WCC Pilgrimage Blog

For decades I have been trying – together with social movements – to raise awareness in our churches and politics that we in the rich North, particularly in Germany, are living at the expense of people and nature in the global South, and that we offload the consequences to other parts of the earth. My focus is on the subject of justice. I believe that there cannot be solutions to the climate crisis if the issues of resource and social justice are not addressed. Peace in the world also heavily depends on this.

Before I was born and as I grew up, there were many gender stereotypes that negatively affected women and girls. These included beating wives and not appreciating baby girls. In my culture, girls were deprived of education, because taking them to school was considered a waste of resources. Parents and the general communities looked at girls as sources of dowry (bride price) and so they were married off at an age of 14 -18 years.

Many of us hate our bodies – bodies which do not match up to the media ideal; hating our bodies because of the liberties taken without our consent; hating ourselves for being born woman.

I am a woman and I thank God for that every day of my life. But being a woman means living every day to meet the demands that society, family and our work places (even the church) impose on us. Because I am a woman, I am expected to be perfect, and this is where I see one of the faces of violence: “forgetting who I am in order to become the superstar everyone expects me to be”.