PROGRESSIVE WOMEN IN SOCIOLOGY TODAY
WINTER, 1999
DEBORAH BILLINGS
A Year in the Life of a Progressive Sociologist
Deb Billings began at Ipas over three years ago (August 1995).
This last year, she traveled around the world to help women in the 3rd world organize around issues affecting the health and well being of women.
Ipas is a small organization, growing rapidly, that is dedicated to improving women's reproductive health. The research division is still fairly new and small in what has traditionally been a very programs-oriented organization.
IPAS research has direct impact on the way that health care is provided to women, specifically for women who arrive at midwives' homes, health centers, or hospitals with complications resulting from unsafe abortion (among the top 5 causes of death for women age 15-45).
Deb is also building a research division within the organization, one that is gaining more recognition and respect for the work we are doing. We're also living in a very exciting time regarding work on women's health.
New perspectives are emerging all of the time and there are a lot of linkages being made in the field among human rights, empowerment, social movements, socio-cultural bases of health and illness, gender, race, class, and health care delivery.
For Deb, working on women's reproductive health issues has been the perfect space in which to link numerous sociological interests and continue activism in her everyday work.
Deb collaborated on work in Kenya has resulted in recommendations to the Ministry of Health (and others) on how to better integrate family planning services with emergency treatment for abortion complications.
An article about the project will appear in the March issue of Studies in Family Planning, which that work...Deb is very hopeful that it will improve delivery of health services.
In Mexico, Deb was able to collaborate with an ob-gyn Practitioner in the Mexican Institute of Social Security in Mexico City on a 6-hospital study that examined different ways of delivering comprehensive services to women with abortion complications.
In Ghana, Deb had the good fortune to work with a team of colleagues/friends in Eastern Region where they carried out a project that examined the feasibility and acceptability of training midwives to provide emergency services to women with abortion complications.
The project in Ghana was exceptionally inspiring because of the impact that it had on the midwives as women and as health care professionals and because of the potential impact on women's lives as they no longer have to travel long distances to hospitals when they experience complications.
One project that is just beginning about which she is particularly excited about is taking place in Mexico where her associates are looking at the intersection of AIDS, unwanted pregnancy, and unsafe abortion in adolescents.
It's going to be very interesting, in terms of the content as well as the methodologies that we use in the work and is enabling me to connect with a lot of very intriguing people and ideas.
In addition, Deb kept alive the work that she did for her doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan. She presented results of her long stay with women in exile in Chiapas....women driven out from Guatemala by a military armed and trained by the USA.
Deb presented some of that dissertation on Women's Organizing in Exile at a conference on refugees put together by Patricia Pessar in May at Yale. She shared the lessons learned with an interested audience.
In August, Deb returned to Guatemala where I served as the translator and facilitator for a delegation to Santa Maria Tzeja, a community in northern Guatemala (the Ixcan) comprised of Guatemalans who had stayed in the region during the war throughout the 1980s and Guatemalans who, in 1994, returned from 12 years in exile in southern Mexico.
The delegation is part of a sister community relationship between Needham, MA and Santa Maria, started in 1988 by Clark and Kay Taylor.
The experience of being in Santa Maria is always a transformative one which gives one hope in the midst of continued violence and struggles for peace in Guatemala.
The school program is one of the few in rural communities in the country run by community members where classes in social and natural sciences, Spanish, Quiche, English, art, math, typing, and women's studies are offered.
Theater is also a mainstay of the school, in which students explore and use their own history and reality as the basis for their work.
Numerous students have gone on to secondary schooling and university where they are studying community development, agronomy, teaching, law, and medicine. These young people are the future of the country and there is no way that the difficult peace process now underway in Guatemala is going to proceed without more leadership coming from rural, indigenous communities.
Clark has invited Deb to join the group again in August 1999.
(If anyone would like to contribute to the scholarship fund that enables students to attend schools outside of Santa Maria, please let me know and I can send you more information. If you'd like to read more about Santa Maria and the peace process in which the community is embedded, take a look at Clark Taylor's book, Return of Guatemala's Refugees: Reweaving the Torn 1998, Temple University Press.)
For recreation, Deb was able to get away for a week with her sister to the beaches of Belize.
Her address until July 1 is: 222 Old Fayetteville Rd. D-203, Carrboro, NC 27510
Work: Ipas, PO Box 999, Carrboro, NC 27510 (919-967-7052)
Her email address is: mailto:Billingsdl@ipas.org
A Personal Note from the Editor:
I first met Deborah Billings in 1986 on Semester at Sea sponsored by University of Pittsburgh...where Deb was a senior.
Deb took my ship-board seminar on Marxist Social Theory along with six other students and three senior citizens.
Out of the 385 students on board ship, Deborah Billings was selected as Valedictorian of the Semester at Sea.
Five years later, in San Francisco, I met her at ASA Annual Meetings.
She had taken three years of graduate work at U/Michigan and had spent a year in Chiapas working with refugee women and, at the same time, writing her dissertation.
I was humbled by her story...she was doing the kind of work about which I only talked.
I am well pleased to be her friend and sometime mentor.
TR Young