This project, at its core, is about the resilience of women. I have not quite finished it, thus my full hypothesis has yet to be solidified. I will continue to work on it this summer and throughout medical school and my MPH training. But what I have now is real and concrete and valuable, and that is the stories and faces of women.
For the years between college and medical school I created a fellowship where I traveled to 5 countries on 5 different continents. I sought to spend time getting to know women from a broad range of living environments, socio-economic statuses, races, and backgrounds. I wanted to ask women what they felt were the biggest threats to women’s health in their countries. I wanted to know what negatively impacted their lives, but also what made them feel strong, what gave them hope, and what made them happy. I sat in on sex ed classes and spoke to mothers in Fada N’Gourma, a small village in Eastern Burkina Faso. I taught at a preschool in the mornings and interviewed women in the afternoons in the Din Daeng District of Bangkok, Thailand. I played with goats and shared meals with female weavers in Cusco, Peru, venturing out to speak with women in villages throughout the Sacred Valley. I then met with activists and roamed the streets of Dublin, Ireland, before returning to my home city of Atlanta, Georgia. I chose each country because it stood out in its region as posing specific threats to women’s health. I ended my journey in my own American city because each threat to women’s health that I witnessed internationally was — and still is — a problem not only in the United States, but specifically in the city of Atlanta.
I believe in putting faces to stories. In these days of anonymity and distance, I think that apathy is far too common. I also believe that it is very hard to feel apathetic towards a real person. So accompanying each interview is a photograph — a real woman who spoke truth to power and shared her life and image with me. While I have much more work to do to compile all of my transcripts of interviews, my photographs, and my ideas for further research, what I have already put together is that there is a current that runs between us all, a stream that connects all the women I spoke to. This current is one of strength and power, resilience and dignity. Across countries, continents, and experiences, the unifying thread I saw come up everywhere is that women are strong. Women felt that their countries and the world at large did not have a true grasp of their lives. I spoke with a woman in Patabamba, Peru who told me that one of the biggest problems for women in Peru was husbands abandoning their wives and leaving them to raise their children on their own. She said that, while the government was focusing on other issues related to women’s health, providing psychological support for children and job opportunities for single mothers would make their lives better. She told me that her biggest advice for her two daughters was that they study, move forward, “do better” than her in life.
These 3 photographs are just a snippet of my project. The first photograph was taken at a tiny village called Chahuaytire, in the Sacred Valley of Peru. She is a weaver for a women’s weaving collective and a mother of 3. She told me that when she went into labor, she walked an hour and a half to the nearest health center because she could not afford any other means of transportation from her village. She also had to walk with the babies to the health post for mandatory check-ups. If she had failed to give birth at the health center or missed the mandatory check-ups, she would have been fined; the government had instituted these monetary punishments in an effort to lower maternal mortality rates and improve child health
In the next photo, the woman with her eyes closed works making children’s toys in Bangkok. She told me about her upbringing in Bangkok, that she’s happy to have found a job and to have money. She told me that she thinks she is ugly and that she has struggled emotionally when her relatives have fallen ill. She talked about how her community and friends make her life better but that she sees more and more unplanned pregnancies in her community. Her biggest advice to young women was, “Be a good person and take care of your body.” I asked her what she wanted the world to know about Thai women. She replied by telling me that they are good and beautiful. In her 61 years of ups and downs, she has remained positive focused on the future. I am so happy to have caught this moment of contentedness and hope.
Finally, the young woman with the short black hair. She is a 15 year old transgender girl from Dublin, Ireland. She told me that she was “born a boy.” She told me that coming out was one of the happiest experiences of her life. She said that, to her surprise, her immediate family took her coming out really well, but that her extended family is still coming around. She spoke to me about the atmosphere in Dublin — how it is is moving in a progressive direction, having just passed one referendum legalizing same-sex marriage and another legalizing abortion. “I don’t see the point in not letting a woman choose what she has to do with her own body,” she said, adding that every woman should “feel safe in their own country.” She finished our interview by saying that women’s lives would be better if “gender didn’t have to come into things as much as it does, you know? [If we] just saw everyone as people instead of as these labels.”
These women do not speak for all women of their backgrounds, countries, or even for women as a whole. They are, however, snapshots — glimpses into lives of women around the world. Disparate in so many ways, but each carried along by the undercurrent, the stream of resilience that my years of travel have convinced me is universal to the female experience.
Zoe Ruhl is an MS1 at the Perelman School of Medicine. Zoe can be reached at [email protected].
