Lesley's World - Dec 2000
by Lesley Abdela
First Published on Executive Woman On-linehttp://www.execwoman.com
December 20001
I got a nasty shock in Geneva the other day. I telephoned from my hotel room to a Swiss mobile number
to arrange lunch with a friend living in Geneva. The hotel charged me 13 Swiss Francs for a 2 minute
call! Even for a strong pound, the Swiss Franc and hotel phone costs are no laughing matter -
that 120 seconds cost me over £5.
With hotel phone prices being so expensive it can sometimes make sense to use your mobile
when abroad, even though the costs seem terrifying. If you want to use your cellphone, here’s
a useful tip when you’re going abroad - check to see which local network is cheapest for your
mobile in the country you’re visiting. Quite often you can choose network and the prices vary.
For example, in Geneva, prices for my mobile vary between 60p and 99p per minute for outgoing
calls depending on the network. Ask your service provider for relevant details and check
their websites for updates. For the exact page for Orange users like me, go to
http://www.orange.co.uk/cgi-bin/roaming/roam_clist.pl
Don’t forget that text messages can be a low-cost, fixed-price alternative. I was able to ask a colleague
for someone’s contact details using text-messaging. It cost me 20p instead of probably about £5 if I
had called the office.
I was in Geneva to give the key-note talk at a gathering of humanitarian aid organisations
working in the post-conflict situation in Kosovo. I spent two and a half months last year in Kosovo
helping to develop democracy. One of the depressing aspects is that women still get overlooked in the
post-conflict rebuilding process by the leaders of the international community. After the horrendous
massacres and rapes in the previous conflict in Bosnia, Human Rights Watch carried out a survey about
how women had been treated in the reconstruction process.
Their report said:
“Discrimination against women during the reconstruction period is legion. Women received far smaller
loans than men. Women were pressed into training programmes focussed on gender-stereotyped, low
paying, low prestige skills such as sewing, hairdressing and knitting."
One woman told Human Rights Watch...
”Women came last - after everything else came women.”
A year later in Kosovo I found nothing much had changed. Nearly all senior posts in the international
missions in Kosovo were held by men. Ignoring and clearly ignorant of the majority gender, they regularly
discussed what percentage of Serbs and other ethnic groups and ‘minorities’ should be represented on judicial,
political and public bodies. If they considered women at all, they sidelined them, asserting it would be ‘alien
to local culture and tradition’ and ‘in any case no women in Kosovo are interested in participation in
politics or public life’.
Not true! Kosovan women complained they had never felt so marginalized as they were by the international
community. To involve women as well as men is part of any solution to rebuilding a society after
conflict, not an optional luxury extra.
Anyone involved in Northern Ireland is aware of the important role women have played
in the community there.
There’s a real need for women’s rights to be taken far more seriously by the International community.
Perhaps we should remind them that it’s women’s taxes as well as men’s that pay these people their salaries.
A woman determined to mobilise women on a global scale is Lynne Franks. She was reputedly the basis for
Jennifer Saunders’ zany PR character Edina in TV comedy series ‘Absolutely Fabulous’. I
attended the London launch of Lynne’s latest venture, a global network for sustainable women entrepreneurs
called ‘SEED’.
“It’s not women who throw the stones and shoot the guns, we women need to do things in a different way”,
says Lynne. “Seed is the feminine way to create business.“
The SEED website offers SEED products, educational tools and SEEDTV plus the first chat-room to
include 3 minutes silent meditation each week. One of SEED’s first global partners is iVillage.
lesley.abdela@shevolution.com
© Lesley Abdela 2000
Links
Executive Woman - http://www.execwoman.com
Seed - http://www.seedfusion.com
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