FAMILY & SEXUALITY / WORK (Kenya)

Empowerment of Women Must Not Leave Men Behind
By Craig Kielburger and Marc Kielburger
The Edmonton Journal, August 27, 2012
"In Emori Joi, Kenya, a generation of men is idle. Without livestock to protect and raiders to repel, they are unneeded as protectors and unable to be providers. Still, each morning they leave their homes and return in the evening as though they were out working. 'They are trying to hide their insecurities and make it look as though they're at least trying to provide,' says 'Mama' Jane Marindany. 'Surely they are walking around with a heavy heart.' With little to boost the pride and self-worth of village men, alcoholism and domestic violence are on the rise. Meanwhile, girls are being educated and women like Marindany are building their own businesses, providing for their families. Women's empowerment has taken the development world by storm. Billions are poured every year into education for girls, women's health and livelihood programs for women. And this is an incredibly good thing. According to the United Nations, women and girls account for six out of 10 of the world's most impoverished people, and two-thirds of the world's illiterate. We've seen the impact on entire communities when women are empowered. Every year that a girl spends in school increases her family's income by up to 20 per cent. Women who earn an income invest 90 per cent back in their families. But the men of Emori Joi are a stark example of a question that is arising in communities - developed and developing alike - around the world: in an age of growing women's empowerment, what about the men? Sipping tea in her home, Marindany talks fondly of another time, when 'Baba' -- her father -- would sit by the door of their hut, spear and bow beside him. His role was to protect the family and their precious livestock from wild animals and raiders from neighbouring villages. Today, villages no longer raid one another and big predators are scarce. Loss of land to development and climate change is reducing herds and the work for men.

GOVERNANCE & CONFLICT (Syria)

"A member of the Free Syria Army walks past a destroyed Syrian forces tank in northern Aleppo province." (Lolo/AFP/Getty Images)

In Northern Syria, People Forced to Scavenge for Fuel and Food
By Martin Chulov
The Guardian, July 11, 2012
"Fuel oil for cooking began to run out in Derat Azza about a month ago. Now, nightly meals in this village near Syria's second city of Aleppo are prepared with scavenged firewood in the courtyards of people's homes. Thin black columns of smoke start to rise at dusk and are soon absorbed by the gathering dark. Then the only lights visible in this blacked out village on the outskirts of Aleppo are the orange flames of the cooking fires. Most people here say they have not received a salary since 2011 and even the basics of life are well beyond their reach. Where fuel oil can be found it costs about £9 a litre. Meat is also prohibitively expensive, so the people eat eggs or potatoes. Even these are now in short supply. Bootleg petrol costs around £2 a litre, more than 10-times its pre-revolution price, and the few cars that move in Derat Azza run on improvised benzine, crackling and thumping their way around Derat Azza's narrow lanes like cartoon jalopies. The story is the same across a swathe of northern Syria. Villages under siege, dangerous roads and scarce fuel have slowed commerce to a halt. Apart from the crash of the occasional artillery shell, the opposition-held village is eerily quiet. After the paper factory was shelled early this month almost all women and children left. Only men of fighting age remain. Earlier that morning, in a dark, dank meeting room below street level, the weary guerillas of Derat Azza were rallying for another day guarding their town. Their headquarters is a vast, gloomy expanse of upturned plastic chairs, foam mattresses and Kalashnikovs scattered to all points like children's toys. In better times, it acts as a wedding venue and a focal point of community life. A dried and brittle bouquet dated March 2011 lies long-discarded against a wall. Two haggard men sat behind a wooden desk, one of them tapping a Chinese-made walkie-talkie, trying to get it to work. 'Mahmoud!' he yelled into it, trying to summon the local guerrilla leader. 'Report to the desk immediately!' Mahmoud eventually stirred at 1pm and roused five of his colleagues. All, like him, were students from nearby Aleppo university, although they had not turned up for weeks. Nor did they think that their admission to one of Syria's most coveted academic institutions amounted to much anymore. 'The revolution means more than the university,' said Ahmed, 22, a gangly fresh-faced chemical engineering undergraduate. 'I didn't go to my exams and nor did most people. This is a price that I'm more than willing to pay for now.'

GOVERNANCE & CONFLICT (Syria)

"Syrian refugees walk outside their camp, just at the border with Syria, in Reyhanli, Turkey, Sunday, March 4, 2012. Some 10,000 Syrian refugees have trickled into neighboring Turkey over the past year fleeing fighting in Syria." (AP Photo/Gaia Anderson)

Syria Eyewitness: Homs Refugees Tell of "Slaughter"
By Paul Wood
BBC Online, March 5, 2012
"The car headlights picked out a ragged group of men, women and children walking up the road towards us. Night had just fallen. There was a bitterly cold wind. They had endured a month of bombardment in Baba Amr then fled, panicking, before ground troops arrived. 'We're homeless,' a woman shouted. 'Why? Because we asked for freedom?' She said they had been walking for three days. Their journey was so long because they walked across fields and through orchards to avoid the army checkpoints. A terrible fear has seized people here about what the government forces are doing now that they are back in control. In a nearby house we sat with six women and their 17 children. They had arrived that day. There were no men. 'We were walking out altogether until we reached the checkpoint,' said one of the women, Um Abdo. 'Then they separated us from the men. They put hoods on their heads and took them away.' Where do you think they are now, I asked. The women replied all at once: 'They will be slaughtered.' We met the Ibrahim family by chance while filming an aid delivery of cooking oil. They told us that on Friday, in the Jobar district of Homs, they had witnessed a massacre. Ahmed Ibrahim told me that 36 men and boys were taken away. Among them were four members of his own family including his 12-year-old son, Hozaifa. All were dead now, he said.

WORK / FAMILY & SEXUALITY (Egypt)

Debts Closed in on Egypt Man Who Died Hanged in His Jail Cell
By Jeffrey Fleishman
The Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2012
"His mother visited him hours before he twisted the edges of his blanket into a rope. 'You'll be out soon,' she told him. 'We paid bail.' 'There's a problem,' he said. 'I owe more.' He hadn't been in his village in months, a scrap of a place tucked amid fields that stretch past the canal to the paved road. The boys on this land learn early to sharpen plow blades and make scarecrows out of grain sacks. It's cold when the rain blows and tough to make a living on, even for a man who cuts furrows. He came home, but in a way no one wanted. 'I guess his life just went black,' said the detective who was called the day guards found Shawadfi Mohamed in his cell. 'Every time he settled one debt there were others waiting for him,' said his wife, Wafaa. Carpenter. Driver. Farmhand. Mohamed was all of them. But they weren't enough in the frayed economy of the Nile Delta. Men running for parliament came up here and said things would get better; maybe they will, but they haven't for decades. No one from Mohamed's village went to the revolution last year in Cairo's Tahrir Square; it was too far and there was no money to get down there and back. People talk about a new Egypt, but it hasn't found the delta yet. The detective, a big man with a mustache who, as is customary with police officials here, asked not to be named, moved his hand in front of him like a plane in a nosedive: 'It was bad before the revolution, now it's worse,' he said, sitting in the station house. 'People can't afford anything unless it's on installments. They don't have birth control, they have a lot of kids, and they have to pay for a lot of weddings and it's all tied up in installments.' A man in the delta is not a man until he's married. Mohamed met Wafaa, a girl from another village, seven years ago. She caught his eye and he went to her family, who said yes. He started borrowing money for the dowry, the wedding, and then the children came -- three boys in five years. He thought about going to work in Libya, like many others in the delta before Libya had its own revolution, but the police wouldn't grant him a passport with all his debts. 'He loved his wife and kids,' said Hamid, Mohamed's uncle. 'He just wanted better for them.' Mohamed had $5,000 worth of IOUs spread out for miles. In this stingy land, it was a sum impossible to make good on unless a man turned to darker things. [...]"

FAMILY & SEXUALITY (Libya)

(Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

Libya’s Sexual Revolution

By Ellen Knickmeyer

Foreign Policy, October 26, 2011

"Before, I was not even daring to look at girls as wife material, because I knew I could not afford" to get married, say Faqiar now. These days, though, Faqiar wears the mismatched camouflage of Libya's rebels and a dashing bandana on his head, pirate-style. He carries a gun. He is a veteran of battles for Libyans' freedom from Qaddafi's regime -- and it's the women who are talking to him. 'Girls around the area come up to you and say, "Thank you! You made us proud, you made us happy,"' Faqiar told me one night recently. He spoke on the sidelines of a camel and couscous feast that the people in this Tripoli suburb threw for several thousand young rebels, after slaughtering 10 camels. From a specially raised dais, speakers praised the young rebel fighters late into the evening.  Hundreds of excited young women and girls in head scarves mingled near rifle-toting young men, a novelty in this conservative country that was overwhelming to members of both genders in the crowd that night. 'It's like a wedding!' Faqiar exclaimed, shaking his head in surprise. Relations between Libyan men and women -- deeply distorted by the eccentric Libyan leader's refusal to provide normal opportunities for Libya's young people -- have changed '100 percent' in the days since Qaddafi fell, the young rebel said. His comrades listening around him voiced agreement. 'Thank God,' 'Faqiar added. Nearby, young women -- a group of cousins and neighbors, clustered together, in long skirts and shirts and head coverings -- said the same, and laughed about taking their pick of a husband from among the rebels when the war was done. Before the revolution, young men her age 'were just lazing around in the streets, no future. I didn't care about them at all,' said Esra'a el-Gadi, 20. 'Now I look at them in a totally new light -- they stood up against Qaddafi. It's something.' 'We saw them as lost youth, unemployed," Rahana el-Gadi, 19, said of men of her generation. "Now we were surprised, so surprised to see what they're capable of,' she added. 'We dream of the day they come back, and we welcome them.' Jokes passed by cell phone text messages across Libya confirm the newfound eligibility of the young civilians turned fighters.

GOVERNANCE & CONFLICT (Global)

Drug Wars: Men in Central America Face One in 50 Chance of Murder before 31
The Telegraph, October 6, 2011
"The spread of drug wars means young men in Central America face a 1 in 50 chance of being murdered before reaching their 31st birthday, a UN report has claimed. Worldwide, 468,000 people were victims of homicide in 2010, with around a third of cases in Africa and a further third in the Americas, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in its first global report on homicide on Thursday. 'In countries with high murder rates especially involving firearms, such as in Central America, 1 in 50 males aged 20 will be killed before they reach the age of 31 -- several hundred times higher than in some parts of Asia,' it said. Increased competition between drug trafficking groups has helped to push up homicide rates in most Central American countries during the past five years. The murder rate in Central America has increased sharply since 2007 after a steady decline between 1995 to 2005, the report said. In some countries in the region, the financial crisis may have played a role in the sudden rise.

GOVERNANCE & CONFLICT (Burma/Myanmar)

"Karen National Army guerrillas who are fighting the Burmese army for greater autonomy and an end to what they describe as ethnic cleansing." (Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

Burma's Convicts Become Unwilling Pawns in a Long and Bitter Civil War
By Esmer Golluoglu
The Guardian, September 30, 2011
"The scars on their shoulders and backs give it away. Its leaders may suggest otherwise, but Burma is a country riven by the world's longest running civil war. And the pawns are the Burmese convicts forced to work as porters on the frontlines. Made to carry heavy supplies, they are regularly beaten and used as human shields against landmines. Those who have escaped form a growing underclass of refugees on the Thai border, where they eke out a meagre living and face deportation at any time. 'I work for a day, eat for a day but I am now free,' said Thay Utoo Ong at the secret location where he and three others met the Guardian. 'With the army, I had to carry 35kg of water on my back for 13 hours every day, without food or water. I knew I was going to die if I stayed ... I would either starve to death or be shot dead. In January, the 32-year-old was one of 1,200 convicts taken to bolster a military offensive against ethnic insurgents. Many were subjected to torture or summary executions, or placed directly in the line of fire, recounted Maung Nyunt. 'One porter stepped on a mine and lost his leg; he was screaming but the soldiers left him there,' he added. 'When we came back down the mountain he was dead. I looked up and saw bits of his leg in a tree.' Since 1948 the Burmese army, or Tatmadaw, has been fighting a civil war against armed groups including the Karen, whose members want greater autonomy and an end to what they describe as ethnic cleansing.