Excerpt from The Weekly Correspondent (Culled from House of Falling Women by Rosemary Ekosso)
Weekly Correspondent: What exactly is this edifice?
Martha Elive: This is a place of solace and self-fulfillment for women. It was created to provide women with more choices than they have so far.
Weekly Correspondent: So this is for the empowerment of women?
Martha Elive: I dislike catchwords. It seems…trite and somewhat hypocritical to reduce the struggle of fully half of the human race to a blithe, fashionable concept coined by a combination of briefcase NGOs, meddlesome and ineffectual do-gooders and so-called development partners. As I said, the aim is to provide women with more options concerning the direction their lives take. I want them to be able to influence their future. I want them to think and act like mistresses of their own fate.
Weekly Correspondent
So they do not have that power now?
Martha Elive
I do not think so.
Weekly Correspondent
How was did project born? How did you organize funding?
Martha Elive
This is my idea, my vision, and the money was given to me by a philanthropist who is now deceased. Honest money, I should emphasize.
Weekly Correspondent
Concretely. What do you aim to do? What are the projected activities?
Martha Elive
Education, retraining and support. Education will be provided to women whose schooling was ignored or interrupted. Retraining will be given to those who wish to upgrade or diversify their skills. Lastly, support, will involve assisting women, who for various reasons, have come up against obstacles to self-fulfillment and need help to tide them over a bad patch. Therefore, as you realize, the overall aim is to give women a chance to reinvent themselves, both socially and mentally.
Weekly Correspondent
So, in fact, you aim to empower them to make choices and implement those choices.
Martha Elive
If you insist on using the term, yes that is it, in short.
Weekly Correspondent
How are you going to implement this?
Martha Elive
I cannot go into detail as we are just beginning. The method will depend on the obstacles we face, on the situations that arise. There no hard and fast rules. However, I am sure that there is a need to be fulfilled, and we are here to fulfill that need.
Weekly Correspondent
Who are “we”?
Martha Elive
Time will tell.
Above is an excerpt from Rosemary E. Ekosso’s House of Falling Women: a story about a young women with quixotic ideas about improving the lot of women who finds out that the crusader’s cloak is uncomfortable. She creates an institute for the empowerment of women only to find that the contradictions to be resolved are more firmly anchored in her psyche than anywhere else.
Ekosso was born in Cameroon. She resides in Holland.
She blogs at http://www.ekosso.com/
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