'Mothers' Gardens" in Bangladesh

A "Mother's Garden" meeting in Chuadanga, Bangladesh sponsored by IMPACT Foundation

With the success of Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDaunn's Half the Sky, it is clear that by giving poor women the tools to help their families through micro-loans, education and other means, not only does the health of children improve, but the status of women in relation to men can be raised.

The IMPACT Foundation has a mission to help children with disabilities. This includes not only surgery to correct crooked limbs, fix cataracts and cleft lip and palates, but educational programs for mothers and midwives to lower incidences of infant and maternal mortality and birth defects. In Chuadanga, IMPACT Foundation has also enabled 4500 families to improve their everyday nutrition. Over the last 10 years they have distributed seeds, education and tools to women who plant "Mothers' Gardens." They grow brightly colored, leafy vegetables high in folic acid and other vitamins that help pregnant women deliver healthier babies. In addition, the organization holds meetings to teach women basic information on nutrition. They also provide safety information and provide barriers that can be placed around open cooking fires so that children will not accidentally get burned while their mothers cook.

Not only has the health of the children improved since the implementation of the gardens, but these women are able to sell their surplus products giving their families added income. These women provide nutrition for their families, gain self esteem for themselves and, through their financial efforts, also become more respected by their husbands. These photos were taken on a visit to IMPACT whose efforts also include the Jibon Tari floating hospital.


A mother from Chuadanga in her garden

Birth Education in Afghanistan

Too many women in Afghanistan face death or post delivery complications when giving birth. The documentary, Motherland Afghanistan tells the story of one native doctor trying to make a difference in his homeland. The article below, taken from BBC News, illustrates another problem with patriarchy in Afghanistan: it contributes to ignorance of safe birthing techniques for teen wives leading to high incidences of infant mortality. Here, it is not doctors but the rural women themselves who are educating mothers, helping them to deliver healthy babies. 

Afghan midwives deliver life-saving birth education

By Nadene Ghouri Kabul, Afghanistan

Afghanistan is one of the most dangerous places in the world to have a child. Women face a one-in-11 risk of dying during pregnancy and childbirth, while one in five children dies during or after birth or before the age of five. One initiative is under way to try to make giving birth safer.

Training and education is helping Rogul to save babies' lives

Rogul wraps a grimy blue scarf around her face and uses the cleanest corner of it to wipe her tears.
She has just told me how nine of her babies died after she gave birth to them at home.
Her firstborn, a little boy, was premature. Her mother asked a village mullah for advice. He suggested prayer and a type of holy water. The baby died.
Her second child died from an infection a few hours after birth. And so it went on - nine dead babies in total.
I am sitting in an Afghan neonatal clinic in Guldara district, just 20 minutes drive from the capital city Kabul.
Women, some in traditional blue burka, others wearing the brightly coloured scarves and loose pantaloons more typical of the nomadic Kuchi tribe, are here.
Some are clutching roundly pregnant bellies, others are here to have their babies vaccinated.
Few would be here at all, if they had not been persuaded to come by a local midwife.
Evil spirits
A young girl called Pashtu, with a dirty face and scared eyes, agrees to talk.
She does not know how old she is but looks no more than 15. She is eight months pregnant with her second child.

Afghanistan has one of the highest infant mortality rates

Next month she will give birth in the safety of the clinic. She gave birth to her first child in a filthy hole-in-the-ground toilet at home with only her elderly mother-in-law for help. Her son was born blue and barely breathing. He survived for just under an hour.
I ask her why the baby died? She gives me a nonchalant shrug. Her aunt, a large woman with long braided dark hair is sitting next to her.
"Pashtu is too skinny and doesn't eat enough," she asserts loudly. "This is why her child died."
Another woman tells me it is because Pashtu's husband is an opium addict.
Many babies in Afghanistan also die because of traditional cultural practices.
It is common for babies to be washed in freezing cold water immediately after birth - which can cause pneumonia - umbilical cords are cut with unsterile knives, or babies are placed on a dirty floor to ward off evil spirits, which can cause infection.
Few women breastfeed for the first few days because colostrum, the nutritious fluid in early breast milk - something which is vital for a baby's immune system - is seen here as "dirty". Instead newborns are often fed melted butter.
No sex education
Istiqlal Hospital in central Kabul houses the city's largest maternity ward. Here stories of ignorance prevail.
Two teenage girls giggle as they tell me they had no idea how pregnancies happened, even after they were married.
One of them is here because she miscarried at five months. She had not known she was pregnant, because she was not aware of any of the symptoms of pregnancy.
"If we ask any questions about these things, we will be called bad girls," they explain as their faces flush red with embarrassment.
The doctor tells me that their mothers often assume they will work it out for themselves after they marry. But they often do not.
"I see many young girls who have married and still don't realise sex with their husband equals babies," he tells me.
But change is beginning to happen.
The ministry of public health has launched a programme to train and deploy 400 new midwives a year.

Some 2,400 midwives have been trained in Afghanistan since 2002

What is key is that the women are not outsiders forced on a mistrustful local population, but are local women from the communities they serve. This means religious leaders and conservative husbands do not prevent them from working.
Largely as a result of this, the number of women giving birth who were helped by a trained midwife has more than tripled since 2003.
Rogul, who learned the hard way just what giving birth alone can mean has now been given midwifery training by the British charity Save the Children.
This woman who lost nine of her own babies has now saved lives of many others.
She tells me how, the week before, she had locked an angry mother-in-law out of a room where a young woman gave birth, because the mother-in-law had tuberculosis and could have passed the infection to the newborn.
She chuckles with glee as she recounts the tale of the mother-in-law banging on the door trying to get in.
It is clear what Rogul, with a combination of personal tragedy and a solid new education, can achieve in her community. But as yet, there are not enough Roguls to go around.
And for her the story has a happy ending. After her training she realised why her first nine babies had died.
When she fell pregnant again, she knew what to do and now has a son and two daughters. "They are living proof of my work," she says with a big smile.

Missing Girls in India

The Economist magazine published the following article, another example of the downside of patriarchy and tradition. For another blog on gender inequality in India click here.

India's skewed sex ratio

Seven Brothers

An aversion to having daughters is leading to millions of missing girls

Apr 7th 2011 | KOTLA, HARYANA | from the print edition

“WE’RE going for a trip”, Sakina remembers her older sister saying. Orphaned and poor, the girls were happy to leave their home in Kolkata. Taken 1,300km to Kotla, a village on the wheat plains south of Delhi, the 12-year-old Sakina was dumped in the arms of an older man while her sister fled. The man, a wage labourer, had paid over 5,000 rupees ($100, today) to a dalal, or broker, who arranged to ship unwanted girls to places short of them.

Sakina, now taking a break from the first harvest of the year, recalls the early misery of her new home. A Bengali forced into marriage, she was jeered at as a paro, a term for female outsider in Haryana, and shunned. We are treated as goats, mutters another woman, imported from Hyderabad. “It was when I started having children that I realised I had no time to be upset,” Sakina says. She has produced nine offspring, eight of them boys. Now she worries about getting brides for them—and says she is even ready to repeat her own sad history by contacting a dalal.

She may have to. Early data from February’s national census, published on March 31st, show India’s already skewed infant sex ratio is getting worse. Nature provides that slightly more boys are born than girls: the normal sex ratio for children aged 0-6 is about 952 girls per 1,000 boys. Since 1981, the ratio has steadily fallen below that point: there were 945 girls per 1,000 boys in the 1991 census, 927 in 2001 and now 914. Fast growth, urbanisation and surging literacy seem not to have affected the trend.

The ratio is most distorted in the states of the northern Gangetic Plain, such as Punjab. Haryana, Sakina’s home, remains the direst of all, with only 830 girls per 1,000 boys. More worrying, places that used not to discriminate in favour of sons, such as the poorer central and north-eastern states, have begun to do so. Economic success, argues Alaka Basu, a demographer, “seems to spread son preference to places that were once more neutral about the sex composition of their children.” The new census showed a worsening sex ratio in all but eight of India’s 35 states and territories (though those eight include some of the most extreme examples, for instance, Punjab).

The “missing girls” are usually aborted, shortly after the parents learn of their sex. A short drive from Kotla to Nuh, a typical trading town, shows how. The main road is dotted with clinics that boast of ultrasound services. Requests for a scan to check the sex of a fetus are turned down at “Bharat Ultrasound” and “City Care Hospital”, but a nervous medic at one does recommend a place that would do it.

In fact, says Gaushiya Khan, a local activist, medics are ready to reveal a fetus’s sex for as little as 600 rupees. Doing so is illegal, and discouraged by various campaigns, but the law is almost impossible to enforce. Slapping the father on the back and saying “you’re a lucky man” is hint enough. D
demand for scans is rampant. Entrepreneurs are said to tour villages with scanners on bicycles.

The impact on Indian society is grim. You might have thought that scarcity would lead to girls being valued more highly, but this is not happening. One measure is the practice of giving dowries. Almost no one, rich or poor, urban or rural, dreams of dispensing with these. Rather, as Indians grow wealthier, dowries are getting more lavish and are spreading to places where they were once rare, such as in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, in the south. In Kotla women huddled around Sakina shake their heads when asked to imagine life without dowries: “then nobody would find a husband”, they say.

A skewed sex ratio may instead be making the lot of women worse. Sociologists say it encourages abuse, notably in the trafficking of the sort that Sakina first suffered from but is now ready to pay for. Reports circulate of unknown numbers of girls who are drugged, beaten and sometimes killed by traffickers. Others, willingly or not, are brought across India’s borders, notably from Bangladesh and Myanmar. “Put bluntly, it’s a competition over scarce women”, says Ravinder Kaur of the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi.

Men, especially if poor and from a low caste, suffer too. Women in India are sometimes permitted, even encouraged, to “marry up” into a higher income bracket or caste, so richer men find it easier to get a bride. The poor are forced into a long or permanent bachelorhood, a status widely frowned upon in India, where marriage is deemed essential to becoming a full member of society. Poor bachelors are often victims of violent crime.

Yet, bad as things are, sex selection may slowly be turning around. Though the sex ratio has been worsening for decades, it is doing so more slowly. The figure in 2001 was 1.9% worse than it had been in 1991. The figure in 2011 was 1.5% worse than in 2001—an improvement of sorts.
Moreover, the ten-year census may not capture what has been happening recently. For that, go to the sample surveys that India carries out more often. These show a different pattern. The figures are not strictly comparable, because sample surveys show the sex ratio at birth, whereas the census gives it among infants up to the age of six. Still, it is significant the sex ratio at birth is improving, not worsening. In 2003-05 the figure was 880 girls born per 1,000 boys. In 2004-06, that had risen to 892 and in 2006-08, to 904. It is not clear why this should be. The samples could be misleading. But perhaps they reveal a recent change in Indian attitudes towards the value of daughters.

The fears about India’s sex ratio are not merely of the harm that today’s level will cause when children become adults. People also worry that the ratio will get ever worse, deteriorating towards Chinese levels (which are even more extreme: on a comparable basis, China’s sex ratio at birth is about 833). This fear, thinks Monica Das Gupta of the World Bank, may be exaggerated. Not only are there signs of an incipient national turnaround, but regional figures give further reasons for hope. The states with the worst ratios, Haryana and Punjab, seem to have had skewed ratios for decades, going back to the 1880s. They now show some of the biggest improvements.

The national average is worsening thanks to states which once were more neutral with regard to sex, such as Tamil Nadu and Orissa. But because they have not had the historical experience of a strong preference for sons, Ms Das Gupta suggests, they also seem less likely to push the sex ratio to the extremes that it reached in Punjab or China. If so, the next census in 2021 could show the beginnings of a shift towards normality. With luck, the deterioration in north-east and central India—damaging though it will certainly be—may not mark the start of a fresh erosion in the value of Indian girls.

The full article can be found at  http://www.economist.com/node/18530371

Educating Against Female Circumcision in Africa



Ms. Funso Orenego, director of the Inter African Committee Nigeria

In 2009, I traveled to Lagos, Nigeria, to conduct a medical site visit and met with Ms. Funso Orenego, Director of the Inter African Committee Nigeria. I was introduced through email to Ms. Orenego by Dr. Shahid Aziz of Smile Bangladesh. Dr. Aziz had considered taking a team to Nigeria to perform cleft lip and palate surgery on children. My job was to review several hospitals, meet with the health minister and various hospital administrators and present a report. 

I asked Ms. Orenego about the work of her organization and was informed that she and several social workers traveled to rural villages throughout the country teaching traditional birth attendants better and more hygienic delivery methods. They also taught against female circumcision - the removal of all or part of the clitoris - also called female genital mutilation (FGM).

I was familiar with the practice. Last week, as I do every semester at Western Connecticut State University in Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, I screened the documentary Shackled Women: Abuses of a Patriarchal World. This short film illustrates the harm done to women in societies where men dominant social, religious and financial institutions. In Bangladesh and India this can lead to female infanticide and 'bride burnings' over dowry demands. In the Middle East, particularly in Afghanistan and Iran, movement of women is curtailed in public through gender segregation, veiling and other interpretations of hijab. While some may find this good moral behavior, other women feel their intellect as well as their actions are stifled. In Western nations, gender violence includes the trafficking of young girls and women for sex. They are often kept in virtual slavery, physically, sexually and emotionally abused by their captors. Finally, in 28 African nations, Muslims and Christians alike practice FGM to mark a girl's transition into womanhood. It is the fate of about 6,000 women and girls everyday.

In Shackled Women, a baby girl in Togo, West Africa of about 2 years of age is brought to a midwife for a demonstration of FGM. The baby is stripped of her clothing and her legs are held apart by a group of village women. The midwife is seen gesticulating to the group with a razor blade while the baby girl's screams pierce the soundtrack. At this point the students are usually covering their eyes and looking in horror and whispering, "She's not really going to do that?!" Yes, it is one thing to read about FGM in the textbook,  quite another to anticipate watching the procedure unfold while the 'victim' struggles to get free. Just as the midwife is about to make the cut, she moves in front of the baby and blocks the 'surgery' from the viewers gaze. Afterward, the women cheer and clap.

In interviews the women claim, "the clitoris is always removed like that, if not the girl will be abused by other women." Some believe an uncircumcised woman's baby will die during delivery. They explain "you must trick the girl on the day of her circumcision in order to get her the place of excision." Men think they will lose control and power over women or that their wives will want too much sex if they are not circumcised. A girl has no alternative to the practice if she hopes to survive as she will be shunned and remain unmarried unless she completes this rite of passage.

In Nigeria, the age at which a woman was circumcised and the type of circumcision varied around the country. According to Ms. Orenego, some girls had the procedure done as infants, some at the time of marriage, others right before the birth of a child.

Instruments used in FGM

Instruments used in FGM

Educating woman against FGM was tough going: sometimes village leaders literally ran Ms. Orenego out of town. Uncircumcised girls and older women were afraid to meet and be seen with Ms. Orenego. Since most women did not know what a person looked like with a clitoris and were unfamiliar with all of the health complications of FGM, Ms. Orenego and her team took on their journeys a model of a woman's lower body with removable vaginae. One of the removable pieces showed a vagina stitched closed after circumcision. Another depicted a baby's head emerging from the vaginal opening with an artificial pool of blood that fitted beneath.  These kinds of teaching tools are necessary when your audience, not just women but men too, has high levels of illiteracy.

I had seen these educational tools in V-Day: Until the Violence Stops by playwright and activist Eve Ensler. In that film, a woman in East Africa also traveled on foot through rural areas, village-to-village, carrying the very same models. In addition, Ms. Orenego had a collection of  'instruments' that she collected from her travels to the villages that were used in FGM, pictured here. They looked medieval. Yes, they were blunt, rough and stained. Wrapped in newspaper and old cloth, they hardly seemed sharp enough to cut butter nor capable of sterilization with the rust and nicks visible on the blades.

I learned through our conversations that Ms. Orenego had attended a certificate program at the Center for International Community Health Studies (CICHS) at the University of Connecticut  in 1993. That year I was in graduate school at UConn studying medical anthropology and working on a grant administrated by CICHS regarding maternal/child health programs in Danbury, Connecticut. When Ms. Orenego pulled out her binder containing all of her classroom instruction materials, there was the name of the instructor/adviser we shared on the title page. At that time, I remember viewing photos of a group of recent graduates from Africa of the CICHS program in their offices in Farmington. Maybe Ms. Orenego and I had passed each other in those hallways one day. What an interesting little coincidence.

 

Today, each in our own way, Ms. Orenego and I are educating women and men about the health dangers of FGM. Her work can have immediate impact. But, one never knows whether or not the students of today will become the leaders of tomorrow, capable of making policies that address this and other human rights issues. Meanwhile, a shout out to all of those who, like Ms. Funso Orenego, are working on the ground and in the field to eliminate the practice of FGM.

A Rising American Export: Criminal Deportees

A deportee speaks to WCSU students on Brava, Cape Verde in 2009

Since placing all deportations to Haiti on hold due the devastating earthquake in 2010, the US is once again sending illegal immigrants home, including 700 former criminals deported after serving out their sentences in American jails. Returnees to Haiti arrive in a country still recovering from disaster, steeped in poverty and disease, including a recent cholera outbreak. Many of these deportees left Haiti in their youth; they are unable to speak Creole or French, unskilled in the local labor market, without friends and often without family. They are stigmatized, treated with derision and shame, seen as having wasted a chance for a better life in America.

Under the 1996 Immigration Act, illegal immigrants sentenced to a year or more in prison, even if the sentence is suspended, face deportation. According to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, between October, 2009 and September, 2010 a record 392,862 immigrants were deported and half of those had  criminal records. Most of the crimes were drug related, but burglary, assault and murder were also included. According to the web site Three Strikes , 160 countries receive deportees, but approximately 80% are returned to Latin America and the Caribbean.  These countries have high rates of poverty and unemployment making it easy for deportees to fall victim to gangs and other forms of illegal activity in order to fit in and survive. Many foreign government officials insist, though it is difficult to substantiate, that criminal deportees have contributed to a rise in the number of crimes committed, including murder and armed robbery. They are believed to have added to the repertoire of criminal acts with hijackings and drive-by shootings. Some officials report that these new arrivals are better, more sophisticated criminals than those who are native born.

In 2009, as an adjunct professor of anthropology and as their advisor, I traveled with 25 students from Western Connecticut State University's Humanitarian Travel Club to Brava and Fogo, part of a group of islands located west of Senegal comprising the nation of Cape Verde. The nine distinct dialects spoken on these islands divided into two branches. Brava and Fogo are part of the Sotavento Creole group. We visited schools across the islands, donating school backpacks filled with supplies, toothbrushes and dental floss. One of our students, an aspiring dentist, gave demonstrations on dental hygiene. They also participated in meetings with criminal deportees who were mainly from Cape Verdean immigrant communities  in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

On the fishing boat-ferry from Fogo to Brava.

We first visited Brava, a small, rocky, volcanic island with 6,000 inhabitants. It is rustic, mountainous and beautiful. Wild donkeys roam the steep hillsides. Rising seemingly straight from the ocean, there are no sandy beaches, but there is a protected inlet with a pool nesting among rock formations, a beautiful spot for swimming. The island is very poor with limited modern amenities. In the past, American whaling ships would stop on Brava to pick up supplies and personnel. In this way, many Cape Verdeans first made their way to America. Today, Brava receives few foreign visitors and its population decreases annually.

After a flight from the capital, Praia, to Fogo, the trip to Brava took one-hour on a 25 person fishing-boat-cum-ferry. The waters were turbulent, many people got sea- sick, and several dreaded the journey back on the rough seas (they held a 'sisters of the sea' vigil for a safe return the night before we left Fogo). This experience highlighted the social and geographical isolation later expressed by the deportees we met.

Students walking to a village on Brava.

On Brava, not only was there no work, there were no fast food restaurants, no regular transportation, chain stores or cinemas. Movies are shown out of doors on a screen set-up on weekends in the main plaza. Household sundries and clothing could be purchased at the tiny "Chinese store," s small shop selling household goods and clothing. We were guests of the mayor and stayed in houses maintained by the local government for visitors as there was no hotel that could accommodate a group of our size.

We met the deportees right away as they tended to congregate in the center of the main town, Nova Sintra, unemployed with nothing to do. Considered outcasts, the deportees on Brava did not speak the local dialect. They evoked fear in the locals and had virtually no chance of employment. They survived mostly on money sent from home. Meetings with them were organized by Ines Silva of Cape Verde Care. Ms. Silva's organization hopes to bring aid and awareness to this situation. Each deportee (they were mainly men in their 20s and 30s and a few women) told stories of drug and alcohol abuse and violence. Some had trouble walking and talking. Others shouted in frustration, pleaded to be heard. They were angry, sad, inebriated, in many cases in need of psychological and addiction counseling. As they stood in the center of the meeting hall, I remember being struck by the limping bodies and halting, hoarse voices, revealing histories filled with addiction and abuse. The students listened with compassion and set up impromptu AA meetings on street corners and in restaurants. They brainstormed for ways to raise awareness in the US.

On Fogo, the story was the same. However, this island, accessible by plane, is physically larger and has a population of 40,000. It has beautiful black volcanic beaches and a landscape dominated by the volcano Pico do Fogo which rises to almost 3,000 meters. The deportees here gathered in the capital  Sao Filipe in a small sparsely furnished bar that might be described as ‘seedy.’ It depicted an urban hip-hop ‘vibe,’ and seemed frozen in the late 90s, the year the owner, a deportee himself, had been returned Fogo. While some work was available in construction and in other odd jobs, these displaced "Americans" too were for the most part ostracized and feared, unemployed, bored and in limbo regarding their futures. These deportees appeared slightly less vulnerable, slightly more skeptical. They had seen well-intentioned researchers, humanitarians and government officials pass through before and were still waiting for whatever assistance these groups had promised.

Students visit the Tattoo Bar on Fogo. It is a meeting place for deportees

As I observed the American students interact with the deportees on both islands I thought it was just like watching any group of young adults laugh, listen to music, dance, make jokes and enjoy themselves while learning about each other. One student was brought to tears as deportees told her of loss and loneliness, of missing their parents, girlfriends and children. After a night out, one male student commented, “These guys are really nice! Back home, I would probably never meet up with people like this and get to know them.” He seemed struck by their friendliness and 'normality.' I told him he was probably right: how often does a clean-cut, middle-class college senior have a night ‘on the town’ with convicted felons?

Most of these Cape Verdean deportees came to the US with their parents as small children. Hoping for better opportunities, some families ended up with low wage jobs in poor, urban centers with high levels of crime. 

On Cape Verde, a 2007 study of urban crime by the UNHCR showed that a third of criminal deportees had been deported for assault and that one in five had committed drug related crimes. In 2008, Katherine McInerney posted an article in New England Ethnic News entitled, "Cape Verdean Deportees Bring US Problems to the Homeland.”  She reported on a meeting between Massachusetts state representative Marie St. Fleur, a delegation of ex-patriot Cape Verdeans, also from that state, and government officials in Cape Verde regarding the struggles of criminal deportees. The delegates recalled anecdotes of deportees still without money, food, friends and family after 10 or 15 years in the country. There were stories of desperation and of deportees committing suicide.

Deportee (center) and WCSU student in conversation, Brava

Paulo De Barros, president of St. Peter’s Teen Center in Massachusetts said that many deportees suffered from psychological problems that Cape Verde officials were unable to address. He further stated that, “The kids are coming from a violent community, they’re traumatized and the trauma goes with them. They go back and try to get used to a place they haven’t been since they were five, six, seven years old. It’s a whole new process and they still have America as their home because that’s all they know." 

Victor Borges, Cape Verde's Minister of Foreign Affairs, said, "When I was a young boy there was always the verb, 'to be': to be something. Now we speak to our children using much more the verb 'to have.' To have things, to have money . . . but before we have all this we must be something." One could make the argument that the deportees developed cultural identities and honed their criminal skills in America out of need and desperation. Now, we are exporting them and these survival skills abroad.

Deportee tells his story, Brava

A concern I have regarding repatriated criminal deportees is not whether or not they should be sent back to their countries of birth, but the process by which the US evicts these individuals from the very country that has shaped their norms and behaviors, values and world-view.  Spend time speaking to deportees and one finds that everything about them - their music, style of dress, sense of humor and slang - is American but their citizenship. They are returned, often fresh from jail or even the hospital, to Haiti, Cape Verde and elsewhere, often to circumstances even poorer than the ones they left behind, with little or no chance of rehabilitation. In fact, those living on Fogo and Brava told of being shunned as failures. Islanders said, "You were in America, you had a chance, and you didn't succeed." 

Certainly responsibility falls upon the families of the deportees who for whatever reasons failed or were unable to obtain citizenship for their children. Circumstances vary and many may have lacked legal, economic or social support. However, these families on reflection may have considered the consequences of keeping their children in the US illegally, especially if they had knowledge that their children were engaging in illegal drug use or other kinds of criminal activities. It's a difficult and complex issue. It is not just about immigration and crime. It is about poverty, access to education and health, about opportunity.  At this point, I hope that legal and humanitarian efforts can be made by both the US and receiving countries to assist criminal deportees, to help find ways to survive besides engaging in illegitimate opportunities, something that harms them, their communities and their families. 

All photos courtesy of Adam Schwarz.

Bangladesh and India: violence against women



Bably and her mother Parul in 2001



In honor (belatedly) of International Women's Day here is a clip from the video, Undesired, by Walter Astrada for Media Storm. Everyday, women in South Asia face violence simply because they are women. The reasons, a mixture of culture, tradition, economics and power, are complex. 

In 2001, I traveled to Bangladesh with a team of plastic surgeons from Healing the Children who performed reconstructive surgery on 33 survivors of acid violence. Mostly women, they were attacked because their in-laws demanded more dowry, they had spurned sexual advances or, in the case of 18-month old Bably, simply because of their sex. Bably's father attempted to kill his daughter by pouring acid in her mouth and down her throat. His parents - the baby's grandparents - tried to hide the crime; however, Bably's mother Parul was very brave and split with her in-laws to save her daughter. Bably not only survived, but thrived and can be seen here dancing at her birthday party in 2006. 

With Ferdousi, her mother stands to the right

Another survivor, Ferdousi, was 15 years-old and attending school. She said 'no' to a boy who wanted to have sex. After threatening many times to burn her, one day as she left school he threw acid in her face. She lost her sight. Ferdousi attended a school for the blind in Dhaka and received money from the Acid Survivors Foundation for her tuition. Of her case, Anita Bell then working with the foundation asked, "Will Ferdousi get married? To be unmarried in Bangladesh is almost like a bad disease! You have really failed as a woman in Bangladesh to not get married." Ferdousi did complete high school and entered college.

Parveen

While dowry is a traditional and customary exchange of wealth from the bride's family to the wife and her husband at the time of a couple's wedding, often demands continue well into the marriage. Particularly important is the fact that the new couple most often reside with or near the husband's parents and brothers, including married brothers and their families. In one instance, when her family could not pay more dowry, a married woman with three children was held down by her brother-in-law and sister-in-law while her husband poured acid on her genitals. She fled with her children to the Acid Survivors Foundation. Her husband and in-laws received life sentences in prison.

Other reasons for acid violence include land disputes and revenge. Often burned in the night, sometimes children too are harmed while sleeping with their mothers. 

Parveen, pictured here, became our helper at Dhaka Medical College Hospital during the one-week surgical mission. The beautiful girl in pigtails to the right seemed too young for such a tragedy. Many had lost not only their eye sight, but their eyes. They had missing ears and hair and could not close their mouths or turn their heads. All lived at the Acid Survivors Foundation where they received medical care, counseling, vocational training and legal assistance. Most of the time these crimes went unreported. With the international recognition of the  Acid Survivors Foundation, many laws have changed in Bangladesh to limit and control the sale of acid, to assist survivors and to punish perpetrators. However, acid violence continues and it is estimated that someone is burned every two days.



Bably at her birthday party, 2006

In India too women are burned through acid violence. In both India and Bangladesh, girls are seen as a burden on the family. Many female fetuses are aborted or, if carried to term, killed immediately after birth. Raising a daughter is equated with 'watering the garden in another man's yard' and second daughters considered  'born for the burial pit.' 

The following story was published on MediaStorm (the complete story with photos can be found on their web site) by Asia Society Producer Shreeya Sinha, who reported, shot video, and field-produced Undesired by photographer Walter Astrada, winner of the 68th Pictures of the Year International for Multimedia Issue Reporting.  

 
The United Nations reports that at least 40 million women in India have died from neglect or were simply never born in the first place. Dr. Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate, first applied the term "missing" to this phenomenon in 1986 when he examined India's census data. Among Christians and Muslims, the female to male sex ratios were close to normal. Among Hindus, who make up 80 percent of India's population, the gender imbalance would spark a demographic crisis.

Until the 1980s, when ultrasound machines became more widespread, girls were commonly killed at birth or were neglected of health and nutrition to ensure their death. Baby girls were left in dumpsters, buried in clay pots or poisoned. Shocking, yes, but the practice still continues. Across the country there is a 47 percent excess female child mortality, girls aged 1-to-4 who are dying before their life expectancy because of discrimination. In the north, specifically the wealthy state of Punjab and neighboring Haryana, the excess female child mortality is 81 and 135 percent respectively, according to India's National Family Health Survey. 

The arrival of ultrasound machines, and its subsequent exploitation, ushered in a silent era of organized crime. Now able to identify the sex of a fetus early in pregnancy, parents who learn their child is a girl often abort her. The government has banned abortions based on gender for the last 16 years. Every ultrasound clinic is required to have a poster explaining the law, yet this $250 million business a year flourishes because of deeply entrenched traditions, official apathy and the lucrative business of illegal ultrasounds.


Every day 7,000 female fetuses are aborted in India, according to the UN.

Dr. Shahid Aziz Brings 'Smiles' to Bangladesh

Today, 80 children with cleft lips and palates are waiting for Dr. Shahid Aziz in Khulna, Bangladesh. His team of 13 will spend a week repairing these deformities free of charge. With 162 million people, the small country of Bangladesh is one of the poorest and most densely populated nations in the world. There are an estimated 300,000 children and adults with cleft deformities and only 30 surgeons in the entire country trained specifically in their repair. Indeed, the need is great and the difference this small team can make in the life of an individual equally huge.

With this mission in mind, Dr. Aziz, his wife Anita Puran, and a group of doctors and nurses formed Smile Bangladesh, a non profit medical organization dedicated to caring for children and adults with facial clefts in Bangladesh and around the world. Visit their web site to learn more about their work or join Smile Bangladesh on Facebook.

The photo above was taken in Bangladesh by Bruce Byers (http://www.brucebyers.com/) who has traveled several times in several countries with Dr. Aziz documenting his work. Having traveled to Bangladesh with both, I am sure that, like me, you too will be moved by their generous and dedicated spirits.

Here is a team from 2010 in Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh. To the far right, Dr. Shahid Aziz. In the center (not in scrubs) is Christina Rozario, Director of Operations for Smile Bangladesh. Behind, to the right of Christina, are (l to r) Dr. Imre Redai (anesthesiologist) and Dr. Sam Rhee (surgeon), all among the founders of Smile Bangladesh.