Two women devising a better system

National Catholic Reporter, March 15, 1996 by Joan Chittister

You don't have to be in Cambridge University, where I am now, for very long before your education starts. I got it at one of my first college meals, in fact.

To very bright young men, one a corporation lawyer, the other in material science. began to tell me how the world works. "You don t understand," they told me with exaggerated patience. "The economy drives the system. Resources are finite. The purpose. therefore, is the most efficient disribution of resources. No one expects ever one to get them. It's impossible."

Too bad about Haiti, too bad about the Philippines, too bad about Appalachia and the Rust Belt U.S.A. Too bad about Jesus, apparently.

"No one has ever devised a better system," they told me triumphantly. But I don't know about that. I began to think about a few women I'd met who might be able to do just that.

You heard a "Treat deal from me when I was in China. Those were the official things, the things I considered important to the understanding of what did or did not happen at the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. There were other things, however, that touched me just as deeply. Some of them in even more personal ways. Some of those were decidedly ,economic."

Those things are in the personal journal I kept as a parallel document to the published articles. This week I would like to share two incidents from that journal. They say a lot about what China is facing -- capitalism -- and a lot about what the West is facing -- accountability for banking policies and the distribution of resources.

In the first incident, I got a glimpse into what the Chinese are facing.

We had come to depend, between U.N. sessions, on the midday croissants and coffee at the Vie de France, a tiny bakery on the main street of Beijing. Most of all I liked to sit in the window and watch the people, many of them in from the countryside.

One day, I noticed an old woman outside the window on a three-legged stool, a board across her knees, selling combs. "Poor woman." I thought as I got up to leave. "I'll buy her combs so she can leave this corner and go home for the rest of the day."

She was propped against the wall of the shop hardly noticeable in the midst of the swarming crowd. I fingered every comb on the board. "How much?" I gestured and held up one finger. "Fine," I said, calculating for a moment and then picking up all the hand-carved combs. "I'll take all six."

"No," she shook her head and took four of them back. I motioned at the combs again and pushed the money toward her. "No," she indicated with new vigor and a touch of annoyance. I frowned a little and looked around. What was I doing wrong? The usual Chinese crowd had gathered to watch the show. "I want to buy all six combs," I said slowly and clearly to no one in particular and everyone in general, hoping some of the younger people might be able to speak enough English to help me.

The Chinese conferred among themselves. Finally, a young man explained to the old comb seller what I wanted, but she got even more adamant. She had clearly understood that I wanted to buy all the combs she had. And she had no intention of selling them.

Finally, someone explained to me shyly: "There are too much women." I frowned again. "There are what?" I asked. The old lady went on scolding. "There are too much women," the younger people repeated. The old lady, exasperated with me, swept her hands across the crowds in a grand, broad demonstration of the problem. And I finally got it: If I bought all her combs, she meant, what would be left for everybody else? So, without my knowing it, she had rationed me to two combs.

Clearly it was more important to her to provide for others as far as she could rather than make the profit that my sure sale promised her. I stood there a little dumbfounded for a few seconds. Then, a little sheepishly, paid for two combs and moved away out of the embarrassing glare of the crowd.

I have a feeling that these people, formed in the fine art of family and the depth of a single culture, are not going to like capitalism at all. And I had just learned plenty myself, come to think of it.

In the second incident, I saw what we were facing, too.

John Wolfensohn, new president of the World Bank, came to the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women. What he heard from the women at this conference made clear the kind of frustration that comes when a woman begins to realize that it is powerless women who, in the long run, are actually paying the debts of the men around them.

It is the educational, health care and development programs most related to the lives and needs of women that are eliminated first in nations required to cut internal expenditures in order to pay more and more of the country s gross national product on debt reduction service. The World Bank calls such national budget cutbacks 'structural adjustment programs." The people affected by them call them SAPs. There's a message there somewhere.

The real point of the meeting lay in the fact that Wolfensohn came to the assembly at all, to meet women, to listen to women, to hold himself and the bank accountable to women, because women are organizing to demand it.