They left their Footprints on the sands of time

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail,” Ralph Waldo Emerson 

On March 8, Sri Lanka joined other countries the world over to mark International Women’s Day (IWD). First celebrated more than a century ago, it is a day set apart to remind us to make a genuine and positive difference for women.   

Gloria Steinem, world-renowned feminist, journalist and activist once said,  “The story of women’s struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights.”   

IWD celebrates the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women and underscores a call to action to accelerate gender parity or equality thus evoking a sense of unity, celebration, reflection, advocacy and action.   

In this editorial we focus on three women, from among several others, who fearlessly stood up for justice and with their accomplishments continue to urge men, women and children to be catalysts for change in this troubled world of ours.   

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, born on February 4, 1913 was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress called her “the first lady of civil rights” and “the mother of the freedom movement”.   

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake’s order to relinquish her seat in the “coloured section” to a white passenger, after the whites-only section was filled. She was arrested on charges of civil disobedience for violating Alabama’s segregation laws. 

Parks’ prominence in the community and her willingness to become a controversial figure inspired the black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year -- the first major campaign of the post-war civil rights movement.  She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation and worked closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the civil rights movement.   For her role in promoting civil rights, Rosa Parks was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 by US President Bill Clinton. She passed away on October 24, 2005.   

Born on August 26, 1910, Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu well-known as Mother Teresa was an Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary. In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic religious congregation which had more than 4,500 nuns and was active in 133 countries in 2012. The congregation manages homes for people dying of HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis; soup kitchens; dispensaries and mobile clinics; children’s and family counselling programmes; orphanages, and schools.   

Mother Teresa received several honours, including the 1962 Ramon Magsaysay Peace Prize and 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. Nine years after her death on September 5, 1997, the Catholic Church recognised her as Saint Teresa of Calcutta at a religious ceremony on September 4, 2016.   She often would say, ‘Do things for people not because of who they are or what they may do in return but because of who you are’.   

Malala Yousafzai, born on July 12 July 1997 is a Pakistani activist for female education and at 17 years of age became the first Pakistani and the youngest ever Nobel Prize laureate. She is known for her human rights advocacy, especially the education of women and children in her native Swat Valley where the local Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school.   

On October 9, 2012, while on a bus in the Swat District, she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman. From the Rawalpindi Institute of Cardiology, she was transferred to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham and following her recovery, became a prominent activist for the right to education.   

In October 2011 she was nominated by human rights activist Desmond Tutu for the International Children’s Peace Prize. In December of that year she was awarded Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize (later renamed the National Malala Peace Prize)

In 2013, with Christina Lamb (foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times), Yousafzai coauthored a memoir, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban.

They are among the several ordinary women who did extraordinary things to make this world a little better than when they found it.   

We also dedicate this editorial to all Sri Lankan housemaids who are toiling in the Middle East to secure a brighter future for their loves ones back home. Some of the housemaids return home with their dreams shattered, some in coffins leaving their kith and kin worst off than before while a few, luckier than the rest, return home with sufficient savings to fulfil their dreams.   
Meanwhile, we hope Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera’s 2019 Budget proposals to uplift the living standards of our housemaids and empower them for a fruitful future will not remain mere proposals but be acted upon and translated into something tangible and meaningful.