion. Everybody’s voice must be heard and we have to respect all the ideas. We may be a great expert on some issues but giving others a chance will be greater”.

They say about her: « Even at 71, an indefatigable Dulcy traverses the country talking to people on both sides of the ethnic concertina, often risking life and limb ».

Dulcy de Silva – Sri Lanka

She works for Mothers and Daughters of Sri Lanka (see on WomenWarPeace.org).

She is the co-ordinator of National Anti-War Front Women’s Sectio, Cofounder of the Mothers and Daughters of Sri Lanka, Dulcy de Silva (born 1933) is convinced that because women are the most severely affected by conflict, they are also the key to peace efforts. She has founded a dynamic peace movement that has gained in influence and recognition. At 71, an indefatigable Dulcy continues to travel throughout the country, braving personal danger. She is known in all of Sri Lanka, respected by Tamils and Sinhalese alike as an honest negotiator, and talks to people on both sides of the ethnic divide. She has been politically active since her school and university days.

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Linked with Banchte Shekha – Bangladesh.

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « They were my university. Every woman. Every life. I have learned everything I know from them », … and: « thousands of helpless women seemed to beckon me to them », … and: « the oppression and insults merely made me more determined to achieve my goal ».

She says also: « They were treated like house servants-underfed, beaten, and mentally tortured. No one respected them, not even themselves. They had no solutions to their problems. Life just went on » … and: « I wanted to find a solution for them, to work on the ‘woman problem’, but everyone-Father Ceci, the sisters, my family-thought I should go back to my own village and get married ».

Angela Gomes is a social worker from Bangladesh. She won the prestigious Magsaysay Award in 1999 for community leadership. She leads the organization Bachte Shekha (Learning to Live) in the Jessore region of the country. It teaches rural women a vast range of income-generating skills, including handicrafts, raising crops, poultry and livestock, fish farming, beekeeping and silk making. Her organization benefits some 20,000 women in at least 400 villages. (wikipedia).

Angela Gomes – Bangladesh

She works for Banchte Shekha.

Her Banchte Shekha organization offers female-empowerment programs to more than 25,000 women in nearly 430 Bangladeshi villages. IN THE EARLY DAYS, Angela Gomes used to borrow a bicycle and pedal alone through the dusty countryside near the Bangladeshi city of Jessore. She would talk to village women, listening to their problems and offering what little help she could. Indignant at this interference in their traditional ways, the menfolk would sometimes hurl rocks at her as she passed. For all the effect they had, they might as well have been throwing ping-pong balls. (full text).

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Linked with Genocide in Darfur.

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « The studen organization ‘Action in Sudan’ has been very successful. Some of my pld students started it up last year. I occasionally give talks, but it’s their baby. I’m proud of my students … we have huge responsibility to give back to the place we study from ». And: « That’s the wonderful thing about anthropoogy, whatever I’m learning, it goes immediately into my life ».

She says also: « No one had gone back to this area for a very long time, partly because I think they were afraid to follow in the footsteps of this great Oxford anthropoplogist (Edward Evans-Pritchard). I decided that if I wanted to study cultural change that I would work there because I had a kind of baseline. I was interested in how these people (the Nur) saw their own world as changing and actively trying to figure things out. It’s a rough place to go ». (Both citations on news.wisc.edu/).

Sharon Hutchinson – USA

She works for the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and for the Civilian Protection Monitoring Team.

Listen: a Sharon Hutchinson Interview, conducted September 29, 2006 with progressiv radio.

For the past 25 years, Sharon Hutchinson has initiated grassroots efforts and focused international attention on human rights abuses in war-torn Sudan. An anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and a human rights consultant, her research has taken her to the frontlines.

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Linked with The World Can’t Wait, Won’t Wait, Isn’t Waiting.

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « We are way more powerful when we turn to each other and not on each other, when we celebrate our diversity, focus on our commonality, and together tear down the mighty walls of injustice ».

Cynthia McKinney is an outspoken leader for peace, human rights, and justice. As a result of questioning her congressional colleagues about the lack of full investigation after September 11 attacks, a retaliatory campaign successfully unseated her for one term, but in 2004 she was easily reelected. In her first term, she got legislation passed to extend health benefits for Vietnam War veteran victims of Agent Orange and sponsored legislation to end the use of depleted-uranium weapons. As a ranking member of the Human Rights Subcommittee, she prompted the UN to investigate the Rwanda genocide. (Read all on 1000peacewomen 2005).

Cynthia McKinney – USA

She worked for the US Congress, the US House of Repr., House Armed Services Committee.

Honors and recognition: McKinney has been featured in a full-length motion picture titled American Blackout. On April 14, 2006, she received the key to the city of Sarasota, Florida and was doubly honored when the city named April 8 as « Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney Day » in Sarasota. On June 14, 2000, Rep. McKinney was honored when part of Memorial Drive, a major thoroughfare running through her district, was renamed « Cynthia McKinney Parkway. » Memorial Drive leads from south Atlanta to Stone Mountain. Her father had previously been honored when a portion of Interstate 285 in Atlanta was dedicated as « Billy McKinney Parkway. »

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Linked with Mountain Spirit MS.

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « I believe that it is important to contribute to the root of a tree for good fruits ».

She says also: “Appreciative Inquiry changed me. It has become a part of my life, my family, and everything I do. Once I started to say things positively, life has become comfortable and easy” … and: , “You must not only teach how to catch fish, but you must do things. You must act!”

Chhing Lamu Sherpa – Nepal

She works for Plan Nepal, and for Mountain Spirit.
She is member of ‘Imagine Nepal.org‘.

Read: ‘ … on PRA and Participation in Nepal‘, 52 p., March 24, 2000.

For the past two decades, Chhing Lamu Sherpa (born 1960) has played a pivotal role in empowering women and extremely marginalized groups in eastern Nepal. As an educated professional woman working to improve the lives of poor and deprived mountain communities, she is a role model for other members of Nepal’s Sherpa community, an ethnic minority living off the rural mountainous areas, often as expedition guides. She had to face ridicule when she started to go to school – Sherpa was an « old » 17 years of age.

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Linked with Village Focus International VFI. – She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « I enjoy my work and am happy when people feel proud of our work ». And: « The climate becomes drier, unlike the past when rainfall was consistent, now we are suffering from drought, and lack of water. Many wild animals that cannot find food start to roam around and eat the villager’s produce. If we do not take care of our own food, well, all the animals, wild boar, barking deer and other deer will eat it all ».

Boualaphet Chounthavong – Laos

She works for Village Focus International VFI. And with The Community-Based Natural Resource Management Network CBNRM.Net.

Her bio.

Boualaphet Chounthavong was born in 1967 in Salawan province, southern Laos, at the height of the Vietnam War. Her father was a teacher who was promoted after the war to a high-ranking post in the Ministry of Education. Her mother was a member of the Laos Women Union. Studying on a government scholarship, Boualaphet obtained her degree in medicine from the National University of Medicine in Laos in 1993.

But instead of opening a high profile medical practice in the capital, which should have earned her a convenient life as a physician, she decided to return to her rural village in Salawan province. She chose to work in a very remote and backward neighborhood in the rural areas.

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She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « We should remember that we will not live forever, that at one point we will pass away. And therefore, it is useless to accumulate too much for ourselves. It is better to create something valuable ».

She says also: « At home, we were never rich. And still, I realized very early on that we are all quite wealthy in Switzerland. I am convinced that we do not need everything for ourselves. So let us share with other people, living in other places that are less privileged. We should not leave people there in poverty and misery. With our wealth and know-how, we can help them to help themselves. » Under this motto, Elizabeth Neuenschwander has been working for almost 50 years and still does so today.

And she says: « I always worked best when they let me do my job and nobody asked how I did it. I went with an order and strived towards my own goals. That is my talent: working on a grassroots level where you have direct contact with the people, where you can teach them the most efficient and practical way to achieve something. That is the way I was taught, that is what made my professional life successful ».

Elizabeth Neuenschwander – Switzerland

Elizabeth Neuenschwander has spent almost 50 years of her life working abroad. She became a dressmaker and left Emmental, a remote Swiss region, at age 19. Since the late 1950s, she has worked in developing countries for different organizations: with Tibetan refugees in Nepal and India, as a nutrition advisor in Biafra and Nigeria. Those were only a few stations on her way from a dressmaker to a project manager. Since 1986, she has worked in Quetta, Pakistan, where she founded self-help projects for Afghan refugees. In 2001, the Canton of Berne gave her the renowned Trudi-Schlatter Award.

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Linked with UNIFEM, and with ‘Centra Asia – Tadjikistan – Dushanbe‘ on our AEHRF pictures blog.

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « My dream is to strengthen peace in my country forever, to make the life of women and children free of violence, to help my people surmount this transition period, and survive the economic crisis ».

Bihodjal Rahimova – Tajikistan

She works for UNIFEM.

Bihojal Rahimova (born 1941) is a national adviser of the Unifem Project « Rights for the Land and Economic Safety of Rural Women » in Tajikistan. Owing to her efforts there have been significant changes in land reform legislation as well as in the state program on equal rights and possibilities for men and women. She pays special attention to the issues of access to land and credit for rural women. She brings to this task long experience as an important political figure in the Soviet Union and a profound concern for the rights of women. (Read all on 1000peacewomen 2005).

Go to Political Heroes.

links:

Women organizations in Tajikistan; and its directory;

Political heroes, (show them all);

Country Briefing Paper—Women and Gender Relations in Tajikistan.

Sorry, I can get no other information in english on Bihodjal Rahimova – Tajikistan.

Linked with European Journal of Migration and Law, and with ‘Centra Asia – Tadjikistan – Dushanbe‘ on our AEHRF pictures blog.
She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « It is very easy to hurt those who are unprotected, and very difficult to secure their safety, liberty, and happiness ».

Gavkhar Juraeva – Tajikistan

She works for Migration and Law (ref. on Queen Mary University, London),
and for Loik.

An art historian and area studies expert by education, and an editor, writer of documentary and feature films, and political mediator by profession, Gavkhar Juraeva is devoted to serving the truth, and with it, those who suffer and need her help. In the post-Soviet period, when a bloody civil war broke out in her country, she served as a mediator and sought to protect those who suffered at the margins, on both sides of the conflict. She was forced to leave her country in 1992. Gavkhar continues her fight from Russia, her adopted home. She is a writer, editor, and critic. (Read all on 1000peacewomen 2005).

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Linked with UNIFEM, and with ‘Centra Asia – Tadjikistan – Dushanbe‘ on our AEHRF pictures blog.

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « In my life I try to follow the commandments of Mother Teresa: Despite everything, always do good to people ».

Viloyat Mirzoyeva (born 1952) heads the Women in Development Bureau and the NGO Gender and Development, both of which promote equal rights for women in society. She trains leaders of governmental and non-governmental women’s organizations. As a result of her work, hundreds of women are successfully working in various areas of society. She has helped Tajik women create NGOs that aim to solve gender problems in Tajikistan. (Read all on 1000peacewomen 2005).

Viloyat Mirzoyeva – Tajikistan

She works in cooperation with the Women in Development Bureau WID (1), and for Gender and Development (2).

The Youth Committee under the Tajikistan government, UNFPA office in Tajikistan and the Gender and Development Public Association opened a youth center in the Tajik southern city of Kulob, the Asia-Plus reported May 22. As Viloyat Mirzoyeva, chairwoman of the Gender and Development Public Association, told Asia-Plus it is already the fourth such a center in the republic. According to her, the Center will be engaged in solving issues related to reproductive health and family planning. (text).

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