Eight year old Maria
Elena del Valle went on a red string strike. She was angry about having to do all
the household chores while her older brother got away with leaving their home a
mess every day. She proposed to divide in two every space she shared with her him, including
the toilet seat, with a red string down the middle for two weeks - half for her and half for her brother. She wanted to show her mother physical evidence that her brother was the one dirtying their home. Did Maria know that she
would eventually become a passionate activist promoting decent work and pay for women
workers in the informal economy of the Bronx, New York?
Maria Elena del Valle
Nine women’s rights
activists enthralled the audience packing the Netherlands Permanent Mission to the
UN on the 59th session of the Commission on the
Status of Women. They performed passionate stories about personal and professional struggles with discrimination, violence and the power dynamics at
play. The activists, eight women and one man, from Ecuador, India, Jordan, Nicaragua,
Nigeria, Paraguay, South Africa and the US, are part of an exciting new initiative
launched at the CSW March 2015 by Gender at Work and TMI Project, with support from Hivos, that brings untold stories into public spaces. The collaborative
storytelling laboratory is a way of catalyzing analysis, learning and greater collective
action. The intense pressure cooker methodology of TMI Project helps participants in only a few day to write, tell
and perform compelling stories of personal, real life journeys.
Momal Mushtaq from
Pakistan narrated her flashbacks whilst walking through metres of snow from
downtown Manhattan to UN headquarters. She told about the origins of the dream
that she has been able to realise now, at the age of 25, the Freedomtraveller initiative, fighting barriers to women’s mobility. As
a girl she was only allowed to ride a bicycle in doors while her brothers
ventured into the streets of Karachi. During het studies abroad. she used
the bicycle as a means of transport, and just for fun, cycled from Germany to
the Netherlands and Belgium. That inspired her to set up the #Iamfree campaign.
Momal Mushtaq
Douglas Mendoza Urrutia from Puntos de Encuentro in Nicaragua narrated how he grew up amidst violence, without a father who commited suicide when he was still a young boy. Fatherhood was not his destiny until he was drawn into the work of Puntos de Encuentro as a young adult. He now coordinates the masculinity programme and is a proud and caring father of two boys.
Douglas Mendoza Urrutia from Puntos de Encuentro in Nicaragua narrated how he grew up amidst violence, without a father who commited suicide when he was still a young boy. Fatherhood was not his destiny until he was drawn into the work of Puntos de Encuentro as a young adult. He now coordinates the masculinity programme and is a proud and caring father of two boys.
These compassionate stories contain compelling, qualitative evidence of the long and winding journey of social change required for gender justice on the ground. At the closing event, Hivos' Senior Women's Rights Advisor, Ireen Dubel, cautioned: “This kind of evidence is often passed by in the prevailing logframes, results-based management and evidence-based reporting requirements of the development donor community.” Southafrican queer activist Kwezilomso Mbandazayo from the One in Nine Campaign then observed that the storytelling methodology should not end up with stories being told from the battlefield in the South and subsequently being appropriated in the logframes decided upon in the North.
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