Ruta writing…At work, we emphasize “gender equalitiy” issues. There is a growing conviction among international development work that a key to dramatic improvements in a developing country’s progress is to educate and empower women. It certainly makes sense to me. Women are key to a family’s culture and values. If the mother is uneducated and repressed, often the children are as well. On the other hand, when a mother values education, she teaches those values of learning, confidence, and ambition to her kids. In Ethiopia there are many issues carrying over from “tradition”. The extreme are termed “harmful traditional practices” which include kidnapping (e.g. if a girl balks at an arranged marriage, she’s kidnapped into it), female genital mutilation (a particularly horrendous, awful, demeaning tradition that affects 60-90% women here) and child marriage. Child marriage has
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