The mission and the vision of Fanm Kouraj--improving the lives of women and children--hasn't changed since Haiti's earthquake, although the needs have become more acute. The side effects of hunger, a housing crisis, and stress can quickly translate into violence against women and children. Whole families need help--psychologically and materially. The Women of Fanm Kouraj are grateful for your support.

Frequently Asked Questions

Newsletter from Nancy Casey: April, 2010

After the Earthquake

A letter from Courageous Women Jan 20, 2010

It's hard to believe what has happened to us here in Haiti, especially on LaGonave. We get strength and courage hearing about the efforts that people are going to in order to help us.

As each day passes, we feel some relief, at least in the sense that we aren't getting constant news about people who have died.

Here are some other things that are better. The Matènwa Community School was open every day this week. None of the other schools are functioning, but we are feeding the children and many affected families, too. We want to put the children in an atmosphere that can help take away the shock that is in their heads. We talk to them about the problems they can have in the way they feel. We have a sense that all of the work and organizing we have done in our communities for education and human rights are paying off in these respects.

Let me tell you how prices are rising. Before the earthquake rice was at 125 goudes, now it's 160. A gallon of cooking oil that cost 200g is now 260. Flour was 50goudes and now it's 100.

Damaged houses are starting to fall down on people. Children and the elderly are most vulnerable. Some places on LaGonave were hit harder than others. Plenn Mapou, for instance has a whole lot of destroyed houses and it seems that community lost the most people in Port au Prince. There are a few people in the morgue, and all the rest are either still under the concrete or taken away and buried somewhere never to be found again.

These are the priorities we have right now:
1. Find other shelter for people in dangerous houses until they can be repaired.
2. Organize schools to absorb the influx of children from Port au Prince
3. Find adequate food.
4. Meet with people who are experiencing severe psychological problems, especially those who are too afraid to function.

For Fanm Kouraj, respectfully,
Afelene Rosemond

History
Courageous Women is a women's group founded on July 14, 2000 at the Matènwa Community Learning Center on the Haitian island of LaGonave in the 3rd Section of Grannsous.

The group came to being after a lot of reflection on the part of a group of women teachers at the school. They had long discussed the poor treatment many people, especially women and children, receive in Haiti. Two women from the organization Women's Rights Internationnal (Peggy Jennings and Shana Swiss) visited our community, helped us clarify our ideas and brought us to the realization that we have the strength and ability to understand our problems and solve them.

In 2005, Jane Regan and Peggy Jennings published this article about us.

With this idea in mind, these women founded Fanm Kouraj to seek ways to act on the problems women and children face. They set the following objectives as their highest priority:

• Work to improve the situation of women
• Fight against the restavèk system which amounts to child slavery
• Fight against violence of all forms against women and children
  

The vision of Courageous Women

• Help women and children know their rights and responsibilities in society.
• Put a stop to the abuse of women and children so that they can speak up for themselves, demand their rights, and say what's on their mind without feeling pressure from someone else not to.
• Use popular theater to communicate our message. People will come to watch a play, and it's easy for people to see themselves in the situations. This causes people to talk and bring situations that have been kept secret out in the open.
• Expand our connections outside of Haiti with women who share our concerns
  

The Mission of Courageous Women:

• Write and perform popular theater pieces and songs that will engage people in discussion about issues of importance for women and children. Discussion is the first step in consciousness-raising.
• Organize trainings and education for other women's groups, for children and for youth.
• Raise people's consciousness in the community, on LaGonave and throughout Haiti through performances of plays and songs.
• Record plays and songs so that they can be played on local radio stations.
• Always fight for women and children who no longer want to be subjected to violence in any form.
• Help children, adults and youth understand the functions of sexuality.
• Help people reflect on the problems that arise in family life.
• Exchange ideas so people can discover the sources of their problems and begin to resolve them.

Our objectives in Haiti for the coming year:

• Inform women and restavèk children of their rights.
• Spread the use of popular theater as a consciousness-raising tool.
• Bring discussions of sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases out into the open.
• Form an additional 5 women's groups in other locations, bringing
  

Activities in Haiti for the coming year:

• Organize popular theater performances, trainings and discussions with a target of reaching 400 women, youth and children.
• Form clubs of groups of women interested in means of discipline other than beating, scolding and humiliation.
• Form clubs or groups of women who want to become more involved in the treatment that restavèk children receive in the homes where they live.
• Organize a meeting/party for restavèk children to help them realize they have a right to live in safety and that they are not the sexual toys of the men in their households.
• Involve judges, and bring them in to talk to women and children about their rights, especially the rights of women in common law marriages.
• Bring in a civil servant to create birth certificates for children who do not have them.
  

• Bring in health professionals to talk to women and girls about sexuality and women's health issues.
• Organize a big assembly of people who have participated in trainings and invite men into the discussion.

International Activities of Courageous Women

• A visitor, Nancy Casey from Moscow, Idaho has been coming to LaGonave and following our work since 2003.
• Afelene Rosemond, Courageous Womean secretary visited Moscow, Idaho in 2006 and 2008 to learn English and explore collaboration possibilities in the community.
• We formed a partnership with the VP Foundation of Moscow, Idaho. Both organizations have similar vision and goals. They will help us achieve our goals in Haiti and internationally.
• Other collaboration partners in Moscow include: University of Idaho Women's Center, Unitarian Church of the Palouse, Palouse Peace Coalition, KRFP Community Radio, Friends of the Clearwater, Latah County Human Rights Task Force, Affinity Farm, Moscow High School French Students, French Conversation Group
• We would like to host more visitors to LaGonave.
  

Budget: What we spend money on (if we have it):

Workshops, clinics, etc. with outside experts. We'd like to bring people from the Haitian mainland to attend our meetings and conduct workshops, clinics, classes, trainings requested by groups of women. Birth Control. Reproductive Health. Family relations. Economics. Conflict resolution. Food. It costs $200 to bring a visiting expert from the mainland.

Workshops, clinics, etc. with outside experts. We'd like to bring people from the Haitian mainland to attend our meetings and conduct workshops, clinics, classes, trainings requested by groups of women. Birth Control. Reproductive Health. Family relations. Economics. Conflict resolution. Food. It costs $200 to bring a visiting expert from the mainland.

Food for meetings. $20 buys a snack for a group meeting. $150 serves a meal to at a big meeting. When small groups get together, someone's stomach has been empty all day. A little bread and peanut butter can do a lot for general enthusiasm. Some people walk great distances to attend a big "open space" meeting, and the meeting takes most of the day. The people who come need a nutritious meal. We encourage women who have formed groups to meet in their communities once a week. We try to have a large open space meeting once a month.

Help for the neediest restavèk children. $25 pays school fees. $60 buys school clothes and supplies. $15 buys nutritious meals for a week.

Educational materials, books and pamphlets: A health guide for young people, $5. Where there is No Doctor in the Haitian language, $40. Prepare and photocopy a brochure, $150

Administrative and other costs: $30 to pay a worker 2 days/week. $ to buy office supplies and presentation materials for a year.

Yearly budget 2009 and 2010: $94,000. Meetings and trainings, including food: $17,500. Help for restavèk children $74,000. Administration, $2500.

LaGonave is in Haiti. It is an island off the coast not far from Port au Prince.

Haiti has enormous economic and environmental problems. Families are malnourished. There is very little health care. This is bad enough. The situation of women in Haiti makes everything worse

All paying jobs are held by men. Women are isolated in their homes, responsible for carrying water, doing laundry, finding and cooking food, caring for children. Many women do not understand that human rights apply to them. It is acceptable for men to beat their wives for any reason.

Women are blamed for rape. Women often trade sexual favors for food or money. Information about sexuality and safe birth control methods is not readily available. Mothers who cannot feed their children often allow them to be "adopted" into the system of human trafficking. (These children are called restavèk). This happens on every level of society and is not spoken about openly.

Every child and every woman is affected. With the slightest shift in circumstances, anyone can become a victim.

Women's isolation and the silence about our problems are at the root of these problems. We combat isolation by holding community events for women. We break the silence with our plays, radio shows, and our openness to discuss any topic with women or men.

There are few opportunities for a woman to support herself without putting herself under the rule of a man.

Keeping a home in rural Haiti is hard physical work under the best of circumstances--searching for firewood, walking long distances to carry water in buckets, scrubbing laundry by hand, always worrying about finding food. A family that eats one meal a day is doing well.

It is the woman's responsibility to make everything work, even though she doesn't have the resources. Haitian women are very strong. The man earns the money and chooses how much to give her to run the household and support his children. Her husband says when she can go out and who she can see.

Daughters learn from their mothers.

Fathers don't want to "waste" school fees on girls when money is scarce. Young women hope for a different life, but there are few opportunities for things to be different, and the cycles get repeated.

To create a popular theater presentation, you sit down with a group of people and ask, "So what's going on? What's on your mind?"

From the answers to those questions, you organize and create the scenes of a play.

Popular theater plays do not preach a moral, nor do they provide resolution or answers to the issues raised. Because the stories are unresolved and open-ended, people will continue to talk about what will happen next in that situation and why.

We have written and performed plays about HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases, men beating their wives, restavèk children working as household slaves, and restavèk girls who become pregnant by family members. We have a play about a woman who gets out of her abusive situation by buying some chickens and starting an egg business.

We also write songs about these issues and incorporate them into our plays.

We have had training in leading large and small group discusions so that we can encourage everyone to participate.

.

Everything that occurs when we perform a play is important.

If men in the audience, yell and laugh because an unmarried women is cajoled into sex and becomes pregnant, everyone present watches them do that and people will talk about that, too, when they talk about the play.

If men dominate the discussion afterwards, even the women who do not speak up are angry. They will talk among themselves later.

When one woman speaks up about her situation, she gives other women the courage to speak, even if they don't talk right away. This is why it is important for us to continue performing plays in many communities. More women are empowered to speak. The topics cannot be forgotten and pushed back into the silence

We are seven women, teachers and former teachers at the Matènwa Community School.

Our group structure consists of president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer for the purpose of organizational tasks.

We meet every Sunday and make decisions by concensus. We receive help and advice from Abner Sauveur and Christine Low, co-directors of the school.

The school also provides us with access to computers, telephone, and the internet and training for using that technology.

An open conversation about women's and children's rights is necessary in our communities.

Our whole society would be different if women understood and exercised their rights.

Women can work together on the problems that they face, but not if they are isolated and subjected to violence.

Women can show each other what their rights are and how to exercise them.

Much of our work involves encouraging women to talk and listening to what they say. What we learn teaches us how to proceed

One of our goals is the formation of other similar women's groups throughout the region, we envision a coalition of women's groups working and making decisions together.

We hope to find money to pay someone part-time to work for our project.

How was Courageous Women formed?

Courageous Women is a women's group founded July 14, 2000 at the Matènwa Community Learning Center on the Haitian island of LaGonave in the 3rd Section of Grannsous.

The group came to being after a lot of reflection on the part of a group of women teachers at the school. The group had long discussed the poor treatment many people, especially women and children, receive in Haiti. With this idea in mind, these women founded Fanm Kouraj to seek ways to act on the problems women and children face.

Women are denied their basic human rights.

Many women don't even realize that they or their children have rights.

Women are isolated. Haitian culture condones women's exploitation by men.

Women cannot improve their lives without the power to do so.

Fanm Kouraj set the following objectives as their highest priority:

• Work to improve the situation of women.
• Fight against the restavèk system of child slavery and human trafficking
• Fight against all forms of violence against women and children.
  

What are the top priorities of Courageous Women for the next several years? Why are they important?

Our biggest priorities are (1) to continue to raise awareness by gathering women together and keeping all of these taboo topics about women's rights in the open, (2) work to organize trainings and workshops on topics that women are asking to learn about, (3) provide material assistance for the most needy restavek children, and (4) experiment with projects that can help women earn a living.

We have big dreams. We are confident that women who are empowered and know their rights will organize to address the problems of poverty. We envision women's centers and women's groups that can bring about, better relations inside families, improved systems for growing and preserving food, ways of making money, health care, and education.

We want to expand our connections on LaGonave and on the Haitian mainland so we can collaborate with other groups and locate people who can help us.

We have no financial resources of our own. We want to learn how to work with organizations that support the kind of work we want to do so we can apply for the funds we need as our work expands.

We would like for some of our members to learn English so we can communicate better with the Americans who want to help us.

We want to learn more about media technology. We want to film our plays and distribute them on DVDs. DVD players are becoming increasingly popular on LaGonave. People gather together to watch them. Most DVDs portray women in a very disrespectful way