Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Foreword – Marie Staunton, Chief Executive of Plan UK
Road Song – Joanne Harris
Bendu’s Dream – Tim Butcher
The Woman Who Carried a Shop on Her Head – Deborah Moggach
Ovarian Roulette – Kathy Lette
Ballad of a Cambodian Man – Xiaolu Guo
Change – Marie Phillips
A Response – Subhadra Belbase, Country Director of Plan Uganda
Remittances – Irvine Welsh
Copyright
About the Book
Seven authors have visited seven different countries and spoken to young women and girls about their lives, struggles and hopes. The result is an extraordinary collection of writings about prejudice, abuse, and neglect, but also about courage, resilience and changing attitudes.
Proceeds from sales of this book will go to Plan, one of the world’s largest child-centered community development organisations.
Proceeds from sales of this book go to Plan, one of the world’s largest and oldest child-centred community development organisations. Plan works in 66 countries on programmes and initiatives that address the causes of poverty and its consequences for children’s rights and their lives. They work locally, embedded in a community, to educate, encourage and build the skills and resources necessary to create positive changes in the lives of children and their families.
Foreword
MARIE STAUNTON, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF PLAN UK
‘How do you feel sending these girls out into the street every night, knowing what will happen to them?’ I asked. A pretty stupid question, as my fifteen-year-old daughter commented later. I was visiting a hostel in Alexandria where, during the day, teachers and counsellors supported homeless girls. But while the boys’ hostel is open day and night, the Egyptian authorities do not allow overnight stays in the girls’ hostel. So, at five o’clock every afternoon, girls as young as nine are given a little bag with soap and a first-aid kit, and locked out of the only home they know. In years of working all over the world nothing has affected me quite like that image so, yes, perhaps it was a stupid question.
To survive on the streets, these girls have to join one of the hundreds of gangs in Alexandria, whose joining fee is sexual abuse by older gang members. The authorities believe that girls who are not virgins, who are now ‘ladies’ are automatically the responsibility of their non-existent husbands. And this blind presumption means that the girls are officially invisible, leaving them, often with their own babies, at the mercy of all the predators on the street.
This book was compiled to make such girls visible in a way that reports and statistics cannot. Recently Plan published research which showed that in many countries girls as young as ten have sex with their teachers to secure better grades. The research received no coverage in the UK’s media.
How to make these victims visible? I remember travelling to a forgotten famine in remotest Sudan with the journalist Bill Deedes. His subsequent report – a simple story powerfully told – shocked readers and prodded governments into action. I enrolled the help of publishers The Random House Group in order to find writers who were willing to go to the places where girls get a raw deal – where girls are fed less than their brothers; are more likely to be taken out of school; are more likely to be abused – and tell their stories.
Writers see with a different eye than development workers. Some responded with passion. Marie Phillips was appalled that the responsibility for sexual abuse was placed on Ugandan schoolgirls, not their abusers.
Kathy Lette was no less passionate but used her wit to illuminate the lives of girls in Brazil in a hilarious but biting story.
Joanne Harris established a strong rapport with the girls she met. Perhaps because of her career in teaching she has an ability to get alongside young people. She shadowed a day in the life of a young girl named Kadeka. As I was sitting in the middle of a village in Togo peeling pimentos, I heard gusts of laughter followed by the appearance of Joanne bent double under a huge load of firewood, the same amount that Kadeka was carrying with apparent ease.
In contrast, Irvine Welsh avoided engagement during his visit to the Dominican Republic. He sidestepped formal meetings, watched from the outside and asked simple, practical questions: the name of a tree, the meaning of a word. His story was a total surprise, but it met with instant recognition from Plan workers in the Dominican Republic – yes, they said, that’s it. He has got what happens here. How did he do that?
Deborah Moggach is a listener. The story she wrote may be fiction but weaves together the many true stories that she drew out of the girls she met. Sitting under her big hat in the shade, gently questioning them with patience and with charm.
Xiaolu Guo is a filmmaker as well as a writer. She also resisted formal engagement and information that came from any sort of official voice. She watched and filmed and found out about the history of the country and its people. She internalised an atmosphere, and her story is true to that.
Tim Butcher approached the assignment as a journalist. Travelling in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the footsteps of Graham Greene, he interviewed girls damaged by war and produced a piece of fiction reflecting the fact that they were still being damaged by peace.
As the authors wrote up their stories, the lives of many girls they had met were rocked by the global financial crisis. The annual report that Plan compiles, The State of the World’s Girls, showed that in 2009 the financial upheaval took a heavy toll on families and communities everywhere, and that when money is short it is girls and women who are the most affected. The World Bank estimates that in 2009 alone an additional 50,000 African children will die before their first birthday, and most of those will be girls. The Bank’s Managing Director, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, wrote in her introduction to the 2009 report:
As a young girl growing up in Nigeria poverty is never a theory. Living on under $1.25 a day was a reality … and I clearly remember when I had to carry my younger sister on my back and walk for five miles to save her life from malaria. Looking back it was education and a caring and supportive family that opened the door to success for me … Investing in girls is an efficient way of breaking intergenerational cycles of poverty. Educated girls become educated mothers with increased livelihood prospects; they also have a greater propensity than similarly educated males to invest in children’s schooling.
Seventy years of experience, working with nine million children across the world, has shown the charity I am part of, Plan, that investing in girls is crucial to breaking the cycle of poverty. We are launching the Because I am a Girl (BIG) campaign to break the cycle of uneducated mothers giving birth much too young to underweight babies who in turn grow up to be unhealthy and uneducated. As part of the campaign, we are following a group of little girls and their families until 2015. One of those girls is Brenda, whose mother Adina was only thirteen when she gave birth to Brenda, her second child. Brenda is now three, and already it is clear that her young mother is struggling to nurture her family. Brenda is withdrawn and often hungry; she is already at a disadvantage and will find it hard to do well at school, if she gets there in the first place.
The twentieth century is considered by most in the developed world to have brought massive progress in female emancipation, and discrimination against girls in education is rarely a major issue, although many may hit their heads against a glass ceiling once they leave school. But poorer parts of the world have not seen even this amount of progress. Today’s girls face new threats – urbanisation means more girls, like those in Alexandria, are living unprotected on the streets; during modern conflicts in countries like Liberia, rape is used as a weapon of war.
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female Head of State of Liberia, wrote in the 2008 State of the World’s Girls report:
Fifty per cent of (Liberia’s) population is under eighteen years old and girls make up more than half of this group. Liberian girls experience gender-based violence by older men in their neighbourhoods and by their teachers on a daily basis … I believe that securing the future for our girls is critical to achieving national development. The popular saying ‘when you educate a man you feed his family but when you educate a woman, you educate a nation’ is profound.
Graca Machel, in her support for our annual report, The State of the World’s Girls, said, ‘We can no longer accept that girls should not be valued simply because they are not boys.’ Girls around the world have been told by so many people for such a long time that they are worthless, so of course they start to believe this. The BIG campaign aims to reverse the lack of belief and investment in girls. Join us by clicking on www.becauseiamagirl.org
Thank you to all the writers in this book for enduring tough travel schedules and difficult living-conditions to produce unique and enthralling writing, and to Rachel Cugnoni and Frances Macmillan at Vintage Books for their inspiration and understanding. It is only right to give the last word to a girl:
Someday I will prove that I am no less than my brothers
Rakhi, 17
Marie Staunton, Chief Executive of Plan UK, 2009
Road Song
Joanne Harris is the author of the Whitbread-shortlisted Chocolat (made into a major film starring Juliette Binoche), Blackberry Wine, Five Quarters of the Orange, Coastliners, Holy Fools, Jigs & Reels, Sleep Pale Sister, Gentlemen & Players, The Lollipop Shoes and, with Fran Warde, The French Kitchen: A Cookbook and The French Market: More Recipes from a French Kitchen. She lives in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, with her husband and daughter.