David Pratt: Stories from the most remarkable women in the most unforgiving places

ALL of them are women of our times. Brought together their individual stories represent a litany of lives spent on the margins, under threat, or on the edge of the abyss. But both individually and collectively their lives tell another story too, one of dignity and defiance, strength and courage.

All are fitting qualities as tomorrow the world celebrates International Women’s Day (IWD) with this year’s theme being “Choose to Challenge”.

“A challenged world is an alert world and from challenge comes change. So, let’s all choose to challenge,” urge the organisers of this year’s celebrations.

Observed every year on March 8, IWD marks the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. This year marks the 110th International Women’s Day, after the first official event was held in 1911. But it was only in 1975 that the United Nations (UN) made the day official, and since then it has marked a call to action for accelerating women’s equality.

Despite the considerable progress, more than half of the world’s girls and women – as many as 2.1 billion people – live in countries that are not on track to reach key gender equality-related targets by 2030. Most of the women whose brief stories and pictures are presented here live in such countries.

Like other women I’ve encountered over many years in such places, their willingness to recount the circumstances under which they live, and events they and their families have experienced, stems from a desire for the wider world to understand what they have gone through.

They make clear in their own words that despite the often-daunting challenges faced, each has the determination to overcome such formidable obstacles. The seven women represented here are far from unique. In the pages of my reporters’ notebooks there are hundreds of others like them and around the world countless more.

These women and their lives challenge us on so many levels and that can only be a good thing. Wherever these women and others who shared their stories with me are now, I’m grateful for their openness in telling them and for the inspiration they provide.

Khatla Ali Abdallah – Mosul, Iraq 2017

“I was carried like a bride at her wedding.”

AS the bus carrying the new arrivals snaked its way down the dirt road towards Chamakor Camp, I could just make out the faces peering from the windows.

As it drew closer the faces became clearer, and the exhaustion and apprehension of those on board was unmistakable. The siege of Mosul and their desperate escape from the beleaguered city had taken its toll.

As they stepped from the bus among them was 90-year-old Khatla Ali Abdallah who was being carried by her grandson who tenderly placed her among the meagre baggage those fleeing Mosul had mustered before their hasty departure. This was the final stage of Khatla’s harrowing and exhausting journey from west Mosul.

Living for the most part in a basement with only her chickens for company, she survived battles the like of which never existed, even during the turbulent years of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.

“I’m very tired, it has been a long way,” Khatla told the young female aid worker who knelt down to offer the old lady bottled water. Reaching for the bottle Khatla first kissed the girl’s hand, expressing her thanks for the help.

Khatla’s remarkable tale of fortitude and resourcefulness at its height involved being carried by her grandsons, under sniper and mortar fire, before making the town of Hammam Alil.

“I was carried like a bride at her wedding,” Khatla told those eager to hear her story, a smile crossing her face. “What will happen to you now?” I asked, as she sat on top of her bags outside Chamakor Camp for displaced persons.

“When the fighting is finished, my grandsons will carry me back again,” she told me matter-of-factly.

Ana – La Coquera, Colombia 2014

“We are happy here in the forest.”

IT had taken a trek through sweltering rainforest and the crossing of rivers to get to the Embera community in La Coquera.

Today the Embera are one of the 34 Indigenous Peoples identified by the Colombian Constitutional Court as at risk of physical or cultural extinction. For these people a close connection with nature is an integral part of their culture.

“Everything has spirits for us, plants, trees, animals, everything in nature,” one elderly woman who would only give her first name, Ana, told me, winking as my interpreter translated.

“Yes, it’s important that our children and grandchildren have the opportunity to go to schools or colleges, but it is important that they don’t lose their cultural beliefs and remain as proud of being Embera as I am.”

Sometimes the outside world comes to them, Ana tells me, and that the armed groups pass through the village but rarely interfere with the villagers. Other Embera communities however have been less fortunate she says.

“All the armed groups have taken our lives, and we have always been caught in the middle of the conflicts, but in our hearts, we are happy here in the forest,” Ana says, winking at me yet again.

Baba Hadiya – Gombe Nigeria, 2016

“Those responsible are an enemy to us all.”

SOME who survived the blast that day in Gombe’s dusty marketplace say the suicide bomber was a young girl.

As Baba speaks it becomes instantly obvious that here is a woman who believes it’s important for people to fully understand what such acts of violence meted out by the Islamist terrorists of Boko Haram really mean for its victims.

Bravely and discretely, she slides up her hijab towards her shoulders to show the terrible injuries the blast inflicted and the stump of her left arm, which hangs limply. Two years on, the scars on her right arm still look raw and her fingers seem locked in a painful claw-like grip. Remarkably, despite the pain Boko Haram have inflicted on Baba and many others, never once among the women I spoke with did I hear talk of revenge or retribution.

Finding a way to feed, house, school and ensure the health of their children was always first and foremost.

Before I left Baba Hadiya that day I asked what she now thought of those Boko Haram members who had planted the bomb in the market that killed her sister and left her with such terrible life changing injuries?

“Those responsible are an enemy to us all,” she replied simply. “But I have left them in the hands of God.”

Anna Dmitriienko – Stanitsa Luhanska, Eastern Ukraine 2015

“Oh, and I always have my cats.”

THEY call it the “contact line”. The centre of Stanitsa Luhanska, the last Ukrainian government checkpoint and emplacements at that time, sat only 800 yards away from a buffer of no-man’s land between the opposing side’s positions.

For years now civilians, many of them elderly women have been caught in the crossfire between the forces of Ukraine and the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic.

One of them is 72-year-old Anna Dmitriienko. Anna told me how she was at home when rockets rained down on her neighbourhood.

“I lost consciousness and was bleeding badly,” she explained, showing me around her yard and outhouse that was flattened.

Even then a huge crater still sat in the middle of the ruined building and Anna pointed out the grey metal remains of the casing from one of the Grad missiles that landed as part of the barrage.

“I spent all my pension paying for electricity and getting my yard cleared up so I can continue to live here,” she said, still limping heavily at the time from the excruciatingly painful shrapnel wounds to her legs. Living alone as she does, I asked if she ever got lonely?

“I have good neighbours and we Ukrainian women are tough and pull together,” she told me, pausing momentarily before adding an afterthought. “Oh, and I always have my cats.”

Zuleyxa Bilad – Kobane, Syria 2018

“His brothers and sisters died defending the revolution for all of us”

IT was grey and overcast with brooding storm clouds scudding across the sky like giant Zeppelins, the day I visited the Martyr’s Cemetery in the northeast Syrian town of Kobane.

Almost four years had passed since that bitter siege in 2014 when Islamic State (IS) jihadists overran most of this city near the Turkish border, only to be beaten back by the determined and near legendary resistance of mainly Kurdish fighters.

Today many consider the battle for Kobane to be a key turning point in the war against IS in Syria and a pivotal moment in the survival of what has become known as the Rojava Revolution.

“We came to plant flowers, we do it once a week or whenever he comes to our mind,” Zuleyxa Bilad tells me while standing in the Martyr’s Cemetery with her daughter Gardenia alongside the grave of her husband who was killed in the battle for Kobane. I asked Zuleyxa if her daughter Gardenia now five years old knew what had become of her father?

“Gardenia knows everything because I explained everything to her and sometimes, she cries,” Zuleyxa replies. “Later she will understand that her father along with his brothers and sisters died defending the revolution for all of us, so that life will be better for her and the next generation when they are adults.”

Rabi Ibrahimia – Sarou Niger 2012

“It helps a bit but after an hour or so you are hungry again.”

WHEN we talked, Rabi and her family were, not for the first time, facing hunger. Niger then had already been described by humanitarian agencies as officially the worst place in the world to be a mother.

Should things continue as they are, Rabi told me as sole surviving parent, she would have no choice but to return again to the termite mounds. How else will she feed her children?

Dotted across the parched desert landscape these conical heaps of sand, moulded from the bugs’ saliva, are home to insect communities, which thrive in a place where human beings scarcely survive.

Here there is nothing but mile after mile of baked sand and rock, with no trace of moisture. Dotted around sit empty, abandoned villages. Armed Islamist militias roam and operate here, adding to the insecurity and forced movement of civilians.

The trail of footprints in the sand heading out into the wilderness was the only ghostly clue to those villagers for whom life had become so bleak they had no choice but to move on in the hope move on in the hope of survival.

“When there is nothing left to eat, we break down the termite nests where the insects store little amounts of grain, and if we’re lucky we find enough for a few cups that we ground down into a paste,” explained Rabi.

“It helps a bit but after an hour or so you are hungry again,” she adds, describing a desperate daily ritual carried out by as many as a quarter of the households in her village of Sarou.

Unknown woman and child –Colomoncagua Camp El-Salvador Honduras border 1985

“We will survive and return to our homes.”

IT was my first ever foreign assignment as a photojournalist, perhaps that’s why this picture has a special place in my heart. Perhaps too because even though we chatted I have lost track of the name of this woman and child from my notebooks. All that remains are a few hastily scribbled details of what had brought her to this border camp where more than 13,000 Salvadoran refugees has sought sanctuary.

Why had she fled her home I asked?

Because of the “Mano Blanca,” she told me, one of the Salvadoran regime’s death squads whose calling card was to leave a white painted palm print on the outside of the house from which they would target their next victims.

“We fled after they left their mark,” the woman told me that day as I photographed her with her daughter. “It was the only way to survive, and we will survive and return one day to our homes.”

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