I’m not an expert on gender issues. I took one graduate course on gender and development and it opened my eyes to the subject, but I still understand very little about how to work against gender issues.
By gender issue, I mean something that is unfair for women, or worse, an outright violation of women’s rights. Perhaps it would seem better to call this a women’s issue. No, I would recommend we use the term gender issue, because the problem is not solely with women, that they are denied so many rights in this land. The problem is that both genders are messed up in their God-given roles of male and female- serving and caring about one another.
WASH stands for water, advocacy, sanitation and hygiene. This applies to both women and men, but it applies differently, because genders here are quite separated the majority of the time. In an agricultural village here, men do not hang around the house or the village at all, they are in the fields, the mosque, or the bazaar for all the daylight hours. Women do all domestic duties: care for children, care for animals, care for gardens, wash clothes, wash dishes, wash children, chase chickens, weave rugs, knit socks, stitch clothes, make bread, make meals, and the list goes on (and you wondered why they have big families- children make good helpers here). So when we come to a village to talk about water, sanitation and hygiene, we need to talk to the ones who fetch the water, wipe babies’ bottoms, and wash childrens’ hands- you guessed it, the women.
I’ve insisted before that rural and community development must be more about behavior and belief change, and less about building stuff. For this reason our first WASH intervention is a participatory hygiene and health course for women. If women attend the course and apply what they are learning as real lifestyle changes, we reward them with a water filter (read BSF posts below). In the course they learn about the importance of clean water, and how it can change the whole course of family life for those who have suffered a lot of diarhoea. This part of our WASH work is good (I think). But in evaluating the effect of the BSFs (water filters) on life, we have realized that we’ve walked right into a gender issue.
We focused on women because they do all the water and sanitation chores, and can pass good behaviors on to their children and ensure that their children are getting clean water. We did not predict what would happen by leaving men out of the initial WASH intervention. Actually we did not leave them out entirely, but we did not involve them until it was time to install the BSFs in their houses. Suddenly one day we show up with a 200lb blue concrete block that their wives and us want to put in their house. We need their help to lug this massive thing that they don’t understand, and then we show them we’re going to load another 150 pounds of sand and rock into the thing, which guarantees that they will not easily move the thing ever again. No men that we know of have outright resisted it, but their passive, unknowledgeable acceptance has had another consequence- numerous men have been unwilling to provide for their families need for a pit or composting latrine.
Let’s be honest, men here do not need a latrine as much as women do. I said above they are seldom home, and they can more easily get away with peeing behind the house when they are home. It is a much harder situation for women who do not have a latrine. Mothers without a latrine often let their babies and children toilet in their dirt yard, where the rest of their siblings play. What is a woman to do about toileting and menstruation if she has no private latrine? The answer will shock you- many women do not toilet at all while the sun is up. They hold it. The number of kidney stones and twisted bowels here is sickening, and this is a big contributor to it.
Suddenly water filters seems to pale in comparison with the importance of latrines and sanitation huh? I wish we would have planned the way we did our water intervention (the BSFs) around the goal of mobilizing whole families to shape up their whole water and sanitation system. Yes it doesn’t benefit men as much so it made sense to focus on women, but now we need the men to strongly support the initiative to build latrines, so that clean water is not useless because of all the filth of open defecation. By focusing and delivering to women, we have allowed some men to say to our project women’s team, “okay, if this is a women’s problem, you fix it for them, it doesn’t concern me.” Pretty distorted isn’t it? Ideally, focusing on women will lead to empowerment, which gathers the recognition and affirmation of men who suddenly see women as more capable, more valuable. Well, I guess it doesn’t always work out as ideally as we’d hope.
Send us your ideas and suggestions on how to proceed!
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