05) STORIES FROM THE ONE BILLION RISING
The "One Billion Rising" actions held on Feb. 14 drew attention to global violence against women and girls. The following are dramatizations prepared by PV correspondent Jean Kenyon, based on the sources listed.
Indigenous women in Thunder Bay
My name is Christi Belcourt. I am a Métis artist living in Thunder Bay. This is what happened to a good friend of mine. She doesn't want to give her name.
One evening in December she was walking to the store, when a green car slowed down beside her. The two white men in the car started taunting her. They called her squaw and dirty Indian as she was walking, and they threw things at her from the car, pieces of garbage and cans.
The men then stopped the car and reached out and pulled her by her hair into the back seat. She tried to fight back, but there were two of them and the one was stronger than she was and he sat on her and pinned her down while the other one drove the car to the outskirts of Thunder Bay.
They said what they were going to do to her as they were driving, and she started to panic and she was fighting back, but they overpowered her. At the edge of town they pulled her out of the car and raped her.
They told her they had done similar things before and would do it again. While they were brutalizing her they kept yelling, "You Indians deserve to lose your treaty rights." They were making fun of the Idle No More movement.
They strangled her and left her for dead, there in the bush on the edge of town. But my friend lived. She walked for hours back to the city in the freezing cold, and reported the crime to the police. She is still afraid that if the men find out she survived, they'll come after her again to kill her. She has gone to a reserve to heal.
The next week the people held a candle light vigil on the reserve to pray for female victims of crime. The police are investigating this incident as a hate crime.
We have started an initiative called Thunder Bird, to map all the reports of Aboriginal women who have been murdered or assaulted or gone missing. My fellow artist Leah Dorion has painted a powerful depiction of the Red Thunderbird Woman.
I meanwhile have taken the traditional name Waaseyaasin. I write medicine stories to help my people, for we must be Divided No More.
A little girl in Mali
My name is Maryam. I am ten years old, and I live in an African village in Mali. At least I used to live there.
One day I was working in the yard in front of our round hut, when a man came by. He said I would make a lot of money if I went with him. My Mommy and Daddy need money and I wanted to help them, so I went with the man.
In the village he put me in the back of a truck. Two other children were there. We had never ridden in a truck before, and we were excited. The truck took off, it was noisy and fast and bumpy and we were scared. As the sun moved on into the afternoon, we came to a strange place, and he left us there. A man gave him money and put us on a bus, and the man with the truck went away. Another truck came with children and they were put on the bus with us, and we drove a long long way. It got dark and we kept driving. Where were we going?
Finally we were let out in a field with strange trees like none we had back home. The men there didn't speak our language. We were in a foreign country ‑ in Ivory Coast.
In the morning we were made to start harvesting fruit from the trees. They were cocoa trees, and the fruits were big and hard. We had to cut them off the trees with machetes. Then we used the machetes to cut them open. It was dangerous! We had to hold the cocoa pods in our left hand and whack them hard to crack them open! Then we had to dig out the beans and spread them to dry. Next day we washed the beans and carried heavy bags of them to be loaded onto big trucks.
The work was endless, day after day after day. No matter how fast we'd go, we couldn't keep up. If we slowed down or stopped to play, we were beaten.
I am still here working every day. I've never been paid any money. I've never been to school since I got here. I miss my Mommy so much.
The next time you buy chocolate, please remember us, the child slaves of the cocoa plantations. I wish I could just go back home, to Mali.
("Maryam" is a composite of the children seen in the documentary The Dark Side of Chocolate. Some brands are slavery-free. The most available in Canada are Cadbury and Camino.)
A girl who immigrated to Canada
My name is Aisha. I'm 18 years old and I was born in Grenada in the West Indies. When I was in my early teens, my father remarried and moved to Canada with his new wife. So I was excited when Dad sent for me and sponsored me to immigrate to Canada. I was 15 and full of hopes and plans for the future.
We lived together happily in Toronto for two years, and I went to high school. But I had a hidden weakness ‑ I was born with sickle cell anemia. Every time my symptoms flared up I would have to go to the emergency room. It was OK because I was on my Dad's Ontario health card.
Then my Dad and step‑Mom separated, and they didn't want to stay in Canada. I was left alone here. My sponsorship lapsed, and I had no status.
I was used to taking care of myself. I got a part‑time job and rented a room and finished high school. Then I enrolled in college.
I was doing OK until I had another sickle cell episode. This time I went to the Community Volunteer Clinic for the Medically Uninsured, in Scarborough. I told them I had no health card, and if I went to Emerg they would ask for $350 up front. It had happened before. The doctor assured me that the episode I was having was an emergency, and the hospital wouldn't demand the $350 this time.
So I went. The triage nurse denied I was in a medical emergency and asked for money. I said I couldn't pay but I knew I was going to lose consciousness soon. The nurse said as soon as I lost consciousness then they would triage me without payment. So I waited on a chair nearby, getting weaker and weaker.
The next thing I knew I was in a hospital ward receiving treatment. I was released after three days ‑ and was handed a bill for $5000.
$5000. Now I have to drop out of college for good, and figure out how I can ever earn this money. My hopes and dreams for the future have come to nothing.
Canadian Family Physician journal, www.cfp.ca/content/58/7/725.full
A woman in Guatemala
My name is Rosa Elbira Choc. I live in the town of Lote Ocho, Guatemala. My people are descended from the ancient Maya, and we have lived on this land for thousands of years.
In 2007 a mining company came into our town. They wanted our land for a nickel mine. It was a company from Canada called Skye Resources. They started building a mine nearby on the shores of Lake Izabel. Then they started trying to evict us from our land! We put up a fight!
One day a crowd of police and soldiers and security men from the mine came into town. They shot two men ‑ one was my relative Adolfo Ich, they shot him and hacked up his body ‑ then a bunch of men broke into my house. There were nine of them. They beat and bruised me and tore off my clothes and they raped me, one after the other, then they just left me there bleeding.
As I lay there sobbing, I started to hear more shouting outside. Later I learned that more women were raped that day, all my neighbours that I knew, all Mayan women. Eleven of us were raped. The village was shocked and devastated. And the man that was shot ‑ the other one ‑ he lived but he's now a quadraplegic. Some of the security men were wearing insignia from the Canadian mining company, we all saw it.
No one in Guatemala would prosecute the men. We went through a 25‑year‑long civil war here, and thousands of women were raped. There's a culture of impunity. Rape is standard practice when you want to intimidate a whole community.
But this time we said No More! Now we are suing the company in a Canadian court for violation of our human rights.
www.minesandcommunities.org/article.php?a=10815
http://nobelwomensinitiative.org/2012/11/guatemalans‑seeking‑justice‑in‑canada‑hudbay‑minerals‑inc/
A mother in Haiti
My name is Evelyne Pierre‑Paul. Before the earthquake my three children and I lived in a two‑room flat in Port‑au‑Prince, Haiti. I worked in a garment factory all my life ‑ 25 years, now I'm 50 ‑ yet I still couldn't afford to rent a house for my family. So we lived in two rooms.
Then the earthquake came and the whole building was destroyed. Everything we had was gone!
They only built us temporary tent camps to live in. After two years I'm still there, with my three teenage kids. I earn $5.90 a day. There are no apartments left that I can afford to rent. Something's wrong with my country, Haiti.
These tents aren't a safe place for women and girls. I worry all the time about my daughter. I can't afford to send her to school.
It costs half of my day's wages just to take three buses to work and back and buy lunch at the plant. Food is twice as expensive as before the earthquake. How can I ever save up? When payday comes, you pay back all the little debts you accumulated, and you don't have anything left.
We sew clothes for Walmart, and labels like Levis and the GAP. The owner of the factory says he can't pay us more because his buyers would leave.
Last year five union leaders came into the textile plants in Port‑au‑Prince and they certified a union! A week later all five of them were fired. The owners were ordered to take them back, but they never did. Nothing ever gets done here. I wish I could give my daughter a better life.
You want cheap clothes and designer labels? You think it doesn't come at a cost?
Just look at me ‑ I am the cost.
www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/12/21
(The above article is from the March 1-15, 2013, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)