Awesome Women: Janet Siddall

The awesome woman for today is Janet Siddall. After a long career in various diplomatic positions in the Canadian foreign service, including a final stint as High Commissioner (ambassador) to Tanzania, Siddall retired from her career but not from life, nor from her love for service and her connection to Africa. She now serves as an organizer for a branch of the Grandmothers to Grandmothers ("G2G") campaign, in which grandmothers from the West help grandmothers in Africa.

Due to the ravages of AIDS and other diseases, older women across Africa, after having already worked so hard to raise and support their families for decades, find themselves in the position of raising their children's orphans. About 15 million orphans now live in sub-Saharan Africa. Not only do the African grandmothers face caring for themselves in old age, after a lifetime of hardship and poverty and without a national retirement pension of any kind, but now they also must provide the love, nurturing, schooling and material support for their grandchildren.

Siddall's knowledge of Africa, gained during her days as a diplomat, helps inform her local branch of G2G. But in spite of her elite career she sounds like just a down-home grandma engaging in grassroots actions to raise money for the cause. She organized a potluck dinner that raised $2,500 Canadian, and a "Stride to Turn the Tide" walk that raised $6,000.

Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/2011/0808/Janet-Siddall-helps-African-families-through-Grandmothers-to-Grandmothers.

Awesome Women: The Barefoot Solar Engineers of Africa

The Awesome Women of the Day are the "Barefoot Solar Engineers", women who left their African villages to spend six months at Barefoot University in India learning to create solar energy installations to power their villages. They brought their skills home, electrified their villages, and share their knowledge with others.





From the video narration:

This is about simple women in Africa who have made an extraordinary difference to their own communities, from Ethiopia to the Gambi, from Mauritania to Tanzania, a quiet revolution is taking place. Illiterate & semi-literate women, most of them grandmothers who have never left their villages in their lives, let alone going to another country several thousand miles away, they are making the impossible possible. They are baffling high-powered engineers, universities, donors, development planners and qualified experts by demonstrating incredible sophisticated skills and exposing the fundamental inadequacies of the formal educational system.

And a special shout-out to the woman who birthed and raised Sanjit “Bunker” Roy -- a man who recognizes that the best candidates for his project are women because of their superior patience and natural motivation to share what they have learned with their communities. Roy's Barefoot College has trained more than 3 million people for jobs in a bottom-up, social entrepreneurship approach to fight poverty and deprivation.

My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

Interlude: cinder blocks and slide guitar

Of all the world's music, and I love (almost) all of it, I love the South African I'm-gonna-act-happy-in-your-face defiant love, and the rhythmic mash-up of it, and the melodic lilt of it. This woman in her 5th-hand clothes and her hard-tack life, just made my Western day.

Today's Hero: Hamis Ngomera

News is spreading about recent murderous attacks on albinos in Tanzania because of the price fetched by their body parts:

According to the Albino Association of Tanzania, the price for a complete set of albino body parts – comprising limbs, genitals, ears, tongue, hair and blood – has gone up from 75,000 US dollars to 200,000 US dollars.

Hamis Ngomera is a chapter chairman of the Albino Association of Tanzania and a Red Cross volunteer.
He travels to and through communities helping albino victims of violence and hoping to quench the superstitious beliefs that fuel this awful trade.

Hamis is himself albino.

Quote of the Day: Emman Mbong, Nigerian Official, re the Gulf Gusher

"We’re sorry for them, but it’s what’s been happening to us for 50 years."

Interlude: Playing. Life. Change. Ah, AfReeCahhh

"The Playing For Change Foundation is building a new music school in the Village of Kirina, Mali. Kirina is a village of musicians, some of whom can trace their musical ancestry back over 75 generations! In this very special episode West African music legend Baaba Maal and friends perform for the village elders in honor of the new "Playing For Life" music school that is just beginning construction."

Evil Trouser Wearing Women

BBC NEWS | Africa | Sudan women 'lashed for trousers' -- and Obama didn't even mention Sudan?

Is there nothing to be done about theocracies that brutalize their women? That is not a rhetorical question, I really wonder about the implications of doing nothing and also about the implications of interfering.

Still wondering whazzup that Prez O did not take one of the most cruel African regimes to task when he had the chance.

TY to Nick Kristoff for his FB post on this.