Ugandan farmer Angela Mukakabirwa and Swedish bank employee Linda Andersson. Photo: Cecilia Abrahamsson/Kooperation Utan Gränser.
It is sometimes said that you can’t fully understand someone else until you have walked a mile in her shoes. The Swedish development organisation The Swedish Cooperative Centre might have had this in mind when they last year announced that they were looking for a woman for the world’s toughest job. So, what was this impossible job? Constructing oil rigs in the Atlantic ocean? Going to the moon?
No. The world’s toughest job consisted in doing what millions of women around the world do everyday: being an impoverished small-scale farmer, in this case in Uganda.
Linda Andersson and her colleagues on their way to work. Photo: Edward Echwalu/Kooperation Utan Gränser.
Among the 49 women who applied for the post, Linda Andersson was chosen. She is a mother of two children, normally living in Stockholm and working at a bank. During three weeks she moved in with the Ugandan farmer Angela Mukakabirwa and her family, changing her Swedish reality for hard physical work 80 hours a week, in cotton and peanut fields, and earning only a little more than 1 Euro per day. And, of course, also telling others about her experiences in a blog (in Swedish).
The idea of the campaign is to raise awareness of the situation for women around the world.
– By letting a Swedish woman try the life as a farmer in Uganda, we try to show the injustice in a concrete and comprehensible way. About 700 million women and girls in the countryside live in extreme poverty. The women often take the main responsability for the farm, and they also take care of children and the household – while the men takes care of the decisions and the money, explains Ola Richardsson at The Swedish Cooperative Centre.
Fetching water. Photo: Edward Echwalu/Kooperation Utan Gränser.
Another aim of the campaign is to show the importance of making aid equal. According to calculations made by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, harvests could increase enough to help 100 million persons from going hungry, if only women had the opportunity to cultivate the land at the same conditions as men.
Now Linda Andersson has returned to her job at the bank, but her tweets continue describing the abyss between the two parallel realities she has come to know:
2500 km from here women die in AIDS. I’m in a meeting.
or
In my home you can take a shower without first going to the river and heating the water on the fire. A luxury after the world’s toughest job.
In her blog Linda Andersson writes:
I get many questions about how my experiences in Angela’s family has changed me – will I think and do differently from now on? Yes, absolutely. The most obvious is an increased awareness about how our lifestyle here actually affects other people’s opportunities to live a tolerable life. How our hunting for cheap cheap cheap makes farmers pay a high price: poverty.
