Getting It Together

So it's been a long time since I've last posted. Kendall, I swear to God I'm still working on my response for our argument on feminism---but I'm like 13 blog posts behind and I want my response to be sufficient and sensitive to your post, so I'm desperately writing up as many 400 word count posts as I possibly, possibly can.

Anyway, the reason I haven't posted in a while is because I've been literally busting my butt (I have to tone down my sailor mouth blue streak now that I'm on Paperblog, hah) to finish this paper for the National Peace Essay sponsored by UNSIP. It was terrible and hard, and it got personal for a while there, but I had to do it,  not just because it was a class assignment or that it was a good scholarship opportunity (which I highly doubt will come to fruit for me, anyway haha) but because at the end there I just had to prove to myself that I could do it.

The goal of the essay was to write a paper discussing gender, war, and peacebuilding. You were supposed to take two international conflicts and examine peace treaties and agreements, and whether or not they failed, in terms of a gendered approach. It was a mess. I ended up studying five conflicts: Iraq, Rwanda, Darfur, Liberia, and Sudan/South Sudan.

I learned a lot.

It really was eye-opening, in terms of gender studies. I think learning about women and their struggles in their own cultures and circumstances really helped me re-evaluate and consider my own position as a woman. It also made me understand how important fighting for women's rights is---and how we, as a people, have one hell of a way to go.

The things women face in conflict and war are horrifying and direct. Rape is considered a strategical weapon of war, in terms of orchestrating terror along the countryside, insidiously destroying communities through the shame and fear of rape, and for ethnic cleansing. In many of these countries, female mutilation is common, making the action of rape even more painful and dangerous. And what's worse? Many women are actually blamed for getting raped. In a lot of these countries, it is simply not talked about, making the process of healing nearly impossible.

Luckily, there are women like Leymah Gbowee, a woman who led the Mass Action for peace in Liberia in 2003, a movement where women wore white and protested in a local fishmarket in the capital of Monrovia. Because of her and the other brave women's efforts, the women of Liberia helped promote peace and establish new power and respect for women in Liberia.

Not gonna lie---I cried when I read Gbowee's memoir Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War.  It was that inspirational. Gbowee's strength and determination gives me hope.