Warrior Women

Rafea Anad

I first “met” Rafea Anad on a PBS TV show called Solar Mamas, one of a series of programs collectively entitled Why Poverty? She was thirty-two years old at the time, with four daughters (a fifth came along a bit later.) She is a Bedouin and lived in a traditional tent in the middle of the Jordanian desert, close to the Iraqi border. Her village was said to be one of the poorest of all the desert villages in Jordan.
Rafea Anad was given the opportunity to travel to India, to the Barefoot College, to learn to be a solar engineer. This college, the brainchild of entrepreneur Bunker Roy, trains impoverished women, from all over the world, to become solar engineers.
And so, Ms Anad left her four daughters, her home and her husband and headed off to India. The project is intriguing on several levels. Uneducated women, living in abject poverty, are given the opportunity and responsibility of first, learning a trade themselves, and later, training their peers to do the same. Their goal is to provide the entire village with electric power.
Watching the PBS show, I was impressed by the dedication and determination of the women at Barefoot College. They came from everywhere: Kenya, Guatemala, Colombia and many other countries. The women could not speak to each other as they did not have a common language, but they still managed to communicate and support one another. The classes were taught in English, by an Indian man with that stereotypical accent so common in Hollywood movies and silly cartoon shows. It is a wonder the women learned anything at all. But learn they did, and after six months of study, were sent home.
What struck me was the enormity of the change in Rafea Anad’s life. Here is a woman who was removed from formal schooling at the age of ten (for girls to be educated beyond that point is thought to be “shameful,”) who had never traveled before, who lived under the complete control of a strict patriarchal society, and in particular, her husband; a woman who lived a simple, perhaps monotonous, life, who was thrust into a completely new, and most likely, scary, world. I don’t know if I’d have the guts to do it.
When Ms Anad returned to her village, she (and her aunt, who had attended Barefoot College with her) installed eighty solar panels in one week. Wow! I just can’t imagine the amount of work involved. And some of the parts and components of the solar panels must have been pretty damn heavy.
Ms Anad experienced great deal of resistance, of course, from the men in her village, especially her husband. They wanted her to remain in her traditional Bedouin role of submissive, meek wife and mother. She had other plans.
The focus, strength and conviction of Ms Rafea Anad is humbling. I don’t know if I could do what she has done. I imagine it must have been excruciating to leave her daughters! What courage.
Brava! for a job well done, Rafea Anad.
To watch the documentary of Ms Anad’s journey, go here:
http://video.pbs.org/video/2296683172/