KIM LAWTON: Graduation day at Union Theological Seminary in New York. This multi-denominational Christian institution describes itself as “progressive and evangelistic,” and its stated vision is that graduates will change the world by practicing their theological vocations. That vision explicitly includes women, such as Itang Young. Young grew up in Houston. She says she never saw herself becoming a pastor or religious leader.

ITANG YOUNG: The leadership roles in church were typically held by men, and the women who did work in the church were either Sunday school teachers or they worked in the kitchen or they worked in the nursery. Very rarely was there a woman in the pulpit.

LAWTON: Young became an engineer and took on a high-powered corporate job. Then, she started questioning the purpose of her life.

YOUNG: I needed to do something to help improve the lives of the people around me.

LAWTON: She concluded that seminary would help her get there, and at Union, she found a place especially open to female students.

Nationally, women make up about one-third of all seminary students. But here at Union Theological Seminary, they’re more than 50 percent of the student body. Women have been coming here for 100 years, but as recently as the 1960s, more than 90 percent of the students here were men.

PRESIDENT SERENE JONES: I think right now at this moment in history we’re in the midst of something of the magnitude of the Protestant reformation.

LAWTON: Serene Jones is Union’s first female president. She believes the rate at which women are entering theology and ministry is one of the biggest changes in 2,000 years of Christianity.

JONES: There are communities in this country in which if a woman says she wants to be a minister, she’s not going to be looked at like she’s stark raving mad. To have a situation in which we recognize the fullness of life of women, the full equality of women changes everything.

LAWTON: Women with seminary degrees are becoming ordained pastors. But they are also becoming chaplains, social workers, counselors, authors, scholars and professors. Despite the new opportunities, limitations do remain, even in denominations that support female leadership.

JONES: The number of women from Union and the number of women in this country who are the senior leaders of large congregations is so miniscule, and it still is sort of the, what they refer to as the stained glass ceiling. You can only go so far.

LAWTON: Jones says the challenges can be subtle.

JONES: There are obstacles I think in the church, of people who don’t even know they have a prejudice against women. But they’ll say things like, “You know, she just, I just, I can’t hear her voice in the back of the sanctuary. I want a minister who can talk loud.” Or “You know, she just looks a little too awkward in the pulpit.”

LAWTON: Then, there are more overt limitations. The Roman Catholic Church and certain evangelical denominations oppose female ordination.

PROFESSOR JANET WALTON: I am a Roman Catholic woman. I have no place at this table. This table is for men.

LAWTON: Janet Walton is a Roman Catholic nun who has been professor of worship at Union since 1981. She’s one of several Catholic women on the faculty here.

PROF. WALTON: It’s very difficult for me to imagine that millions of Catholics never experience a woman leading the liturgy. Because I think it matters. It’s not essentially that I think it makes a difference whether a woman or a man does it, but that no women can do it is a very big problem in the Catholic Church.

LAWTON: Part of how it matters, she argues, is in portraying a fuller vision of faith.

PROF. WALTON: There are lots of ways in which the, being a woman and having the experiences that go with being a woman do affect the way one understands God.

BARBARA RICE: It’s not just about having the same place as men in ministry. I mean, certainly we need all those same rights and need access to as many of those positions, absolutely, and equal pay, for sure, but it’s also about bringing all of our uniqueness as women into those positions. We have gifts. We have gifts that are uniquely women gifts and that those don’t get checked at the door

RICE: What is sacred?

LAWTON: Barbara Rice is a second-year masters of divinity student who says she has wanted to be in ministry her entire life. She grew up in a conservative evangelical church in North Carolina, and as a woman and a lesbian, she felt her opportunities for ministry were restricted. But she believes women have much to contribute.

RICE: We have an ability to listen to our intuition. And I think, as far as spiritual matters go, that that’s incredibly important. Whether that’s the way we’re socialized or whatever it is I think that we tend to have a sense of things, that if we can learn to trust it, especially with the discernment of a community, it can be a really spiritually enlivening thing.

LAWTON: Jones believes women bring to theology what she calls a sense of spirituality wedded to the ordinary.

JONES: It’s about breaking bread and putting on Band-Aids on a skinned knee, and about being angry and standing up for justice in a community. Those aren’t things that men don’t do, because they do. It’s just that women somehow bear that in their souls with a depth and a persistence that brings freshness to ministry.

CHARLENE SINCLAIR: The journey for women has been a journey that’s been so difficult so that when they finally are able to step on this path, there’s a level of just like deep joy and gratitude.

LAWTON: For Charlene Sinclair, a 4th year PhD student, seminary has been a way to enhance her work as a community organizer.

SINCLAIR: Seminary actually not only gave me permission to engage my head in this process, but showed me that engaging my head was critical so that I wouldn’t be a reactionary pastor or a reactionary spiritual person, but I can do it out of a place of, not just deep love, but deep, thoughtful love.

LAWTON: Jones found her own passion for theology early on.

JONES: Studying theology, reading Augustine and Calvin and learning about scripture and reading about women’s leadership, it was like eating chocolate all day long. It was so delicious. And that’s when I, when I stumbled into that world I realized I’d found my home.

LAWTON: She grew up in the Disciples of Christ denomination and says her family encouraged her to pursue that passion.

JONES: The struggle along the way was, it’s one thing to imagine yourself doing something and it’s another thing in the broader world to have this, the confidence and the strength to believe you actually can do it.

LAWTON: Jones says it’s important for women to have role models and people to encourage them. She mentors younger women. And, she says, men can also play an important role.

JONES: As women go into the ministry it’s often going to be men that are their biggest supporters. It’s not just women that are out there cheering and you know, giving sustenance.

LAWTON: Itang Young says her time at seminary vastly expanded her vision of how God may use her in ministry. She says it’s actually not all that different from her work as an engineer.

YOUNG: As an engineer, we build things better. We deconstruct and reconstruct items, objects, in a way that helps to improve the lives of other people. And within a ministerial context, the function is the same. We’re doing church in a new way. We are building God’s people. So I went from building things to helping build God’s people.

LAWTON: For now, Young is still deciding whether or not she’ll pursue ordination. She’s not at all worried that as a woman, her ministry options may be limited.

YOUNG: There’s one thing that I learned here at Union that is to create opportunities where none exist. So if there’s not a position available, market yourself and perhaps one could open. The word of God says that your gifts will make room for you, and I believe that.

LAWTON: Jones says that’s the vision she has for all her students.

JONES: If you can come to believe that God wants you to succeed and flourish and lead, that’s unstoppable.

I’m Kim Lawton in New York.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Back in the 1990s, Cambodia, impoverished and rebuilding after its genocidal Khmer Rouge years, took steps to give its new garment industry a competitive leg up. It agreed to a system of fair labor standards with a minimum wage rule, a limit to working hours, unions to represent workers, and freedom of expression. All would be open to international inspection. Today, there are perhaps 400,000 garment workers in more than 300 factories in and near the capital, Phnom Penh. They are subcontractors to brand names and retailers in Europe and America.

Beginning from scratch less than two decades ago, Cambodia’s garment industry has grown into the largest export earner for this country. Three out of four dollars that come into Cambodia come from the garment factories.

The key question is how much all this has benefited workers, almost all of whom are female. Many factories have been plagued by labor unrest. Occasionally, it’s been violent. There have been frequent reports of faintings on factory floors. The unions cite unhealthy conditions and workers weak from malnourishment.

CHEA MONY (Trade Union Leader): Workers have very low salaries, only $61US per month. You cannot afford to live on that day to day. It’s legalized slavery.

DE SAM LAZARO: Chea introduced us to these workers. Like most of their colleagues, they are young, rural migrants living in tight, shared quarters, supporting extended families back home.

SOY NAKRY (Garment Worker): We have to pay for the room, electricity, water.

VONG SOPHAL (Garment Worker): In the evening, we just buy some fish and make some soup. Sometimes we have to keep part of it for breakfast.

DE SAM LAZARO: Chem Savet supports a farm family in a rural province 60 miles away, including her husband, her parents, and two-year-old daughter.

CHEM SAVET (Garment Worker): I can only see her once a month. When I go home she really misses me, so she hugs me, especially when I must leave one day later. One time she put some of her clothes in when I was packing. She wanted to come with me.

DE SAM LAZARO: The standard six-day, 48-hour week plus overtime leaves little time for travel to see family. Factory managers aren’t sympathetic during family emergencies, they complained, and many employees are on temporary instead of permanent employment contracts.

FEMALE GARMENT WORKER: Previously, we saw a lot of strikes, but those haven’t happened recently in our factory because there are a lot of newcomers.

DAVID SCHILLING (Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility): The minimum wage clearly is not sufficient for workers to meet their basic needs. We’re talking food. We’re talking clothing.

DE SAM LAZARO: David Schilling is with the New York-based Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. It’s a shareholder activist group that wants to add a moral voice in global economic matters.

SCHILLING: Whether you’re talking about all the Abrahamic traditions, the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions, at the core is that concept of the human dignity of the person. So you’re taking that and then you’re moving into the realities.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ken Loo represents Cambodia’s garment factory owners. He sees a very different reality for workers.

KEN LOO (Cambodia Garment Manufacturing Association): They’re not whipped, you know. They’re not chained. They come to work willingly.

DE SAM LAZARO: He says most garment workers make more than the $61 minimum wage; closer to $90 dollars a month, he says, higher with overtime. That’s more than policemen, teachers, or most civil servants, he adds.

LOO: We have to put things in context. The per capita GDP of Cambodia for last year as announced by the World Bank was $908. The average common factory worker earns 40 percent more than national per capita GDP. If you use that as a gauge, I think any worker in America would be glad to get 40 percent more than national per capita GDP.

DE SAM LAZARO: Cambodia’s minister of commerce says factory owners have little wiggle room because they are no more than contract tailors.

CHAM PRASIDH (Cambodian Minister of Commerce): They do not own the fabric. They do not own the brand. They just import the fabric, cut, sew, pack, and then sell.

DE SAM LAZARO: Prasidh could impose higher wages in the factories, most of which are owned by investors from China, Taiwan, Korea, and Malaysia. But he says that would be suicidal.

PRASIDH: There is a lot of demonstration to ask for living condition, ask to increase the minimum wage, and what happen? The investor just packed their sewing machine, and they go home!

DE SAM LAZARO: Or they go to another country?

PRASIDH: They go to another country so we have to compare that, our price with Bangladesh. We have to compare our price with Pakistan or India, yeah, or even with China.

DE SAM LAZARO: San Francisco-based Gap is the largest buyer of garments made in Cambodia. It also buys from dozens of other developing nations. Spokeswoman Bobbi Silten says Gap, which owns the Old Navy and Banana Republic chains as well, has no plans to leave Cambodia.

BOBBI SILTEN (Gap Foundation): We have very longstanding relationships with many of the vendors in Cambodia. It’s been one of our top ten sourcing countries for the last ten years. So we are very committed to being there, and we think that the labor standards that they have put in place is one of the reasons why we continue to stay.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ken Loo says buyers may talk up the labor standards. But in 2008, when the global recession began, many, including Gap, cut back in Cambodia. At the same time, he says, Bangladesh—with lower pay and labor standards—saw no drop in business.

LOO: It just confirms our knowledge that, indeed, compliance of labor standards is the icing on the cake. Price is the cake.

PRASIDH: It is a race to the bottom, and Cambodia—to survive we have to create something special.

DE SAM LAZARO: Jill Tucker says Cambodia does have a special competitive advantage since buyers want to be associated with ethical labor standards. Tucker heads an agency supported by the UN and the US government that conducts factory inspections for compliance with the labor standards.

JILL TUCKER (Better Factories Initiative): In the olden days, by that I mean maybe ten years ago, it was more of a cat-and-mouse game than it is now, and the really smart producers, I think, realize that, you know, you need to treat your workers well to retain your workers, and that it’s just not worth it to not treat your workers well.

DE SAM LAZARO: She cites this factory, run by a Taiwan-based company, QMI, as a good example. There’s plenty of air and light and, managers say, good labor relations. All ten thousand of QMI’s workers are on permanent contracts, and wages here range from $90 to as much as $150 a month. That’s still below what unions say is adequate. But Tucker says demands for higher wages, however justified, are a tough sell given realities in the US, the biggest market.

TUCKER: I really wonder if American consumers are willing to pay significantly more for their apparel.

DE SAM LAZARO: Really?

TUCKER: Yeah. The cost of apparel has only dropped over the past decade. None of us are paying more for our garments than we were 10 years ago.

SILTEN: We do need to think about what consumers are willing to pay, where we can source these goods to achieve, you know, get the math to work for everyone. From a macro standpoint I think it’s a very complex issue.

DE SAM LAZARO: Gap’s Silten isn’t sure if consumers would pay more for ethically produced garments. The Interfaith Center’s Schilling says retailers like Gap, pressured by competitors and Wall Street investors, aren’t likely to ask them to do so. More likely, he says, campaigns by activist groups should bring a greater awareness of worker rights issues as they are now on environmental ones.

SCHILLING: There’s more and more advertising around, you know, sort of ecologically sound products. I think more and more that’s going to happen within the social space as well.

DE SAM LAZARO: That would bring greater awareness of the plight of workers in Cambodia and more urgently other nations that don’t subscribe to fair labor standards, and Schilling says it could not happen fast enough.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: In recent years, thousands of rural communities in Senegal have held extraordinary public rallies they call “declarations,” and they’ve declared an end to a deeply rooted practice, one rarely discussed in public, one commonly known as female circumcision.

MOLLY MELCHING: Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that I would be sitting here years later, saying that 4,792 communities in Senegal had abandoned. In the beginning it was just unthought of, unbelievable, because it was so taboo.

DE SAM LAZARO: Molly Melching founded a group called Tostan—“breakthrough” in the local Wolof language—in the early ’90s. She had modest goals: to educate people about health and human rights, especially in rural areas and in local languages. The Illinois native is fluent in the ways of Senegal but she keeps a low profile in the work of Tostan.

Tostan’s work often begins with an ice-breaker, like an old movie. Many in the audience have never watched a film. To overcome the language barrier, the selection is a Buster Keaton silent movie classic from 1923, and it’s a hit. A more serious film followed, on vegetable gardening. It’s all part of seminars on nutrition, health, basic human rights, and other issues—in groups, songs, dances, and drama.

Skit: She needs to be cut. All girls need that.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s proven to be one of the most promising attempts in history to wipe out what Melching calls female genital cutting [FGC], a practice that dates back 2000 years. Each year, the World Health Organization says up to 3 million girls in Africa are subjected to genital mutilation, and up to 140 million women live with its consequences.

Skit: You can’t have a recognized marriage if she is not cut.

DE SAM LAZARO: That cut is a painful rite of passage for girls across a wide swath of predominantly Islamic African and Middle Eastern countries. However, the practice goes back hundreds of years before Islam or Christianity and is also practiced in both faiths and religions native to this region. It’s thought to have originated in the harems of ancient rulers as a means of controlling women’s fidelity, or as a sign of chastity among those who aspired to be consorts.

MELCHING: Those who were in the rest of society could move up, and you could marry someone who was more prestigious or had more money, more status, if you underwent this practice, because it was a sign of good reputation, and as the years went on, I mean 2,200 years, it became very much a part of what was considered criteria for good marriage.

DE SAM LAZARO: Melching came to this West African nation as a student in the 1970s and later as a Peace Corps volunteer. She stayed on to work on improving health education, which she found sorely lacking.

MELCHING: When you see a friend that you’ve known for several months and you’ve gone to her house for lunch, and then she tells you her child has some problem, that it’s someone who has cast an evil spell on the child, the baby, and that she’s going to take them to a religious leader to get the spell taken off, and you don’t know what to say, and it turns out the baby was dehydrated.

DE SAM LAZARO: But from the health education, women began to understand infection, and Melching says they began to connect the dots.

MELCHING: So suddenly as they started learning germ transmission and the consequences of FGC and how these infections occur and why they had more problems in childbirth than other women who had not been cut, they started saying wait a minute.

Seminar: People used to be afraid to talk about this before. Not anymore.

DE SAM LAZARO: But how did women in conservative, patriarchal societies become able to speak out, especially on a sensitive sexual topic? Melching says it’s because Tostan involves men and religious leaders who’ve confirmed that cutting is not required.

MELCHING: We share our modules with the religious leaders so that they see that everything that we do is for the well-being of the community, the health, and all these things are things that Islam espouses, and so they’re very happy in general, but first of all they’re happy because we start with them. We respect them.

DE SAM LAZARO: And that respect also carries over in the group’s message on genital cutting.

MELCHING: Tostan found that using approaches that shame or blame people really was just the opposite of what would work in changing social norms. When you say to someone, we know you love your daughter and you’re doing things because you love your daughter, but let’s look at this and let’s try to understand together exactly what are the consequences of this practice. But you are the ones who will have to make the decision. Then suddenly people are willing to listen. They don’t get defensive.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s far more effective than the approach of many aid groups—religious, government, and private, says Princeton University professor Gerry Mackie.

PROFESSOR GERRY MACKIE: Not hectoring and preaching but having pro and con discussions. When we think of an ideal way of making a change, we’d say it’s democratic. We all get together and talk it over and decide what the best thing is to do. Whereas some development approaches would, say, force them to do it, pay them to do it, trick them into doing it.

DE SAM LAZARO: Tostan’s volunteers and staff who conduct its seminars all hail from the local communities. Often they are leaders and elders speaking from personal experience or anecdotes. Diarre Ba used to make a living as a female circumciser.

DIARRE BA: I was part of this process. I felt bad. This is not right. But I didn’t know anything at the time. I had no learning.

DE SAM LAZARO: Others have painful, vivid memories. Ibrahim Sankare was very close to an older sister growing up. He walked into her room one evening.

IBRAHIM SANKARE: I saw her lying in a pool of blood. I thought someone had really hurt her. I screamed. My father explained to me. Since then, even now I get goosebumps thinking about it.

MARIAM BAMBA: It was very painful. I will never—you ask me if I can forget it? I will never forget the pain. So painful.

DE SAM LAZARO: Marieme Bamba is a long-time campaigner against genital cutting, and she’s spared her ten-year-old daughter the trauma. Yet before she became involved with Tostan and early in her marriage, she was determined to keep up the tradition. Even her own husband was opposed to genital cutting.

SULEYMAN TRAORE: She insisted that she had to do it. There were so many problems if you didn’t do it. If you cooked meals, no one would eat your food. It’s because we didn’t know. People told us that it was our religion. If you don’t do it, you’ll be going against your religion. All this is false. But I alone can’t do this in the village.

DE SAM LAZARO: They say Tostan was able to insure they were not alone—that communities in which they intermarried were also thinking alike, that their daughters would still be marriageable. The large declaration ceremonies have been critical.

MACKIE: One part of bringing about a change like this is to get everyone to change at once, what we call “coordinated abandonment.” Everyone has to see that everyone else sees that everyone is changing.

DE SAM LAZARO: Genital cutting is not the only tradition they want to change. Many communities have vowed to end the frequent practice of allowing older men to marry adolescent girls, acknowledging both the health risks and the girls’ human rights. Molly Melching says there’s plenty of historical precedent for abrupt changes in social norms and attitudes. She sees a very current example every time she comes home. That’s in American views about smoking.

MELCHING: People were smoking, and nobody said anything about it much through the ‘50s, the ‘60s, and even the ‘70s. As people became more and more aware of the harm that it causes, more and more people—there was a critical mass of people who started really protesting. It was amazing for me, coming from Senegal to the United States, to see how quickly things turned around.

DE SAM LAZARO: Tostan’s efforts have now expanded to 14 other African nations.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Kaolack, Senegal.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: The patients are often teenagers or barely in their twenties, yet several of them hobble in on walkers to physical therapy. These women suffer from fistulas, ruptures in vaginal, sometime even rectal tissue—a humiliating, even crippling consequence in most cases because of obstructed childbirth.

DR. CATHERINE HAMLIN: They’re leaking urine, and some of them are leaking bowel contents as well.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Catherine Hamlin and her late husband, Reginald, came to Ethiopia in the 1960s as Christian missionaries and founded the Hamlin Fistula Hospital a few years later. A memorial to her husband invokes the Gospel of Matthew.

DR. HAMLIN: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these, my brothers, you did for me.” In the Bible it says my brothers, isn’t it? We say brothers and sisters.

DE SAM LAZARO: The least of the patients the young obstetricians saw were those with fistula. Amid a lot of suffering, Dr. Hamlin says the fistula patients were especially desperate.

DR. HAMLIN: She’s smelling. She’s poor. She’s got nothing, and she’s an outcast from her whole society, from everything that makes her happy. They lie in bed thinking if I keep really still, the urine will dry up. They curl up in bed. They become stiff. Their knees become contracted, their hips become contracted. They get nerve damage to their feet. The sciatic nerve is pressed on by the long labor, and they’ve got paralysis of the feet. They can’t bring the foot up.

DE SAM LAZARO: Fistulas were common across the world until the early 20th century, when prenatal care and modern systems of delivering health care, like cesarian sections, became available. Today fistulas are almost unheard of in richer countries, but two million women endure them in the developing world.

DR. YETNAYET ASFAW: For me as an Ethiopian, the fact that fistula is happening in the 21st century is not something that we are proud of.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Yetnayet Asfaw works with a nongovernment aid group called Engender Health. She says the big issue is access to care in the vast, impoverished rural areas of this land of 82 million people plus myriad cultural practices.

DR. ASFAW: Eight-four percent live in the rural population, so the majority are rural women, and for rural women the issues are many. Women don’t have access to education. There are also several cultural issues, such as harmful traditional practices. Female genital mutilation is one, early marriage is another.

DE SAM LAZARO: Complications from the practice of cutting external female genitalia and other trauma, like rape, are thought to cause about 20 percent of fistulas. But the vast majority are a complication of obstructed labor, which results both in still birth and permanent injury to the young mother.

DR. HAMLIN: The pelvis of the woman is too small for the baby to come through, or the baby’s in a bad position inside the woman. So my husband used to say it’s either the passage or the passenger. The passage is the pelvis that it’s got to negotiate to get out, and the passenger is the baby, which if it’s not lying in the right position can cause the obstruction.

DE SAM LAZARO: Vaginal and rectal fistulas can be repaired surgically, and Dr. Hamlin, who is 87, still performs many of the procedures, like this woman’s case. We were asked not to use patient names.

DR. HAMLIN: Three days of labor, and then she had a stillborn baby, and then she was left with a vaginal fistula in her bladder. And it was quite—it was a reasonably difficult one.

DE SAM LAZARO: What’s the period of convalescence?

DR. HAMLIN: I think in about 10 or 12 days.

DE SAM LAZARO: She’s better off than most women here. Many have lived with their injuries for years, too late to be repaired even with surgery. Hospital services are free, but transportation is often unaffordable—if they can get a ride.

So how far away has this lady traveled to be here?

DR. HAMLIN: It’s about a four-hour drive.

DE SAM LAZARO: Four-hour drive, which for her would mean a bus ride, maybe?

HAMLIN: She would come in a bus, yes.

DE SAM LAZARO: Which sometimes is difficult for them, if they’re…

DR. HAMLIN: Yes, it is difficult, and sometimes the passengers say, “This woman’s smelling. Put her off. She’s got some disease,” and they’ll be thrown off the bus.

DE SAM LAZARO: To offer better access to its services, the Hamlin Hospital created five satellite facilities like this one in the rural countryside. They are funded entirely by donations from governments and private, often church-based donors. Still, only a third of the 10,000 Ethiopian women who develop fistulas every year receive any care for them. That’s why experts say it’s important to shift the focus from repairing fistulas to preventing them. Ethiopia’s minister of health, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus says a holistic approach is needed.

DR. TEDROS GHEBREYESUS (Ethiopian Minister of Health): We need to focus more on community-based interventions and on preventing the fistulas. The most important issues, it’s the education part, which will be very important, and also law enforcement, like age of marriage is very important. Girls’ education is very important, and we’re working on that.

DE SAM LAZARO: His ministry has won praise from public health experts for building a network of rural health centers in recent years, with a major focus on maternal and child health. But there’s still a huge shortage of skilled people to staff them.

Midwife students in class: Anterior, posterior ….

DE SAM LAZARO: A few years ago the Hamlin Hospital began a four-year midwifery program. These freshmen were studying plastic models of the female pelvis, learning how to detect abnormalities in the fetus position. So far two dozen graduates have gone on to staff regional health centers in rural areas—a small, promising start, says Dr. Hamlin.

DR. HAMLIN: We just have to keep the next generation of doctors and nurses inspired to help these women until it’s eradicated from the countryside, and it can be eradicated and it will be eradicated. In England, obstetric fistulas no longer occurred after 1920, so it’s not so very long ago that fistulas were occurring in England and in Europe.

DE SAM LAZARO: But Ethiopia, like so many developing countries, has a long way to go. Most Ethiopian women today still deliver their babies without the presence of a skilled birth attendant.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, his is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

ROSHANEH ZAFAR (Founder, Kashf Foundation): I think poverty is definitely an issue that we need to resolve, and second is education.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Fifteen years ago, Roshaneh Zafar began trying to understand and attack the roots of Pakistan’s poverty. It’s been aggravated in recent years by civil unrest, religious militancy, and natural disasters. Yet Zafar says she’s seen progress in some places, like this neighborhood in her native Lahore.

ZAFAR: So you’ll see a little slightly better infrastructure. You’ll see that their homes have improved over the years. You may not see the same poverty that we saw over a decade ago.

DE SAM LAZARO: And you may not see any women, at least outdoors. That’s not uncommon in a conservative Muslim society. But Zafar says it creates the mistaken impression that women don’t contribute to economic activity. So in 1995 she started a nonprofit organization called Kashf or “revelation.” It makes small-business loans to women to increase the impact and visibility of their work.

ZAFAR: The women businesses are home-based businesses.

DE SAM LAZARO: And so behind a lot of these storefronts are homes and families run by women, and those are the targets of your loan program.

ZAFAR: Absolutely. There’s a whole, you know, back end that’s being run by women and managed by women, and that’s really the target.

DE SAM LAZARO: In the narrow by-ways and alleys of this ancient city are thousands of small family businesses financed with loans from Kashf. The group now has 150 branches across Pakistan and has loaned the equivalent of $200 million so far to more than 300,000 women. She took us to visit Ruquia Boota, who borrowed about $120 eight years ago and grew her business in embroidered textiles with the help of two more loans. She now employs her two daughters and occasionally up to 10 other women from the neighborhood.

ZAFAR: How do you know what is selling and how much material to buy?

RUQUIA BOOTA: We get orders and then buy accordingly, and we also know what the trends are.

ZAFAR: Where do you get your materials from?

DE SAM LAZARO: The questions are more than pleasant conversation. Loan officers from Kashf pay close attention to the affairs of borrowers. The relationship begins early with financial education.

Teacher speaking to a class for potential borrowers: I’m going to show you this chart. It has four kinds of expenses: necessary, unnecessary, emergency, and wish list.

DE SAM LAZARO: Prospective borrowers get basic tips on how to budget their expenses and rank their priorities.

Teacher to class: Where would you put the cell phone?

DE SAM LAZARO: Kashf gets most of its fund by borrowing from commercial and national banks, and it disperses loans—an average of $150—after rigorous evaluation, and every day young loan officers, most of them female, fan out to visit clients like Sobia Saeed. She has steadily expanded her salon business with three loans.

SOBIA SAEED: I’ve been doing these kids’ hair today. One more left to do.

Mother: How much do you charge for each?

SAEED: Thirty rupees.

DE SAM LAZARO: That’s about 40 US cents. This 27-year-old entrepreneur is doing a lot better than before, but like most borrowers is hardly well off. It’s one reason Zafar says her group makes sure that loan proceeds are put to their intended business purpose, not to household or even emergency use.

ZAFAR: If the money is misutilized—let’s say they spent half of it to fix the roof in the house—then the loan officer goes and informs the branch manager, and we tag that loan, and we will then monitor it. Ninety-seven percent of our loans are spent on the businesses that were agreed on. Three percent may be used on other—may be misutilized.

DE SAM LAZARO: The vigilance comes at a time when microfinance has become a highly competitive business in several countries—often a for-profit business. In India, where it became a multi-billion-dollar industry, an epidemic of nonperforming loans caused a near standstill in lending, hurting many deserving clients, Zafar says.

ZAFAR: As competition is increasing, the microfinance institutions are targeting the same client. So one client may have two to three or four loans, and what that leads is to pyramiding and over-indebtedness, and ultimately the client is stuck with debt and can’t repay it back. The idea is really to add value to the clients’ lives. It’s not to force the credit on them.

DE SAM LAZARO: The idea of giving small loans to poor women was popularized by Bangladesh’s Nobel Prize-winning and nonprofit Grameen Bank. A chance meeting with its founder, Muhammad Yunus, inspired Zafar to leave her job as a World Bank economist and start a similar social enterprise in Pakistan. Zafar says microfinance is a particularly good fit in Pakistan, officially an Islamic republic, since it complies with Sharia law, which has strict rules on lending.

ZAFAR: There’s a lot of compatibility between the notion of Islamic finance and microfinance. That’s how I see it, very simply. The first is you only do productive lending. In Islamic finance you cannot do consumer lending, for example. Similarly, in microfinance we are not really in the business of consumer lending. The second thing is you support the business itself, so you have to do a very detailed analysis of returns from the business.

DE SAM LAZARO: You’re sharing the risk.

ZAFAR: You’re sharing the risk.

DE SAM LAZARO: They also must share the high administrative costs. Borrowers pay an effective interest rate of about 35 percent. Zafar says it’s the only way to sustain the model, because Kashf has to pay between 14 and 16 percent on the money it borrows to make loans. From clients like Sadhiya Aijaz, there are no complaints. She and her husband, Mohammed, worked for years cutting metal manually into short strips to be bent into chain links. Their loan from Kashf has brought them machines and a much improved standard of living for this couple and their five daughters.

SADHIYA AIJAZ: We’re able to produce a lot more now, and the work is much easier. Previously life was very tough, but now with money coming in life has become much easier. We can send our children to be educated, give them clothes, books, food. I want my children to become officers, to be educated like you people. When you have an education your life is much improved.

DE SAM LAZARO: Roshaneh Zafar, raised in an affluent family, with degrees from Yale and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, agrees that education must go hand in hand with economic opportunity if endemic poverty is to end. For now she’s working to expand a new savings bank at Kashf, hoping to lend more money and to larger enterprises. One type that’s in solid demand, she says, is small private schools.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Lahore, Pakistan.

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BOB FAW, correspondent: For the women of the Magdalene community, now mornings begin quietly, with prayer.

WOMEN PRAYING: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

FAW: With meditation and expressions of gratitude.

WOMAN: Today I don’t feel alone. I know God has got me right where he wants me.

FAW: It is a long way from the violence and addiction they have known. Tara Adcock, once in and out of prisons, started that life on the streets of Nashville at 17.

TARA ADCOCK: My pimp—I was just like his everything. He fed me with crack, bought me new clothes. I didn’t know nothing about none of this, and then just one night he said come on I’m taking you and another girl, and she’s going to show you the ropes. So he dropped me off right here. I’ve been dragged up and down this road. I was raped. I hated myself.

FAW: For 12 years, Regina Mullis also worked the streets.

REGINA MULLIS: I never thought that I would be in prostitution and an addict. I did it because this man offered me $300 to be an escort at a dinner ball, and he was a doctor, and he sent for me in a limousine, and I was like, if this is what it’s about I can do this. But throughout the years quickly it went from being a $300 escort to, you know, just accepting $5.

FAW: Regina has a job now after going back to school and reclaiming her children. She survived, along with Tara, with the help of a remarkable program called Magdalene started by a somewhat unconventional Episcopal priest, Becca Stevens—a free spirit who not only preaches barefoot at the Vanderbilt University chapel but who turned a vision into reality.

REV. BECCA STEVENS: I wanted to create a space that felt like it was healing and luxurious and safe and hopeful for women, so that there would be a space to feel like you could do the work and the healing that needed to happen in your life.

FAW: What Stevens created was a nonprofit organization for female addicts and prostitutes, most who have been sexually abused, all who have been raped. By hand they create natural bath and beauty products—soaps, balms, candles—all made under the label Thistle Farms.

STEVENS: The thistle is the weed or the flower, depending on your perspective, that still grows on the streets and the alleys where the women walk. It has the deepest taproot of any plant, and it can push through two, three inches of concrete. It is a great reminder that all of us, with our prickly outer selves, have this beautiful, deep, rich center that’s a gift from God.

FAW: Here they not only pick thistles but crush, moisten, soften and then turn the thistle into paper. With the products and through donations which Thistle Farms has raised, Stevens has opened a residential community of six homes where women off the streets are given rooms and food for two years at no charge. Stevens takes neither federal nor state money.

STEVENS: It’s great because it keeps you pretty honest, and it keeps you working pretty hard. You know, give us this day our daily bread. Be thankful for this day and for all the gifts. I mean people give to us because they’re grateful for all they’ve been given.

FAW: Here residents not only get shelter but medical help, counseling, and spiritual guidance.

STEVENS (speaking to woman): Where is God in this recovery for you?

FAW: And here faith is a component of healing, but no doctrines are taught. Nothing is force-fed or imposed. There is a very spiritual, loving foundation, Magdalene graduate Katie Lynn says, but…

KATIE LYNN: …they don’t push religion on you, so that you can make the choice of your own, because a lot of people such as myself come from a background where I was told that if anything bad I did God was going to get me.

STEVENS: I think most of the women have pretty strong feelings about what their spiritual path looks like, and I’m more interested in encouraging them to have that religious and spiritual voice, where nobody’s saying like this is what you need to believe.

FAW: For the women who come here there is no staff hovering about, no one telling them what to do. What they do get: something most of them have never gotten before.

KATIE LYNN: I felt unconditional love. They loved me for who I was, and they wanted to help me through anything, just to get better.

FAW: At first that environment, that acceptance seemed unreal to Tara and Shelia McClain. When she was very small, Shelia was repeatedly abused for years. Leaving home at 14, getting addicted, at 18 she turned to prostitution. Tara and Shelia bonded when they were working the streets.

ADCOCK: Like we’d go do a trick, a date together, or we’d go to an apartment.

SHELIA MCCLAIN: We were treacherous, okay?

ADCOCK: I would rob and she would…

MCCLAIN: I would flat-back.

ADCOCK: She would flat-back.

MCCLAIN: We were treacherous out there together.

FAW: So on a good day you could make how much?

MCCLAIN: Most days it was easy to make at least $1,000 a day.

ADCOCK: Yeah.

FAW: They both hated it, they say, but neither could break loose.

MCCLAIN: After I turned the trick to get a room, I’d feel the degradation hit and then I’d have to buy dope to medicate how I was feeling about just dealing with the trick, and it’s a vicious cycle, you know.

STEVENS: My theory is no woman ended up on the streets by herself. Whether it’s a failed family, violence experienced early on, she didn’t get out there by herself, and so it’s crazy to think she’s going to come off the streets by herself, you know, out of jail with no provisions. They’re going to call their drug dealer to come get them, and it just starts over again.

FAW: Ready for a change, Shelia wrote to her judge from prison asking to be admitted to the Magdalene program. Two years later, she graduated with the judge by her side. She is different now: clean, owns her own house, is married with two children, and a college student. Tara, who graduates in December, has also put her drug-ridden past behind.

ADCOCK: There was no judgment. They just want to help you. They showed me what I can do, you know, and I believe in myself today.

FAW: Assisted on that Vanderbilt campus chapel by her Grammy-winning songwriter-husband, Marcus Hummon, the barefoot priest sees the Magdalene homes and Thistle Farms as part of her ministry.

STEVENS: I’m doing the best that I can to live out my faith as I understand it, and I’m doing it on the path that I have chosen, and I’ve chosen as an Episcopal priest to do this work.

FAW: Her ministry springs partly from sexual abuse she suffered from a deacon in her church when she was just six to eight years old.

STEVENS: I get some of the recovery issues. I see in my own abuse in my life as in some ways strangely a gift—that I learned a lot. It’s nothing I would have asked for, but it is a gift, and it’s a powerful tool. So I’m a defender of a lot of women, because I know you don’t get over that stuff. I have a tenderness for what it does and how it makes you look at the world.

FAW: Through natural products, private grants, and gifts Stevens has raised nearly $13 million, with it sending the women of Magdalene to visit women in prison. She has also helped fund a school in Ecuador and to help establish a business for women’s groups in Rwanda—abroad and at home demonstrating what she says is the same theme:

STEVENS: That love is the most powerful force for social change. That love could be powerful enough to change a life. And what I think it means now is it has changed my life, and I think I’m really different because of the gift of this work. I believe that more now than when I started out.

FAW: What happens at Thistle Farms and at Magdalene seems to be working. Seventy-two percent of the women who complete the program, says Stevens, are clean two-and-a-half years later. And while not everyone embraces the program—this streetwalker, Angie, said she just wasn’t ready when her old friends, Tara and Katrina, urged her to join— nearly 80 to 100 women are waiting to get in. For those who do graduate from what Becca Stevens has started, there is exhilaration and pride and a conviction that their lives have been transformed.

ADCOCK: I know that now there is a different way, and I will never go back. Never. And a lot of people say you never say never, but I know I will never go back.

MULLIS: My gift now is to be, now that I’m breathing, is to be able to show other women a way out, and Magdalene was that way out for me.

FAW: A way out where abused women bond sharing simple daily chores, where they grow closer helping one another, where, with hands that have known hardship they now make candles which burn sweetly, where the faces change but the circle of healing grows stronger.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Nashville, Tennessee.

Sarah Sayeed, Moderator (Interfaith Center of New York): The first question that’s going to guide us right now is: What is your role within your respective faith tradition?

Fatima Zahra Salhi (Mourchidate from Morocco): My name is Fatima, and I am also mourchidate working with the ministry in charge of religious affairs in Morocco, and I am extremely happy to be here among you because I believe that what gathers us together is more than what separates us.

Mahara’t Sarah Horowitz (Rabbinic Staff, Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, New York): Right before I was going to college, my parents insisted that I take a vocational test to see where my strengths lie. So after this two-day intensive testing, the results showed that I would be best suited for clergy. At the time I laughed, because as a female Orthodox woman there was no opportunity for women to be rabbis.

Rev. Elizabeth Garnsey (Associate Rector, Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, New York City): I just have an example of a young girl who is eight in my congregation, who grew up in the Episcopal Church. Her grandmother took her on a trip to Virginia to visit the relatives who were of another denomination. In that church there were all male clergy. The little girl said to her grandmother, “Grandma, there’s something wrong with this church. There are no women up there.” She is used to seeing women at the altar. The Episcopal Church just elected, two years ago, as Presiding Bishop, a woman, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who is a former oceanographer, a very brilliant woman and very articulate. She’s the first woman to reach that level of leadership in our church since Elizabeth I in 1500, so it’s a big deal. Among all the provinces in the Anglican Communion she’s the only woman at that level. So at the other end of this spectrum of perception and welcome, her bishop colleagues from certain places of the world will not receive communion if she’s present.

Nezha Nassi (Mourchidate from Morocco): When I counsel women prisoners, they feel more at ease talking to me and opening up to me, and I have the tools actually to talk to them and try to orient them in the right way. Of course, this opportunity was not available to us until the creation of this program, imams and mourchidates. I really don’t feel any difference between the work I do and what the imam does. In fact, I do chair a committee that is composed of imams and mourchidates.

Sarah Sayeed: Is it important to have women doing the kinds of things you’re doing, and is there something new or different that you are bringing as women to this role that your male counterparts cannot do?

Rabbi Stephanie Dickstein (Spiritual Care Coordinator, Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, New York City): I would say that one thing that is probably different about my rabbinate is that I have never given a sermon using a baseball or other sports metaphor. Another difference I think—and certainly we saw this in chaplaincy work and I see it in my counseling now—is that being a woman makes me more available to people. And so when I walk in the door of someone who has been estranged from Judaism, or never really involved at all—they weren’t rejecting anything; they just never had it—when I walked in the door as a woman rabbi, there was an immediate message, which was: Hey, there’s possibilities for me, even though I don’t fit a certain…I don’t come from a certain background, or I may be angry. If you can be there as a rabbi, maybe there’s possibilities for me within Judaism as well.

Rev. Elizabeth Garnsey: I don’t feel like I’m really on the cutting edge. I feel I’ve inherited the fruits of the hard work of the pioneers in my church and that my responsibility is to take my place as an equal among my colleagues. That’s its own project day to day, and I have to contend with the prejudices of others and assume my role and realize that others can also do the work to learn how to accept and treat females in positions of leadership, just as it happens in the outside world.

Mahara’t Sarah Horowitz: In the Orthodox community it is still revolutionary. Seeing a woman in the forefront of the clergy is revolutionary, however the day-to-day job that I perform is entirely unrevolutionary, entirely normal. A rabbi is a teacher, a role model, a pastoral counselor, somebody who gives guidance in Jewish law as well as life, somebody who facilitates life cycle events. All these roles are functions that a woman can and should and do perform. There are a few things that women in the Orthodox world still do not do. Sometimes these roles are seen as very public. For example—I saw this in some of the restrictions that you have, so I relate—that although on a Shabbat morning, a Sabbath morning, I can address the entire congregation and give a sermon, what I don’t do is lead services.

Nezha Nassi: Concerning leading prayer, we are Malakites. Our doctrine is the Malakites, where woman is not allowed to direct prayer. This is the reason why there was no debate on whether the woman should lead prayer or not, and there was no conflict.

Mahara’t Sarah Horowitz: There are certain areas, of course, that women feel more comfortable coming to me specifically as a woman when it has to do with areas relating to sexuality and other topics that are more sensitive. I’ve found that, whereas women were not coming to rabbis to ask these sensitive questions and they were kind of just suffering themselves, now women have a spiritual leader to turn to.

Ilham Chafik (Mourchidate from Morocco): Concerning the relationship, or what we bring to women, we do feel like we are making a big difference in women’s lives because of sometimes the questions that women cannot ask the imams, and they feel very comfortable asking the mourchidate.

Fatima Zahra Salhi: Just as an example, if there is a conflict in a couple’s life the man actually, given the fact that he trusts the mourchidate, he asks his wife to go and ask advice and counseling from the mourchidate. Whatever decision she takes, or whatever view she gives him, he trusts it.

Mahara’t Sarah Horowitz: I think women bring a unique voice to the table, but I think being in a position of spiritual leadership is about creating relationships and establishing a connection with people.

Rev. Elizabeth Garnsey: I also see my role as bringing along women in the church to assert themselves and to speak up and to have their own voice in the church. The church has long been so male-dominated. There are so many wonderful, fantastic male voices, but there are many lurking in the shadows that are female that need to be brought out, too.