Money Issues

The following is a guest post from Lennita. We are very pleased to note that over 80 women will be attending Women's Worlds 2011 thanks to the Solidarity Fund. Lennita is one of these women and will be presenting her paper, "Exploring Feminist Epistemologies Through Lived Bodily Experience" on July 4th at 5pm in 9161 Desmarais.

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It was an audacious move from my friends and I to respond the Women's Worlds 2011 Call for Participation. We have been debating gender matters for a while: it bounds us and it guides our work even though the geographic distance that keeps us apart.

Women's Worlds seems like the perfect place to gather and experience life among people that share our issues. Audacious moves bring with them audacious problems and besides gender issues, we had than also money issues.

It’s not cheap at all to fly from Brazil (or Portugal, England or Italy) all the way to Canada.

Beautiful country, we can be expect to see astonishing maple trees, but a long way from home for us.

We all made our attempts with the Solidarity Fund, read and checked each others' applications, followed the site looking for the response, praying to manage the savings, arrange financial support and be all able to hug ourselves in Ottawa.

As the process kept going I remember thinking: that’s a job I would not like for myself, being responsible to choose among all those applications beautifully written and full of faith. It’s like choosing among beautiful people and we should not be obligated to do that.

Of course there were guidelines, age, country, curriculum, etc.

As it turned out, my 29 years of age and Brazilian citizenship made a difference and I got the answer we all expected.

It made me very glad, but it did not manage to dissolve the feeling selection process are always full of suffering. It seemed so unfair my friends did not get the help they needed as much as I did and Women's Worlds would mean much less without them. Not to mention all the other beautiful women I could only picture that didn’t get the answer they expected. This process tells a lot about the world we live in and I write these lines to pay tribute to all the women who will not come to Women's Worlds for money issues. They are serious business.

I’m happy to finish in a optimistic tone, being able to tell all my friends got either savings or other financial support (actually, both) and we now are all meeting in 1^st of July!