TEDxTraverse City Paola Gianturco Women Who Light the Dark
show me your hand if you take pictures for fun aha I think it's everybody me too the story I'm going to tell you could be your story when I was 55 I was doing business consulting all over the country I had for over 30 years and that year I decided to do teaching as well and at the end of that year I counted up and I had made two years worth of income in one year I'd bought myself a year I also had a million frequent flyer miles it's not almost the same amount Asst flying to the moon but I could go almost anywhere for free so I decided I would take what I thought was going to be one year off and do a book about low income women artisans whom I had read were sending their children to school with the money they earned from making handicrafts I invited a friend to come with me never mind that she wasn't a professional photographer either neither was I some people might say this was a harebrained scheme don't you think but I'll show you what happened we traveled by dugout canoe to islands off the coast of Panama to interview women who make Mullis like this we moved boulders in Guatemala in order to get to the weaving villages we traveled so far into South Africa into the countryside that the banks had never seen traveler's checks which we had hoped to use at that point this is turkey this is Olivia in India we hid on the floor of the Jeep as we went up against the Pakistani border through the military checkpoints to interview Mirror embroiderers this is Thailand we marveled at the energy and the commitment and the ingenuity of these crafts women the women became our teachers and our friends Here I am learning to ululate in a field in Kenya you can't take a midwestern the midwestern out of the Midwestern girl Here I am hoeing corn I was born in Illinois I will tell you something I never went back to business I'm now working on my fifth book and in fact I've documented women's lives in 55 countries do you remember when Sigmund Freud asked what do women want I know they want economics sustainability environmental sustainability they went social justice they went education they want health and they want peace that's it they not only yearned for those things they are working tirelessly to get them and I'm going to show you three instances in which I saw them making progress in erisa India rural people go by train to the cities looking for jobs often they don't find them sometimes they can no longer afford to feed their children so they have to abandon them and the result is that girls like Rama are destined for molestation and disease and drugs and prostitution a teacher named Inderjeet Khurana went to the train platforms one morning with chalkboards and began teaching the children right there in the train stations when they arrived the first morning she taught 11 children she did that once a week at first and suddenly she was teaching 114 children every day today there are 12 train platform schools you can see little clusters of children like this under the trees at the end of the platform the children learn the 3 R's in three languages as the trains zoom right past this is in Bob way traditional healers tell men there who are hiv-positive that they will be cured cured if they have sex with virgins like these a teacher Betty Maconie founded the girl child Network which currently has 30,000 members all little girls ages 6 to 16 they have made child rape a national issue the girls write poems about their experiences and perform them in public meetings and instantly their communities are mobilized to action the girls celebrate their successes in Brazil PETA and Sasa runs an after-school program for little girls who grew up in the favelas in the shanty towns they usually grow up to be able to do only housecleaning or to be prostitutes Etta's program provides academics and they teach classical ballet which helps the girls learn discipline which they need to study math students when I was there were putting on a fashion show this is the minus sign model and the big news was that does uh had just been accepted to university I call women like that women who light the dark I have met women who light the dark all over the world so fasten your seat belts I'm going to take you on a whirlwind tour with me I had never put all over the photographs I've taken in the last 15 years or so in one place before but I suddenly realized that they will show you exactly what faces women and their families virtually everywhere so here we go in every country the poorest of the poor are women the United Nations estimates that half of the world's families are supported by women some still are doing traditional work crafts for example in Morocco Czech Republic and Nepal Beirut women still farm in Kenya in India in Indonesia in Morocco and Vietnam women's ditch in India and in China and they raised animals in Morocco but increasingly women everywhere beginning to learn how to do jobs that pay more for example in Nepal women are training as trekking guides they are learning how to be taxi cab drivers and hairdressers in Nicaragua women are learning how to do the construction trades a chef in China the nursery owner in Ecuador illiterate women in India learning how to be solar engineers so they can bring light to their dark villages women's work means that their families can eat Zimbabwe French West Indies Ireland Cameroon Turkey Kenya the United States let's talk about literacy nearly a billion people can't read and two-thirds of those are women and girls but more girls are going to school in Cuba Kenya Zimbabwe where they can barely afford school uniforms and many can't afford shoes the global sex trade is a multi-billion dollar industry in Cambodia when factories like this close because production is moving to China 1,500 women may become susceptible to the drug to the sex traffickers the United Stated Nations estimates that one in every three women in the world is beating in Vietnam storytelling is therapy for abused women in the United States women in wheelchairs who are particularly susceptible to attack learn how to do self-defense everyone as we've been hearing experiences environmental problems in Vietnam it's the motorbikes who are causing the kind of things you saw from space in China a huge problem for women is water we've heard about water a lot today Nepalese women may have enough water to do laundry but in Africa often there is not enough water water and getting water is the work of women and girls they may walk as many as seven hours a day out and back to get it leaves no time to go to school in Kenya women's troops get water this is also true in India where the girls get water instead of going to school in Kenya the women's cell water in order to raise enough money to pay back the drillers who drill on credit in order to give the communities water the women in Guatemala who's using an old bicycle as a water pump let's look at health issues half the people living with hiv/aids in the world are women a woman doctor in Cambodia runs a mobile clinic and she teaches prevention grandmothers in Swaziland run a nursery a seedling nursery and then plant a community garden in order to feed the AIDS orphans whom they're taking care of in South Africa the grandmothers are taking care of AIDS orphans by sharing the responsibility for running a daycare center Cameroon Medical Women's Association teach the traditional healers that they cannot cure AIDS like this they've also taught nutrition to women who were living with AIDS as this woman is and taught new mothers how to avoid it this indigenous nurse teaches AIDS prevention in Ecuador but AIDS is not the only issue that women are tackling women with disabilities from 30 countries come to Eugene Oregon in order to learn leadership disabled women in Cameroon get job training from community health workers in Kenya little girls dance when sanitary napkins are distributed at school otherwise they wouldn't have any at the train platform schools that we looked at earlier Saturday's hygiene day the children are taught to take baths in the drinking fountain on the plane train platform a lot of little streakers on Saturday morning that day and a doctor comes once a week to be sure that they're healthy in Senegal grandmothers have convinced villagers to stop female genital mutilation so that their daughters won't die and childbirth in the u.s. raging grannies demonstrate behalf of healthcare reform this senegalese woman by the way told me she was 130 because she never eats anything with preservatives let's look at human rights lesbians in Argentina do Street Theater to reduce discrimination this play is called the seven patriarchal Commandments Filipino women who were sex slaves during World War two have sued Japan for reparations acknowledgement and a place in the history books they are determined this will never happen again even though they may be poor woman's spiritual lives are very rich and Nepalese shaman conducts a ceremony in the United States the healer in Ecuador does a birth ritual Syria Brazil Bolivia Portugal United Arab Emirates a baptism in Kenya Spain Olivia this is Melinda Iran what else is universally important to women their families their sons for example in Cameroon India Italy Spain white Amala Ecuador in the US their husbands this man isn't whether than Cameroon Italy China I ask you how could you not fall in love with guys like that so here they are falling in love in Cuba Portugal a wedding in Laos another wedding in Cuba universally mothers hope that their daughters will have better lives than they have had so I'm going to end with a kind of meditation on little girls may their futures be bright Swaziland Thailand Zimbabwe Italy Sweden Ecuador Italy Turkey Zimbabwe Cuba I call this buns Ireland Nicaragua USA heck we're doing USA Italy Jordan Cuba Panama Peru France USA Brazil this is a mom in Vietnam mothers love those families that's all the pictures I have to tell you show you I just want to close by this by saying that the women in my books taught me how to create an artistic social and economic legacy as you heard I give a hundred percent of my author royalties to nonprofit organizations that are working on which issues that affect women and their families everywhere and what I never counted on was that the readers of my books would join me I now know of a hundred and twenty thousand dollars that went from the readers of the first book to the women who had been featured in that book made me very proud and very happy people often ask me how they can get involved you know you will get gift bags as you leave today and in your gift bag is I can get mine out of my pocket a little USB key and I put on it hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ways to understand the issues that affect women and their families everywhere and hundreds and hundreds of ideas about how you can get involved if you would like to I know that the people in this audience are engaged in doing good things here in Traverse City and regionally and nationally and internationally but if you know somebody who isn't yet this might be useful and by the way tell them that they don't have to be millionaires into in order to do good things all they need is a talent and an asset as I did with my photography which was a hobby and my frequent flyer miles I'm going to end by reading you a poem that I love this was written by a woman named Marge Piercy she said it goes on one at a time it starts when you care to act it starts when you do it again after they say no it starts when you say we and you know who we mean and every day you mean one more I am absolutely convinced that it will take all of us all of us working together to create hope and possibility for this world so I thank you were very inviting me here and I salute you on the good work that you are already doing