|
|
|
Photo Elizabeth Winston
Emma Reinhardt is trying to broadcast the voices of women and girls across the globe. |
|
Nonprofit seeks to air women’s stories
By Elizabeth Winston
BANNER CORRESPONDENT
Several years ago, Emma Reinhardt was working as advocacy director of the Washington, D.C.-based World Sindhi Institute, a human rights organization that focuses on the politically divided Sindh region of Pakistan. The stories and accounts of life in Sindh she heard were rarely, if ever, those of women and girls — and the lack of representation seemed to Reinhardt to be a gap in the work they were trying to accomplish.
She consulted with the board of the organization about the possibility of doing an outreach project to help involve the region’s women in their work, and asked for contacts in Sindh who might be able to help. All of the people on the list she was given were men — so Reinhardt began making calls, and asking for “Mrs. whatever-the-contact’s-last-name-was,” she recalls with a laugh.
It was a challenge; Reinhardt spoke only a small amount of Sindh, but managed, from the 50 or so phone calls she made in that first outreach effort, to gain the help of four women who were willing to act as facilitators, interviewers and translators for the project in Pakistan. Over the course of the next year, 70 different interviews were conducted with a wide range of Sindhi women and girls, old and young, from different social, economic and educational backgrounds. Eventually, Reinhardt selected a number of the statements, along with images of the women and girls behind the voices, for a public presentation of the project.
“It’s what I’ve sort of been doing along the way in each community, … trying to work specifically with women and girls,” says Reinhardt, who moved to Provincetown last June, and has worked with a number of human rights advocacy and nonviolent conflict strategy organizations over the last 10 years.
Response to Reinhardt’s initial efforts were so positive that she expanded the presentation — and last year founded the non-profit organization HERvoices, an endeavor inspired by her work with Sindhi women. Reinhardt will present “Her Voices from Sindh” from 3 to 5 p.m. at The Schoolhouse Gallery, 494 Commercial St., on Saturday, Feb. 19. The presentation is open to the public, with a suggested donation of $10.
“Starting HERvoices felt like the organic next step from the work I’ve been doing. It was a way to stay connected with the communities I’ve been involved with,” Reinhardt says.
“So often, the voices of women and girls aren’t being heard. This project was a way of sort of saying publicly, you have value. Your voice is imperative to what’s going on here, to what’s going to happen in the future.”
Most of the Sindhis interviewed for “Her Voices from Sindh” had never been asked about their lives, their daily routines and their hopes and fears; many were afraid to speak openly or have their photographs taken or their names associated with the project. Divided in 1947 after Partition of the Indian subcontinent, the Sindh region has remained divided between Sindhi Muslims, who remained in what is now Pakistan, and Sindhi Hindus, who fled to India. Responses to questions asked by the interviewers ranged from simple yes-and-no answers to moving and often heart-wrenching metaphors about the women’s complicated — and often lonely — lives.
“Beautiful things came back,” Reinhardt recalls. “The whole tone was one of poeticism and profundity.” One woman, who likened her existence in Sindh to that of a bird whose wings have been clipped, became intensely involved with the project, eventually acting as a narrator for the presentation. Since working with HERvoices, the woman has moved to London, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in women’s studies. During the “Her Voices from Sindh” slide show, viewers hear the words of 12 Sindhi women and girls talking about their thoughts on such diverse subjects as motherhood and education, the role of women in Pakistan, global relations and war.
The “beautifully simple” presentation gets to the heart of the mission of HERvoices: to acknowledge the contributions of women and girls in the establishment of communities worldwide, and to lessen the imbalance between the role of men and women by placing the voices of women and girls from around the world into the public domain. “Sometimes, just speaking about your life can inform you of your own importance; and, often, hearing about her life can resolve something in you and remind you of your humanity,” the HERvoices.org homepage reads.
Reinhardt has toured with the Sindh presentation, as well as other HERvoices projects, to reach a wider audience base. Although the organization is still young, she hopes that the awareness-raising projects will help raise funds to benefit the communities that engendered them. To bring audience members more fully into the reality of the women from Sindh, Reinhardt has volunteers read the words of the interviewees during the presentation, acting as the “voices” of their female counterparts from the other side of the globe.
“My hope is to keep [all of it] really simple, to show that there’s profundity in simplicity. This is a very soulful presentation … you can feel the humanity of it, and that’s the idea,” Reinhardt says. “The idea is to remind people of the connectedness we all have just by being alive.”
To learn more about HERvoices or the “Her Voices from Sindh” presentation at The Schoolhouse Gallery, visit the organization’s website at HYPERLINK "http://www.hervoices.org"www.hervoices.org.
|
Manor deal heads 47 article warrant
New Truro administrator familiar with theatrics
In the News
|
|
|
|
|
Mar 10th, 2005