Womanity - Women in Unity Dr Amaleya Goneos-Malka Producer

This week on Womanity-Women in Unity Dr. Amaleya Goneos-Malka talks to award winning South African actress Shannon Esra. Her first professional acting role was playing Siri in the feature film I Dreamed of Africa, with Kim Basinger, which cemented her desire to pursue acting professionally. Some of her television work has included Lioness, Isidingo, The Queen and Hard Copy.  Theatre wise she has just wrapped up performing a one-woman play, My Left Breast, written by Obie Award winner Susan Miller.



Storytelling, identity, human understanding and connecting with people are some of the interests that Shannon channels into her passion for acting. She views the characters she plays, as one would see their children, there are no favourites! Inhabiting these different identities offer channels for self-discovery. We discuss Shannon’s most recent portrayal in My Left Breast, a solo performance, where she engages the audience exploring a range of emotional realms experienced by Susan Miller as a woman, mother, partner and professional during her journey with breast cancer.



Shannon shares some advice for aspiring actors, imploring them to introspect about their motivations for the profession and evaluate their talent. She highlights some hard truths, such as the fact that in acting you tend to have more down time than work time and that sometimes self-doubt can creep in. She raises the fact that some people define themselves by the work we do, and when we don’t work, we tend to lose our sense of self. Women, in particular nurturers, tend to focus on others at the expense of neglecting themselves. Shannon reminds us to think about our own identities and our own personal values, because the way that we value ourselves tells other people how valuable we are.

This week on Womanity-Women in Unity, Dr. Amaleya Goneos-Malka talks to the Ambassador of Mexico Sara Valdés Bolaño. She is accredited to twelve countries in Southern Africa. Prior to this appointment she was Ambassador to Vietnam. Some of her previous roles include director general for Africa and the Middle East at the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, director of the Mexican Cultural Institute in Paris, DCM at the Embassy to Ireland and political counsellor at the Mexican Mission to the European Union.



We discuss trade exchanges between Mexico and South Africa, noting the establishment of integrated global value and supply chains between the two countries that create opportunities for international trade in the global south.



Ambassador Valdés introduces us to the MIKTA alliance between Mexico, Indonesia, Korea, Turkey and Australia. One of the initiatives of this grouping of countries is to build capacity to empower women economically. We discuss micro-financing as an important solution, noting that fintech and new technologies have enabled new ways of doing business as well as financing.



In 2020 Mexico adopted a feminist foreign policy, which amongst other elements strongly advocates for gender equality. Mexico has been a forerunner in the feminism movement, with notable efforts in the 1970s. Ambassador Valdés remarks that gender based violence is a major challenge to women world-wide and impedes their human rights. She draws our attention to two Mexican women that have made significant contributions in addressing GBV. Anthropologist Dr Marcela Lagarde who identified the concept of femicide in Latin America; and activist Olimpia Coral Melo, who succeeded to have legislation passed to punish people that perpetuate digital violence and abuse.



In closing, Ambassador Valdés reminds us that human rights are not a pie, it is not a case that if somebody gets a larger piece of the pie that they are taking it away from someone else. Human rights benefit all humankind.



Tune in for more.

This week on Womanity-Women in Unity, Dr. Amaleya Goneos-Malka talks to Dr Therese Fish , who is the Vice Dean of Clinical Services and Social Impact in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Stellenbosch University.



Dr Fish reflects on some highlights from her career, in effect coming full circle, from training as a medical doctor herself to now being responsible for teaching upcoming generations of healthcare professionals.  She shares key aspects of her role, emphasising the development of partnerships between universities and the public health sector to strengthen social impact. By straddling the intersection between health and higher education and engaging different communities the university ensures it is of service to society.



Approximately 45% of the South African population lives in rural areas. It is therefore important that students are familiar with working in remote spaces and resource-constrained environments. Through successful partnerships in the Western and Northern Cape numerous training sites have been established in rural areas to accommodate students. By immersing students into these communities, they are able to attain a strong understanding of how people live in rural areas and potential impediments to treatment.



Reflecting on her leadership role, Dr Fish encourages diversity of thought and work practices in the environment. She notes that sometimes the same behaviours exhibited by men and women are interpreted differently by audiences because of gender biases, i.e. a male leader may be seen as assertive whereas a female leader is perceived to be aggressive. We discuss the importance of ensuring that women thrive, and this necessitates understanding the complexities of various societal roles women play and cultural demands placed on them. We consider the idea of changing systems to enable women to fulfil their professional and family roles. Dr Fish also advocates for leading beyond authority, a concept where everyone can lead in their own space irrespective of the position they hold.



In closing, Dr Fish reminds us that to succeed we cannot do things alone, we need to find our clan and nurture relationships. As someone who has actively driven institutional transformation, she states that you can change systems from within, by being present and being the change you want to see.



Tune in for more…

This week on Womanity-Women in Unity, Dr. Amaleya Goneos-Malka talks to Dr Lusanda Bomela  who is an orthopaedic spine surgeon in private practice.



Women are underrepresented in orthopaedics, making up less than 5% of orthopaedic surgeons. Dr Bombela shares how her interest in the spine, coupled to the fact that few women take up this area of specialisation motivated her to pursue her studies in this field. One of her hopes is that she sets an example to encourage other women to take up orthopaedics and specifically spine as a specialisation.



Medicine can be a demanding career choice, but this profession does not preclude women from having a family life. Dr Bomela notes how having the right support structure in place enables her to be a spine surgeon, mother, wife, mentor and teacher. She reflects that it is not possible to be everything to everybody all the time but with a team ethos and good communication everything is doable.



Dr Bomela is passionate about learning and has a deep desire to share education with others, which is part of her maternal philosophy, she believes that if we have a skill it must be passed on or used to better someone else. We have a responsibility to empower the next generation by imparting what we know to them, both in terms of skills and enlightenment. She tells us how her grandmother used to walk her mother to school 20km away for the sake of education, and years later part of her grandmother’s legacy was establishing a school 500m from her house, so no children in the village had an excuse not to be educated.



Dr. Bomela reminds us not to give up on our dreams. The road might be rocky, there may be a few detours along the way, but hold fast to your dreams; and when you make it others will see all things are possible.



Tune in for more...

This week on Womanity-Women in Unity, Dr. Amaleya Goneos-Malka talks to Prof. Kathryn Chu, who is a Professor of Global Surgery and is the Director of the Centre of Global Surgery at the University of Stellenbosch.



Prof. Chu specialises in colorectal procedures and is a general surgeon. Her academic journey began at Stanford University, where she earned her undergraduate degree. Following this, she pursued her medical degree and underwent residency training in general surgery at the University of California- San Francisco. She obtained a Master's degree in Public Health and Developing Countries from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She currently holds positions as an adjunct professor at the University of Botswana's Department of Surgery, serves as a Board member of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health, and leads as the inaugural director of the Centre of Global Surgery.



The need for surgery is time sensitive. Unfortunately, many people around the world don’t have access to surgical care when they need it. According to a 2015 report from the Lancet Commission for Global Surgery two thirds of the global population i.e. five billion people don’t have access to safe, affordable surgical care and the majority lived in low- and middle- income countries. Global surgery concerns developing health systems so that people can receive surgical care when they need it.



Prof. Chu discusses some interventions to make health systems more equitable, specifically surgical access. These include policy reform, developing co-ordinated surgical plans, establishing more facilities, increasing the number of qualified personnel, upskilling people to perform specific procedures, integrating with indigenous health care practitioners.



A few of Prof. Chu’s former roles include working with the health and humanitarian organisation, Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without borders), who are renowned for operating in disaster and conflict zones. She also spent two years training surgeons in Rwanda, helping to rebuild their surgical training process. Through these experiences she recognised how useful surgeons are in under resourced regions.



Prof. Chu has a passion for her field and highly recommends medicine for anyone that feels a calling. She shares the responsibility and privilege that doctors experience in caring for people, who are sometimes at their worst and being a critical part of people’s lives. She also encourages women to retain their femininity; empathy and care makes people better doctors and surgeons.



Tune in for more.

This week on Womanity-Women in Unity, Dr. Amaleya Goneos-Malka talks to Prof Nicky Falkof, who is a cultural studies scholar based in the Media Studies department at the University of the Witwatersrand.



Media is ubiquitous and takes multiple forms, that impact how individuals perceive themselves and others, construct their identities, and navigate their social worlds. Prof Falkof shares some insights into the themes of her academic qualifications; studying a Masters in critical theory with a dissertation on race and masculinity in 1980s action films and then studying an interdisciplinary PhD at the London consortium, which was a collaboration between the Tate Modern, The Science Museum and the Architectural Association.



Her current work explores the ways in which persistent negative emotions, like anxiety and fear intersect with race, particularly in urban areas and how these emotions structure social life. Part of her driving impulse is the desire to take emotional life seriously, because there is a trend where society tends to dismiss the way that we feel, but feelings are fundamentally the things that make us act the way that we do. She unpacks the collective emotions that define communities and influence behaviors, drawing on learnings from cities like Mexico City, where positive patriotism fosters a sense of unity and hope amidst adversity.



We discuss aspects of the Me-Too Movement, emphasising there isn’t a universal expression of feminism and that countries in the Global South have had long standing feminists that have been empowering women in ways that are relevant to their social constructs. Implanting an ideology from one hemisphere of the world into another, is not necessarily a solution if it doesn’t take cultural differences and contexts into consideration.



We also reflect on organisational systems as impediments to wide scale change and maintaining the status quo. Corporate, political and social systems that were designed by men tend to be operated by people that think like the system’s architects. This is one of the reasons why gender discrimination is still pervasive, even if some organisations have women at their helm.



In closing the conversation Prof. Falkof emphasises that change doesn’t materialise unless we make it happen.



Tune in for more.