Living History (46 page)

My most vivid memories of India were not of the Taj Mahal, breathtaking as it was, but of two visits I made in the city of Ahmadabad in the state of Gujarat. The first was to Mahatma Gandhi’s simple ashram, where he sought a meditative retreat from the roiling struggle to create an independent India. The deprivation I had seen and the simplicity of his life reminded me of the excesses of mine. Gandhi’s beliefs in nonviolent resistance to oppression and the need to organize large opposition groups to a government’s policies influenced the American civil rights movement and was critical to Martin Luther King’s campaign to end racial segregation. In his own country, Gandhi’s life and principles of self-reliance and rejection of the caste system inspired a remarkable woman, Ela Bhatt.

Following Gandhi’s example, she founded the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in 1971. Liz Moynihan, Senator Moynihan’s extraordinary wife, had introduced me to Bhatt and encouraged me to make a trip to SEWA and see for myself what one determined woman could create.

Both a trade union and a women’s movement, SEWA claimed over one hundred forty thousand members, including some of the poorest, least educated and most shunned women in India. These women entered into arranged marriages and then lived in their husbands’ households under the watchful eyes of their mothers-in-law. Some had lived in purdah until their husbands died, were disabled or left, and they had to support their families; all struggled day-to-day to survive. SEWA offered small loans to enable them to earn their own income and also provided basic literacy and business education training.

Ela Bhatt showed me the large books kept in SEWA’s one-room office that recorded the loans and repayments. Through this system of “microfinance,” SEWA was providing employment for thousands of individual women and changing deeply held attitudes about women’s roles.

Word of my visit had spread through the villages of Gujarat, and nearly one thousand women flocked to the meeting, some of them walking nine or ten hours along hot, dusty paths through the country side. Tears filled my eyes when I saw them waiting for me under a large tent. Fanning themselves in their sapphire-, emerald-and ruby-colored saris, they looked like an undulating human rainbow. They were Muslim and Hindu, including untouchables, the lowest Hindu caste. There were kite makers, scrap pickers and vegetable vendors, and Chelsea sat down among them.

One by one, women stood up to tell me how SEWA had changed their lives, not only because of the small loans they received and the help SEWA gave them in their businesses, but also because of the solidarity they felt with other struggling women. One woman struck a common chord when she explained that she was no longer afraid of her motherin-law. In their culture, the motherin-law typically exerts rigid control over her son’s wife as soon as the couple marry and move in with his family. Having her own market stall and her own income gave this woman welcome independence. She added that she was no longer afraid of the police either because a group of SEWA-sponsored vendors now protected her from harassment by overbearing officers in the market. The dignified bearing, chiseled faces and kohl-rimmed eyes of the speakers belied their difficult lives.

Finally, I was asked to make closing remarks. As I finished, Ela Bhatt took the microphone and announced that the women wanted to express their gratitude for my visit from America. In a stunning flash of moving color they all sprang to their feet and began singing “We Shall Overcome” in Gujarati. I was overwhelmed and uplifted to be in the midst of women who were working to overcome their own hardships as well as centuries of oppression.

For me, they were a living affirmation of the importance of human rights.

I was still thinking of their faces and words the next day as we flew from sea level to Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, which sits in the middle of the Himalayan mountains, in a low valley at an altitude of just over 4,200 feet, the same as that of Salt Lake City. On a clear day, you can see a panorama of snow-capped peaks ringing the city.

The landscapes of Nepal are among the most beautiful in the world, but the inhabited regions of the country are overcrowded. Human waste is used for fertilizer and clean water is a rarity. The Americans I met all had stories of getting sick after spending time in Nepal, making it sound like an inevitable rite of passage. Peace Corps members showed up to see me wearing T-shirts that listed all the diseases they had survived.

We took extraordinary precautions, since we were only halfway through our trip and even one sick day would throw off the rest of our schedule. Our hosts went out of their way to accommodate our concerns. “Mom, you won’t believe what the Secret Service agents told me,” said a startled Chelsea our first day. “They said the hotel pool was drained before we arrived, and they refilled it with bottled water!” I never learned if this was true, but it would not have surprised me.

During a courtesy visit to the royal palace, I was received by King Birendra Bit Bikram Shah Dev and Queen Aishwarya in a room with a huge tiger pelt on the floor. The Queen had met me upon my arrival at the airport and told me she looked forward to talking with me. I hoped I would have a chance to discuss health care and girls’ education with her, but the King did all the talking. Until recently, he had reigned over a kingdom essentially sealed from the outside world. Now the country was undergoing a transition to representative government, and he wanted to discuss potential American aid and investment.

Nepal was also facing violence and unrest from Maoist guerrillas in the countryside.

That, however, turned out to be less of a threat to the royal family than a pathology within the palace. It is still difficult to accept the fate of the King and Queen and eight family members, shot dead in that very palace a few years later. Their assassin, according to official reports, was the Crown Prince, who was enraged because he was not allowed to marry for love.

Early the next morning, Chelsea and I went for a long walk in the hills above the city.

People stood on the roadside to watch us pass by, and one bright-eyed girl, about ten or eleven, joined us. She spoke a smattering of English, mostly names of places, like “New York City” or “California,” which she would punctuate with an adjective like “big” or “happy.” Then she nodded or laughed as though we were friends having a long conversation.

She completely won me over. The higher we walked, the more I saw how every square inch of land was used for something―houses, terraced farming, roads or Buddhist monasteries that dotted the hillsides. I heard the tinkling of bells from the monastery nearest to us and saw white prayer banners waving from its ramparts. When we walked back down to our cars, the girl’s father was waiting. By then, I had learned that she didn’t attend school but had picked up her bits of English by attaching herself to tourists and trekkers. I complimented the father on his daughter’s intelligence and curiosity, but I doubt I communicated effectively. Though I knew that money was an inadequate token of gratitude and concern, I wanted her father to recognize that I valued his daughter. I hoped that her work ethic and resourcefulness might raise her stature in her family, and encourage them to consider different life choices for her. I have often wondered what became of her.

Later that morning, we visited a women’s health clinic founded by American women living in Nepal. Nepal had one of the world’s highest maternal and infant death rates-a staggering 830 maternal deaths for every 100,000 births, compared with the world average of 400 and the American average of less than seven. The clinics, a partnership among USAID, Save the Children and the Nepalese government, employed a commonsense, low-tech approach to preventive care and had established a program to provide pregnant women and midwives with “safe home delivery kits.” The kits contained a plastic sheet, a bar of soap, a piece of twine, wax and a razor blade. In Nepal, a plastic sheet for a woman in labor to lie on, soap for the midwife to clean her hands and utensils, string to tie off the umbilical cord and a clean razor blade to cut it can make the difference between life and death to a mother and her newborn.

On a stopover in the Royal Chitwan National Park in southern Nepal, Chelsea and I rode an elephant. To be honest, if I hadn’t known I was going to be photographed for posterity, I would have just put on a pair of jeans. Instead, I was garbed in a kind of Out of Africa look, with a khaki shirt and skirt and straw hat. The picture of Chelsea and me that flashed around the world showed a happy mother-daughter team perched on our pachyderm and watching a rare Asian rhino. Later, when we got back to Washington, James Carville remarked: “Don’t you just love it? You spent two years trying to get people better health care and they tried to kill you. You and Chelsea rode an elephant, and they loved you!”

Bangladesh, the most densely populated country on earth, presented the starkest contrast of wealth and poverty I saw in South Asia. Looking out the window from our hotel room in Dhaka, I could see a wooden fence that ran between shanties and garbage heaps on one side and the swimming pool and cabanas where visitors like me could enjoy a drink and a swim on the other. It was like looking at a stereopticon of the global economy.

Here, the authorities made no effort to hide the destitute behind brightly colored cloth. The city was wall-to-wall people, more people per square foot than I had ever seen anywhere, all moving in small cars that clogged the roads or in huge crowds that spilled into those roads. More than once, I gasped as a car narrowly skimmed a group of people.

Walking outside in the heat and humidity was like stepping into a steam sauna. But this was another country I had long wanted to visit, because it was home to two internationally recognized projects-the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research (ICDDR/B) in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the Grameen Bank, a pioneer of microcredit. The ICDDR/B is an important example of the positive results that come from foreign aid.

Dysentery is a leading cause of death, particularly among children, in parts of the world where there are limited sources of clean drinking water. The ICDDR/B developed “oral rehydration therapy” (ORT), a solution composed mostly of salt, sugar and water, that is easy to administer and responsible for saving the lives of millions of children. This simple, inexpensive solution has been called one of the most important medical advances of the century, and the hospital that pioneered it depends on American aid. The success of ORT is also a model for the type of low-tech, low-cost treatment developed abroad that can be replicated in the U.S.

I had first learned about the Grameen Bank more than a decade earlier, when Bill and I invited the bank’s founder, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, to Little Rock to discuss how microcredit lending programs might help some of the poorest rural communities in Arkansas.

The Grameen Bank provides loans to very poor women who have no other access to credit. With loans averaging about $50, women have started small businesses―like dressmaking, weaving and farming―that help lift them and their families out of poverty.

These women have not only proven to be excellent credit risks―the Grameen Bank has a loan repayment rate of 98 percent―but dedicated savers as well, who tend to reinvest their profits in their business and their families. I helped set up a development bank and micro-lending groups in Arkansas, and I wanted to promote micro-lending throughout the United States, modeled on the success of Yunus and the Grameen Bank. They have provided or facilitated assistance to similar programs around the world, distributing $3.7 billion in collateral-free loans to 2.4 million members with borrowers in more than forty-one thousand villages in Bangladesh and elsewhere.

But its triumphs in helping landless women gain self-sufficiency had made the Grameen Bank (and other similar programs) a target for Islamic fundamentalists. Two days before we arrived in Dhaka, some two thousand extremists marched on the capital to denounce secular aid organizations, which they accused of tempting women to defy a strict interpretation of the Quran. In the months before our visit, village banks and girls’ schools had been torched, and one of Bangladesh’s leading woman writers had received death threats.

One of the most disconcerting aspects of security is that you never know how to identify a truly dangerous moment. The Secret Service had received intelligence suggesting that an extremist group might try to disrupt my visit. When I traveled outside the capital to visit two villages in southwestern Bangladesh, flying in a U.S. Air Force C-130 transport plane, we were again on high alert. In the village of Jessore, we visited a primary school where the government was testing a program that rewarded families with money and food if they allowed their daughters to attend. This seemed like a novel inducement to persuade families to send their girls to school in the first place―and then let them stay there. We showed up at the school, which was in the middle of open fields, and I went into the classrooms to talk to the girls and their teachers. While talking to students, I noticed a commotion outside and saw Secret Service agents running around. Thousands of villagers had materialized out of thin air, pouring over a little rise, ten to twenty people deep as far as I could see. We had no idea where they came from or what message they might have wanted to deliver. We never found out because my agents swept us out of there, afraid of a crowd they might not be able to control.

Our visit to the Grameen Bank in the village of Mashihata was worth battling the crowds and the long, bumpy drive. I had been invited to visit two villages―one Hindu and one Muslim―but I could not manage both because of my schedule. Remarkably, the Muslim women decided to come to the Hindu village for our meeting.

“Swagatam, Hillary, swagatam, Chelsea,” the children sang in Bengali, “Welcome, Hillary, welcome, Chelsea!” My old friend Muhammad Yunus was there to greet me, bearing samples of clothing that some of Grameen’s women borrowers had made for sale.

Both Chelsea and I were wearing similar outfits, which he sent to the hotel for us, and he was delighted. He said a few words echoing the theme I had been developing in my own speeches.