This short video was created by the organization I am writing my paper on, the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). MCC is an organization of the Mennonite Churches of the United States and Canada which works both in North America and around the world in a number of capacities. This particular video focuses on a branch the organization’s global “Generations at Risk” HIV/AIDS awareness program in Nepal, and specifically two of the local women (Laxmi Kuwar and Tuka Regmi, both of whom became HIV positive through husbands who went to work in India) who have started support groups to counsel those with the disease and raise awareness in the wider community.
What I found particularly interesting about the video, and many others featured alongside it on the MCC website, is that the central characters are women. In Chapter 3 of Making Development Geography, Victoria Lawson talks about the challenges mainstream development theory has faced concerning the role of women. Development has often been aimed solely at men, while women have often been considered, implicitly or explicitly, as passive and dependent on male breadwinners. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Lawson identifies approaches such as Women in Development (WID), which, although able to shift the focus of development, in the process “constructed a homogeneous ‘Third World woman’, associated with a series of problems, such as illiteracy, high mortality, high fertility and poverty, that were holding her back.” She is the “ideal subject of development” (102).
In contrast with these caricatures, this clip shows that women do certainly face unique challenges. According to MCC’s website, “Women in general, and girls in particular, are more vulnerable to HIV and are disproportionately affected by the epidemic. They bear the greatest burden of care. Families remove girls from school to care for sick relatives or assume family responsibilities, thereby jeopardizing recent gains in female health, nutrition and education. This has an especially detrimental impact on girls’ own development and leaves them more vulnerable to the epidemic” (MCC).
I think that by recognizing the distinct challenges faced by women in Nepal concerning HIV/AIDS, and allowing the two women in this video to tell their unique stories—stories in which they have active roles—this clip avoids recreating either the ‘passive housewife’ or the ‘Third World woman’ and instead shows a good example of involving women in little ‘d’ development, which can hopefully create practical change.
If you would like more information, this video initially came from here.