One More Day: An International Women’s Day Message
What a year it has been to be a Haitian woman. What a decade, really.
In the best of times, women do the heavy lifting in Haiti. Visit an open market – the backbone of the Haitian economy – and you’ll see that far and away, most of the machann (marketplace vendors) are female.
Check the dropoff and pickup areas at any of the little schoolhouses scattered across the country. Look to see who is doing the cooking, the cleaning, and the caring for sick neighbors. Nearly always, it’s the women.
As the violence and instability has carried on in Haiti, the gangs have pulled the entire country deeper into this unrelenting war that has millions of losers and will never produce a winner. Now, women have had to take on yet another role – protector.
Today in Haiti, it is all too common to be walking down the street on an unremarkable errand – maybe a trip to buy mangoes or rice, perhaps to visit a friend, when out of nowhere, bullets start flying. The war has found you. At any moment, the already-difficult work of caring for your family amid incredible poverty becomes different work entirely – it becomes a mission to survive. Get your babies somewhere safe. Keep your head down. Pray.
Women are not the soldiers in this gang war, but still they pay a high price. Protecting themselves and their children from the violence is yet another unbelievably difficult task that falls upon them.
When I speak with some of the courageous Heartline Maternity Center midwives who are mothers themselves, they shrug it off. It seems to be a common Haitian response to the crisis. “What else can we do, but keep trying to live?” they say.
This International Women’s Day, around the world and particularly in Haiti, millions of women are just trying to live – just trying to keep themselves and their babies alive. The dream of equality, concepts of freedom and thriving and equity are simply not relevant. They are not happening. For so many women, it’s just about making it one more day.
It’s heartbreaking, but it’s the reality. At Heartline, the team is working with what they have – and in a war zone, every “one more day” is a little miracle.
I hope you’ll mark this International Women’s Day with a gift to Heartline. It’s a motion of solidarity with women who are truly fighting for their lives. It’s a way to send a message to a faraway place that says “you are not alone.” It’s a gift that very well could mean one more day.
About the Author
Tara Livesay
Tara Livesay is originally from Minnesota. She is a Certified Professional Midwife and a Licensed Midwife in the State of Texas. Tara is the director of the Heartline Maternity Center, located in Port au Prince, Haiti. Tara and her husband, Troy, along with their seven children, moved to Haiti in January of 2006, where they lived and worked for fourteen years. In addition to overseeing The Heartline Maternity Center, Tara is the co-founder of The Starting Place, a center for maternal healthcare and education in Central Texas. She’s also a co-author of The Starting Place Curriculum, which equips healthcare providers to provide holistic midwifery care in low-resource settings.
