Hi everyone,
I can't really take many more of these articles about the plights of women in the global south. I read this story in a text I read for a class that took on looking at gender in a transnational perspective.

In the 80s, white feminists from the US went to a village in Kenya to do humanitarian work. They saw that the women in the village were walking two hours everyday, there and back, in order to get water from a well.Why were the women in the village forced to walk so far in order to get water? The white feminists saw this walk as a result of the systematic oppression of women in the village. So they decided that the money they had for their humanitarian work would be invested in building a well in the village.

Several months later, the women from the US came back to the village in Kenya to see the result of their good work. They found that the women in the village chose to walk the two hours to the well that was farther away everyday even though there was a well close by. Well, it turns out that the two-hour walk everyday was a time when the women of the village could talk amongst themselves. Going to the well close to the village would take away those two hours of camaraderie and socializing.

Misogyny and patriarchy are expressed to varying degrees in different ways in different places. My experience as a white female college student in the United States is unimaginably different from that of a woman in a Kenyan village. Historically, white feminists' efforts to help third world women have often done more damage than good. And who benefits from having a bunch of white feminists way over in in Africa "saving" the women? The white men in offices and in corporations and in their houses who these women would be protesting and giving shit to if they were in the US.

[edit: One commenter ask that I be more specific about what I posted this story in response to. I wanted to give an example of the dangers of white western feminists working in the global south. There are many other examples of these kinds of happenings. I hope that I and other white feminists in the West can have a conciousness of this history in whatever we do. I have to work within a history of white colonists in the global south who were also claiming to "help" the women. I feel that because there are posts in this community about women in the global south, every person here, including myself, should be extremely concious of this history.]