Yes - but I am still counting on that Army of 70 Year Old Women to eventually Take Over The World....
This essay- from 2005- still rings in my ears -
..."What struck me most, though, in Bukavu were the women. As I drove into the city, I passed women I have known all of my life. There were old women -- old in Africa means 35 or so -- with huge bundles of bamboo sticks on their back. In most cases, the burdens were larger than the backs carrying them as they trudged up one hill after another. There were market women in their colorful dresses -- in Liberia we would call them lapas -- huddled together on the side of the road selling oranges, hard-boiled eggs and nuts.
There were young women and girls, sitting in front of village huts bathing their sons, daughters, brothers and sisters in rubber buckets. No electricity or running water was anywhere close, but one 10-year-old girl had dragged a bucket of dirty creek water up the hill to her house so she could wash her 4-year-old sister.
These were the women I grew up with in Liberia, the women all across Africa -- the worst place there is to be a woman -- who somehow manage to carry that entire continent on their backs.
In Liberia, when their sons were kidnapped and drugged to fight for rebel factions, and when their husbands came home from brothels and infected them with H.I.V., and when government soldiers invaded their houses and raped them in front of their teenage sons, these were the women who picked themselves up and kept going. They kept selling fish, cassava and kola nuts so they could feed their families. They gave birth to the children of their rapists in the forests and carried the children on their backs as they balanced jugs of water on their heads.
These are the women who went to the polls in Liberia last week. They ignored the threats of the young men who vowed more war if their chosen presidential candidate, a former soccer player named George Weah, didn't win. "No Weah, no peace," the boys yelled, chanting in the streets and around the polling stations.
The women in Liberia, by and large, ignored those boys and made Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who is 67, the first woman to be elected to lead an African country. I wasn't surprised that Mr. Weah immediately said the vote had been rigged, although international observers said it had not been. In the half-century since the Europeans left Africa, its men have proved remarkably adept at self-delusion."..
Helene Cooper Editorial Observer on Bukavu in Congo, luxuriant landscape ravaged by years of pointless civil war; describes particular plight of women, young and old, whose harsh lives are so like those of women in her home, Liberia, who have just elected Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf president; tells...
www.nytimes.com
Shirleaf Johnson went on to serve 3 terms and was winner of the Nobel Peace Prize
www.britannica.com
www.transparency.org
