One brave woman

Last week there was a bit of fluttering about my post supporting International Women's Day. So I thought I'd give you a snippet about one brave woman I met when I was in Laos. I met her in a cafe in Luang Prebang; I'd already learned some of the details about the bombing of Laos by American fighters during the Vietnam War.

I am gathering myself to leave the cafe when a small, olive-skinned woman walks across. She has piercing dark eyes and black hair pulled on back of her head.

            ‘Are you a professor?’ she says. It is a strange way to begin a conversation and I’m flummoxed. In my sweeping skirt and shirt that needs ironing I can’t believe I look like an academic.

            ‘I’m Carol. I’m meeting a professor here,’ she says. ‘To help with my research; into the psychology of Buddhism.’

            She has an accent from the west coast of America, and the eyes of someone from south-east Asia. Her voice is so soft I must lean forward to hear her.  She picks up a heavy book. ‘I think there must be something, in the psychology, that helps understand why the Laos are as accepting as they are. Buddhism, you see,’ – she struggles to find a page as if to prove her point – ‘is the only religion that does not sanction war. Which makes what happened here all the more terrible. The most bombed country in the world … and Nixon told us it wasn’t happening.’

It is a relief to meet someone as upset about this as I am. I confess my own struggle to understand why the Lao don’t hate us.

‘They never did. When I was here before – in about 1964, I think it was, at the start of the bombing, I was with a medical unit, doing admin, they were astonishing. We had places to stay, but the things we saw …’ She lets the sentence hang and I wait. ‘There were so many factions. We were at a dinner, with a General. His son loved a girl from another group. Three days later the son was brought into us with gunshot wounds – he was dying and I wanted to sit with him, hold his hand while he died. Like anyone would.’ She looked at me, as if for confirmation that compassion was permitted. ‘I was told to leave him alone; it wasn’t safe. No one knew if it was someone from the General’s side disapproving of the son’s choice of girlfriend, or from the other side wanting to upset him. If it was known I’d befriended him, well, they might have come after me.’ Now her look made sense.

She took a deep breath. Was she working herself up to say something even more difficult? ‘Americans were dying here too,’ she said at last, ‘though they didn’t know that at home. If they died here their families were told they were missing in Vietnam. Even now families don’t know if their loved ones died here.’

We arrange to have supper together before I leave Luang Prabang. We settle in a restaurant and our chatter is inconsequential for a while, but she is easily distracted and I feel sure she has something she needs to say. As our food arrives she leans across the table to whisper to me.

            ‘I read a dreadful thing,’ she says. ‘In my books, talking about the war here. That project, the medical project – it was part of a CIA operation. They never told me.’ Her eyes are wide with the horror of it. ‘I never knew, honestly I never knew. The CIA, here, in Laos, and the bombing.’

            It hangs, her confession, over our curry. She is not hungry and I play with my rice. I have no idea how to reply – or even how to think about it.

            ‘The CIA,’ she says again. It is as if she needs to say it over and over to help herself believe it. ‘I never knew; honestly I never knew. It’s only the reading I’ve done this week – I was young; nobody told me.’

            I have no idea if she needs consoling, or affirming that I believe her (which I do), that it is truly shocking. All of which I want to say but somehow it is so appalling that I can’t find the words.

            Our meal is soon over; we exchange addresses, hug, and go our separate ways, promising to keep in touch. I slip into a bar for a beer; she has given me much to think about. She’s asked about my writing – and knows I’ll tell this story. She has told me much more than the high and mighty of America might want disclosed. She will recognise herself here. The core of this story is as she told it. But I’ve played with her biography; I cannot put her a risk.

This is an edited extract from Bombs and Butterflies - there are links to the right of this blog if you want to read more. Or trot across to the website here.

Do we still need International Women's Day?

Next Saturday is International Women's Day. Surely such a concept is outdated, in the twenty-first century?

Oh yes, we still need it.

Not only because there are so few women in the Cabinet, nor are there many with any real political power.
Not only because there are so few women with real authority in business.
Not only because the pay gap between men and women (in the UK) continues to grow, decades after to equal pay act.
Not only because there are so few women on game shows on the BBC.
Not only because a national newspaper feels it appropriate to present pictures of women's breasts and call it 'news'.
Not only because it's easier for men to get their books reviewed than women.
Not only because far greater attention and vitriol is fired at young single mothers than the fathers who left them in that position.
Not only because 30% of women in the UK have some experience of violence within the home.
Not only because 3 women a week are murdered by their partners in the UK.
Not only because the impact of benefit cuts falls unfairly on women.
Not only because statistics suggest that women still do most of the housework, shopping, child care, and general homemaking.

And not only because women struggle all over the world, and not just in the UK. In fact, women here can think themselves lucky:

Over 20% of maternal deaths in childbirth take place in India - a country with more millionaires than America.
It has taken the courage of one young women for the world to realise that so many girls don't go to school.
Rape has been used as a weapon in war.
It has taken a few brave survivors to make people begin to about the abuse that is FGM.
There are too many countries where men dictate what women are allowed to wear, where they can go, if they can drive.

So how will you be celebrating? (If you ask nicely, I'll share my cake.)

Things I'm just not good at ...

I have a book on my shelf entitled 'You Don't Need a Man to Fix It'.

I am a feminist - I believe that women and men have equal rights to the good things of life, to education and employment, and the right to walk down streets safely.

I also believe that there is nothing intrinsically masculine about mending things. Women can wield a paintbrush or screwdriver as well as a man. I know there are a few things that require brute strength - but you get the basic idea. There's no fundamental reason why I shouldn't be able to put up a shelf or paint a window.

Some years ago my iron died. (This was in the days when I did ironing. When I was travelling all my clothes lived in a rucksack and I discovered that, however, crumpled my best shirt might be, Nothing Happened! So I stopped ironing). Anyway, my iron died. So I found a screwdriver and took it to pieces, putting everything down in a logical order as I knew I'd have to put it together again. And then I looked at my book and found the instructions: it is impossible to mend irons; buy a new one.

Undeterred, I decided to sand the windowsill - it had too many overflow stains from plant pots. What a success - the windowsill was smooth as silk, and I even managed a coat of paint on it without spilling too many drips on my shoes. I turned to the sideboard: I would take it outside to sand it, I decided. Which meant taking the double glazing apart across the back doors ... my book had no instructions on what do to with several panes of glass and wooden struts when the whole thing collapses.

Soon after than the cat flap fell apart. No, I decided, I'd not try to mend it. I'd just buy a new one. Which was fine until I discovered that the holes for the old one were in a different place on the door ... a neighbour came with his four-year old to fix it.

I have tried. Honestly, I have tried. And I now accept I'm simply not good at it. I can blame my education (I was brought up to make pastry while my brothers mended the punctures on my bike). Or I can simply say that handy-stuff, like gardening and cooking, is just not one of my skills.

I'm stuck with the dissonance of knowing I should, and knowing I can't. So when the man who mended my wooden garden chairs suggested I give them a coat of something I nodded, as if I knew what he was talking about. And something else on the metalwork, he said. I nodded again.

To be fair, I managed to buy the stuff and coat the chair with weatherproofing, and it doesn't look that terrible. But if a knight in shining armour had galloped across my garden and offered a cup of tea at that moment when I dropped the can and splattered a pint of 'dark oak' across the flagstones I might have kissed him.

Does that make me a bad feminists?