Mois : septembre 2007

Linked with Cultural Aura of a Nation.

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

PAGAN CHILDHOOD: “I was born in the same year as Charlie Chaplin, Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, the Eiffel Tower, and Eliot, I think,” Anna Akhmatova wrote in one of her autobiographical notes. Lina Kostenko was born several days after the newspaper Pravda carried Stalin’s article “Dizzy with Success.” This happened on March 19, 1930, in the village of Rzhyshchiv, situated on the banks of the eternal river.

Many years later Kostenko said that Rzhyshchiv once reminded her of Macondo from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Nobel Prize-winning Columbian author described Macondo as “a small settlement with two dozen huts built of clay and bamboo on the banks of a river that carried its transparent waters over a stone bed of white polished boulders the size of prehistoric eggs.” Macondo is inhabited by odd people, who time and again find themselves afflicted by strange maladies. In their world reality merges with fantasy and fable. What was Lina Kostenko’s fable of Rzhyshchiv like? (full text).

She says: « No human being or living creature deserves to be killed or eliminated. His destiny cannot be solved here, on earth ».

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Lina Kostenko – Ukraine

Lina Kostenko, born in 1930 near Kiev is considered one of the greatest contemporary Ukrainian poets. She was just a young girl when the Second World War began and Ukraine was occupied. This marked her for life and she started to put her feelings into poems at the age of 14.

Later she had to fight another battle: the struggle for freedom of thought and identity in the dark years of Soviet totalitarianism. The Ukrainian language and culture were more or less banned and she was among a handful of writers who had the courage to defend those ideals.

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Linked with Human rights education should be a must.

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

She says: « I have done my part. If I die today, I believe I have left a legacy that can be carried on to greater heights ».

She says also: « We counsel the sick, look into the special needs of orphans and engage village leaders in discussions on cultural and behavioral change that they must champion ».

And she says: « Church pastors even told their congregations that they should not go near Tovwirane. We lacked the political will. Our volunteers were scorned. We had no cars or bicycles to cover the distances. It’s like a miracle, when I think back ».

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Sorry, I can not find any photo of Helen Munthali, Malawi (see also my comment ‘Brave women without photos‘).

She works for the Tovwirane HIV/Aids Organisation.

Helen Munthali is the executive director of Tovwirane HIV/Aids Organisation, based in Mzimba in the northern part of Malawi. She was born in 1946 in Nazala Village near the country’s commercial city of Blantyre to a Malawian mother and an Indian father.

Tovwirane (« Let’s help each other ») was launched in 1993. Since then it has assisted thousands of people infected and affected by HIV/Aids. It offers orphan care, counseling of people living with HIV/Aids and their caretakers through outreach campaigns and community-based projects.

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

She says: « I have a dream for Lao children to have bright and clear faces, happiness in their mind, when they are reading books. This is why I am eager to dedicate my time to them ».

She says also: « The Palm-leaf manuscripts contain Dharma, Buddha teaching, the history of Lord Buddha, history, astrology, magic, folk tales, indigenous medicinal herb texts, indigenous medical treatment and other important things such as folk law and village law. The National Library will publish these in Lao language for people to read. If Lao people can read Dharma alphabets in Palm-leaf, they can get doctorate degrees without having to go to abroad to study ». The program received a Gold Medal at the Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany.

And she says: « Children in our country have less opportunities to read books. That is why I proposed this project to government, which presented it to foreign organizations ».

Kongdeuane Nettavong – Laos

She works for the National Library of Laos.

Kongdeuane Nettavong was born in 1947 to an upper class family in Muang Chiang Kwang, northern Laos, when France colonized the country. After finishing secondary school in 1970, she went to Laval University in Quebec, Canada for her Bachelor’s Degree in Geography. In 1973, she went to Paris for her Master’s Degree in Archives at Saint Cloud, graduating in 1974, for her Master’s degree in Archives.

She returned to Laos and taught geography and history at the Teacher Training College. She has pursued a literacy program for the Laotians by setting up libraries, publishing books in Lao and encouraging people to read. She has been Director of the National Library of Laos since 1989. She was also assistant teacher of French and English and consultant for academic affairs in Laos.

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Linked with .

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

She says: « Nowadays there is a tendency to attribute micro credit for reasons for which sometimes I feel responsible, as I was a pioneer in this matter. But they have changed my idea, distorting it. Today, they function as a kind of loan company that charges women an interest rate of 5% for nothing. We shall build a social bank, with strategies to facilitate the process of empowerment. For us, credit is a means, and not a goal. A means, which allows women to organize themselves, to be active. It gives them the means to use their own skills, the means to have a better life and the means to be happy. The right to be happy can be affected by cultural matters. Nevertheless, I believe that this is fundamental. It is something that has the ability to expand you, to make you feel things fully, to make you strive to achieve things. It also makes you aware that to experience things fully, you have to live in harmony with the rest of your environment ».

She says also: « The essential part of our work concerns the organization and the personal development of rural women. We are not management offices. We do not give out grants or food. I don’t come to see if I can. I come because I know I can. I don’t like confrontation, even if I am very demanding. I look for strategies. I have worked for peace on all sides. I am a builder, a guerrilla for peace. I am always making proposals and I try to turn them into reality, step by step ».

Nuria Costa Leonardo – Mexico

She works for the National Network of Rural Women (direct website not found, but there are many rural women networks, see some down after ‘links’).

When Nuria Costa Leonardo was 13 years old, she helped in her father’s publishing house. She learned to work hard, to value her independence and to be firm in her judgments. With the richness of her background, she went to the mountains at the age of 19 and lived in rural Mexican communities for the next 20 years.

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

She says: « I have no regrets and I will fight again against such injustice in the future ».

Yinxiu Zhu – China

Zhu Yinxiu, a brave peasant laborer, appealed against the township government’s ill-treatment of her family’s arbitrary fines, detentions and searches, and infliction of personal injuries. The incident was exposed in the media and the arbitrary levies on peasants were corrected to a large extent.

Zhu Yinxiu’s brother-in-law, migrant worker Chen Jiabao, returned to his home in Anfu, Jiangxi Province during the SARS period in China. His family reported his return to the local township government since anyone coming in had to be quarantined for a certain time because of the SARS epidemic. Several officials visited and imposed a fine of 1,000 yuan without any reason.

The family was helpless, they pleaded with the officials, even trying to bargain with them, but to no avail. Finally the amount was decided at somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 yuan, but the family did not have the money to pay right away and neither could they arrange for a loan in such a short period. The cadres threatened to take away their cattle.

Chen Jiabao safely passed the quarantine period during which the cadres returned twice to demand the fine. Chen Jiabao could not arrange for the money since he was quarantined and the cadres took away the cattle and one of the motorcycles without giving a receipt or indicating the equivalent value of either in cash. Zhu wanted to take some photos as evidence.

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Linked with Who is afraid of sexual minorities?

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

She says: « Women, cherish yourselves and engage in acts of passionate resistance and resilience for this can create a force so potent that it banishes the darkness and brings peace back into the world ».

She says also: « I have chosen these strategies because it is my responsibility as a White person to work with and encourage other White women / people to realize and undo the damage caused by our colonialism, our racism and xenophobia. Being Irish by heritage affords me insights into what it is to have one’s lands, language and lives stolen by an invading and occupying dominant society. I feel a deep rage at the injustices perpetrated by colonialism (historical and contemporary) and I have learnt to turn that rage to the advantage of the Indigenous peoples in whose lands I was born and live as a result of the Irish diaspora caused by English colonialism ».

And she says: « I have been taught, and sometimes challenged, by their determined insistence to name injustices I had not yet perceived, including my own unsuspected behaviors and attitudes. Above all I have been inspired by the determination of the women elders to strive against all odds to pass their cultural knowledge onto their young ones, so that they might grow proud of who they are and strong in their cultural heritage. I continue to hold the Indigenous women in admiration for their ability not to hate, despite the terrible destruction wrought upon their peoples by White society. These women are my guides and mentors, and for that I am blessed ».

Zohl de Ishtar – Australia

She works for the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement NFIP (named in PEACE-Magazine), for the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, and for the Lesbian movement.

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Linked with Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola MPLA.

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

She is also named on political heroe.

She says: « I was standing barefoot in the warm African earth and my mother said to me, ‘This land is ours, go tell the world that this land is ours ».

She says also: « We live on our mothers’ backs, our skins are fastened. That imbued me with Africa. It is something I have never forgotten » .

Maria de Jesus Haller – Angola

She works for the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola MPLA, and for the Union of Angolan Writers/Uniao dos escritores Angolanos .

The first woman ambassador from Angola, Maria de Jesus Haller, was born in 1923 to a 12-year-old Angolan mother. Her father, the Portuguese owner of the plantation, sent her to Portugal at the age of three.

Twelve years later a short-lived but decisive reunion with her mother provided the incentive for her political commitment. She became a teacher, then a journalist fighting racism and discrimination.

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