Chapter 14: What You Can Do

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world" - Mahatma Gandhi

For the last chapter, Kristof emphasizes his hope to see a broad movement emerging to battle gender inequality and pushing for education and opportunities for girls around the world. The time is just right and "ripe" for a new emancipation movement to empower women and girls. The challenge is to prod the world to face up to women and girls who are forced to abide by all the cruel patriarchal traditions. And Kristof points out in order to start a successful and effective moment, we should adhere to these following principles:

• Resist the temptation to oversell
• Helping women does not mean ignoring men
• American feminism must become less parochial, so that it is every bit as concerned with sex slavery in Asia as with Title IX sports programs in Illinois.

As a class, we discussed the final chapter of "Half the Sky" titled "What You Can Do." The chapter starts off by examining the historical events that we can learn from and apply in the battle of fighting gender inequality. These include American Civil Right movement and environmental movement. A video that we didn't get to in class expands on the history of the Civil Right movement:

We compared slavery and sex trafficking by looking at this specific quote: "Slavery did not exist in Britain itself, only in British territories abroad, so for the average English family slavery was out of sight. As with sex trafficking in India today, it was easy to cluck about the brutality of it all and then move on" (Kristof 235). Indeed, the lack of global awareness of brutality that stems from gender inequality is preventing us from making more intentional effort to make a difference. As a class we came up with some of the ways that can spread global awareness. There were many different strategies including TV commercial, documentary, internet ads (YouTube ads), motivational speaker, art and music.

We also compared the Civil Right movement and global poverty. "Most people agreed on the American values: individualism, respect for private property, and belief in equal opportunity. The key problem was that we believed in equal opportunity, but didn't actually provide it." As from the previous discussion, it was evident that the US was not the most progressive country in providing citizens with equal opportunity regardless of their gender. Similarly, many around the world are aware of global poverty but people often underestimate the power of one and as a result, do not take action. However there are different opportunities we are given to partake in the movement. These include donation, volunteering, writing letters, visiting third world country to understand the depth of these issues and talking about the gender inequality to people around us. One of Heifer's model was introduced to show how a cow can transform lives of families in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda.

The chapter also includes a story of Tererai Trent, a Zimbabwean woman who wants to provide every girls in Zimbabwe with an access to education. As a class, we were encouraged to see these educated women going back to their homeland to improve the conditions for the girls. Although women in these countries once thought they had no hope and did not understand the meaning of "achievable," Tererai proved that education can change everything. Reading about these inspirational women made each of us motivated to take our opportunity to speak up for the women empowerment to promote this change in the world for the better. Their testimonies taught us not to underestimate the power of one and a difference one can make in bringing about a positive change in the world.