Video: Celebrating Women on their International Day  · Global Voices
Juliana Rincón Parra

A Cactus Flower for Capt. Suresh by http://www.flickr.com/photos/kkoshy/
International Women's Day has been celebrated since the early 1900s: at first as a reminder of all the wrongs done to womankind and the long hard row necessary to achieve equality and fight for women's rights. However, for the past few years, many of the original points of dissention have been resolved and right now the  day is used to celebrate the positive improvements instead of a reminder of the bad events. And through poetry marches and songs, we'll see how people around the world do just that.
The Chilean Planning Ministry is venturing online for their Women's Day Campaign, and for today, they bring us a poem read by several women. The poem is Ode to the Washerwoman by Pablo Neruda, which paints us the image of a woman washing laundry for a living at night, with a lit candle and the moon as company:
La nocturna
lavandera
a veces
levantaba
la cabeza
y ardían en su pelo
las estrellas
porque
la sombra
confundía
su cabeza
y era la noche, el cielo
de la noche
la cabellera
de la lavandera,
y su vela
un astro
diminuto
que encendía
sus manos
que alzaban
y movían
la ropa,
subiendo
descendiendo,
enarbolando
el aire, el agua,
el jabón vivo,
la magnética espuma.
In Peru, women members of the Colective Canto a la Vida marched in Lima, demanding the respect of women's rights as well as sexual and reproductive rights: the right to therapeutic abortions, against forced sterilizations and for access to the Day After Pill.
Peruvian women are not the only ones marching. Nepalnews.com an online Nepali news channel also tells us about a walkathon organized by women in the capital city of Kathmandu:
And last but not least, Bielorussian singer Dmitry Koldum, an Eurovision contestant for 2007, uploaded a video of himself singing a song for “all the girls in the world”, on their day:
To all women in the world, happy Women's Day!