Women's Creativity in Rural Life. (News).

Meet Felicita (above, left) from Peru who is one of the three women to have won the prestigious Prize for Women's Creativity in Rural Life awarded each year by the Women's World Summit Foundation based in Geneva. Felicita works in a rural area at the north of that country, where she leads a women organization of about 3200 people. This organization is initiated by her to help women to develop their skills in dying woolen clothes. Most of the men in their community usually do not allow women either to go to school or to do any other outside work than house keeping and child care. So starting this women's collective, managing them and to sell the clothes made by them a great accomplishment for a lady who was totally deprived of even a basic education. Her father she tells us, did not allow her to go to learn to read and write because he was afraid she might then learn to write love letters!

Women in this collective use plants gathered from the jungle to prepare dyes and have prepared more than a thousand colors!

Although most of them are still not able to read except some young women, it is important to know that people like these are struggling for their human dignity in different places of the world which we should remember that is a call for us to act too.

Meet also Pasumpon Mayandi, (right) another recipient of this award from Sekanoorani, a dry village in the interior Tamil Nadu, a southern state in India. She comes from a community which is very caste oriented and comes from a caste which resorts to solving any issues more by fighting than by arbitration. She was married at the age of 17 as soon as she finished high school to a totally illiterate mill worker whose income was not enough to run the family. So she decided to help herself and help others in the process. Her involvement with the Guides Movement earlier at school helped her to organize the local people into a collective for training in gem cutting and mushroom growing. She started to avail all the government facilities intended for rural women's upliftment. The Government recognized her enterprising spirit and built a training center for systematic training of rural women under her leadership. The local community leader was upset with a woman's leadership that is superceding his authority and decided to claim the building for his purpose by putting a lock on the door. Pasumpon just broke the lock and challenged the man to get the building in his name through a court order if he could! She challenged the passivity of the local police in solving caste related murders that were being hushed up and dared them that unless they solve the crimes they would have to face the local group's demonstration. When she was invited by the Women's World Summit Foundation to Switzerland, the visa officer was reluctant to issue her a visa because he felt that she would not be able to manage herself to go alone to a foreign country when she cannot even speak in English. Pasumpon simply told him that giving her a visa is his job and how she manages in a foreign country is her job!

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