In Celebration of Friendship
Staff member Karen Seabrooke reflects on Inter Pares' 20+ year journey with activist Khushi Kabir of Bangladesh.
 Khushi Kabir and Karen Seabrooke |
October 1982
Khushi Kabir arrives in Gander, Newfoundland in the midst of a snowstorm that has shut down the airport in St.John's. She and Shireen Huq are in Canada for a series of meetings with women's groups and community organizations across the country, organized by Inter Pares. Khushi is the Director of Nijera Kori, a national landless peasant and women's organization formed just a few years earlier. Shireen is an organizer, researcher and women's rights advocate. They are both active in the women's movement in Bangladesh, and are young, bright, dynamic, articulate. I'm meeting them for the first time, having corresponded for several months in preparation for their visit. I'm nervous about the trip ahead, hoping we'll get along and that the meetings will lead to common cause and collaboration among Canadian and Bangladeshi women. Khushi and I end up billeted in the same house, in the same cold room. For over twenty years now we've joked about that auspicious start to our friendship - how neither of us slept well because of the cold, and the strangeness of it all.
We shared an important experience that month, and by the end of the visit we were no longer strangers. I learned so much from these two women and from others we met across the country - about the links between the personal and political, about poverty and violence against women in Bangladesh and in Canada, about women's organizing and feminism. Khushi and Shireen broke down myths and stereotypes - about Bangladeshi women, and about the causes of inequality and impoverishment within and among countries. Khushi and Shireen were catalysts, provoking Canadian women to keep debating, strategizing, mobilizing - to join our struggles for women's empowerment with broader social justice movements nationally and internationally. As Khushi put it, "Let's work together and strengthen each other, because our futures are bound together."
October 2003
On a sunny, unusually warm fall day in Ottawa, a group of Canadian women gather at Inter Pares to meet four of our colleagues - Asha El-Karib from Sudan, Junice Melgar and Sylvia Estrada-Claudio from the Philippines, and Khushi - sharing experiences and strategies to confront and resist political violence against women. Our international colleagues share insights into the context for women in their countries. Khushi describes Nijera Kori's work with women in rural communities of Bangladesh, providing examples of women's leadership and courageous resistance to violence and the status quo. All four women address the need to collaborate globally and mount an international challenge to fundamentalism in all of its forms - religious, cultural, economic, scientific, patriarchal.
I look across the room at Khushi. It is twenty-one years almost to the day that Khushi landed in Newfoundland. I recall the dynamic young activist I met then, and think about the journey Inter Pares and Nijera Kori have taken together since. I can still see Khushi discussing with women working in fish plants in Corner Brook; sitting with a group of women farmers in a kitchen in Brandon; speaking with immigrant and minority women in Sudbury; presenting at a public meeting on aboriginal women's health in Downtown Eastside, Vancouver; meeting with Inter Pares supporters in living rooms across the country.
Khushi's participation in this meeting in Ottawa is part of the political relationship between Nijera Kori and Inter Pares that began over two decades ago. Khushi tells the others that Inter Pares is unique among Nijera Kori's relationships with northern organizations, and the most long-standing. "Inter Pares has never behaved like a 'donor', but as a friend of Nijera Kori; we share our knowledge and aspirations, raise critical issues and challenge each other in constructive ways. You can only do that when there are shared values and a strong basis of trust."
Nijera Kori and Inter Pares continue to move forward, to build a future that honours women and is safer and healthier for all. There is still so much to be done - for our futures are bound together and we must join our struggles to change the world.
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Inter Pares works overseas and in Canada in support of self-help development groups, and in the promotion of understanding about the causes, effects and solutions to under-development and poverty.
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Financial support for the Bulletin is provided by the Canadian International Development Agency.
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