2.6.08
At our microplanning meetings we did lots of exercises with the women to see what their day-to-day lives were like/ what their needs are/ what would benefit them most, etc. Instead of coming in with a ready-made plan, the idea is to gather as much information about the village and the villagers...and then, with their input/ideas/work, etc., devise a workplan for helping them out. This is a little chart that compared the daily lives of the village women with the men. We wrote down all of the agricultural activites, domestic activities, and "social" activities (which pretty much means anything that involves going out in public.) Turns out that the women do all of the work. The men are technically the "farmers," but the women feed the animals, take them out to graze, carry all the water on their heads for miles, take care of the kids, cook everything, clean everything, etc. The only thing the men do (seriously!) is the "social activities" like going to market, meeting with friends, etc. Oh, and they always eat first and go to bed first.
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Turns out the same situation here in Kenya too. The women do all the work. I mean all the work. The men say their job is to "protect the house" if anyone were to try and come in.
Men always think they protect the house. What's the deal? I protected our house the other night! Silly Cat brought a live field mouse through the cat-door at 4:30 in the morning! And who do you think chased it down and got it out of the house? Cat-door = very bad idea. I don't know why this didn't occur to me until I was pregnant and chasing Silly and a gimpy mouse through my house before dawn, but clearly the cat-door is not a well conceived concept. Do you know that Aaron slept through the mouse and the fire alarm twice in one week! Now really, who's protecting our house?
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