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Asma was 13 years old and in eighth grade. She was living with her parents and other siblings in a remote village of marsh land in Bangladesh. She had to walk a mile, cross a river and then walk another mile to attend the high school. She was only girl from her village who was attending high school. Most of the girls of her age were dropt out after completing primary education, getting married and giving birth. She had moved away from home to live with her aunt, who was located much closer to the school because she was under constant harassment on her way to school by a man of 27 years who proposed her a marry. As Asma refused his proposal and failed to push her to accept his offer than he sent his family to Asma’s family with a marriage proposal. The man was uneducated and a “bad boy.” Neither Asma nor her family approved of him. Moreover, Asma’s father told the family, “I want my daughter to continue her studies and I’m not going to marry her off now.” 

WE DO NOT OBEY: More women follow Ilana Hammerman`s footsteps: we shall not obey illegal and immoral laws. On Friday, July 23, we went on a trip - a dozen Jewish-Israeli women with a dozen West-Bank Palestinian women and four of their children, one of them a baby. We drove through the interior hill country (`Shfela`) and toured Tel Aviv and Yaffa together. We ate at a restaurant, bathed in the sea and had a great time on the beach. We returned via Jerusalem and watched its Old City from afar. 

"The first film I make when I go back to my village will be about unequal wages women peasants get compared to their male counterparts," says Haseena Mallah, an unlettered farmhand in her 40s. A mother of five, Mallah is one of nine women who attended a two-week filmmaking workshop from Jul. 14–26 in Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi, some 143 kilometres from her village near Hyderabad. And at the premiere of the engaging 10-minute film they made, entitled ‘Half Face’, these women showed that one does not always have to be technologically savvy – or even literate – to make a documentary. 

Accommodating the growing number of Kuwaiti women wanting to trade, as well as Kuwaiti cultural tradition, the Kuwait Finance House is opening a trading hall exclusively for women at the local stock market exchange. “Women’s banking is no longer limited to deposit and withdrawal,” Tahani Saleh Al-Khamis, an area manager with the bank Kuwait Finance House told The Media Line. “[Women’s banking] has expanded over and beyond to include the demand for diversified products such as participation in investment funds and portfolios, particularly new and existing [ones].”