Cendra Guillaume walks into the dusty depot of manly machines, passes fellow female workers, and steps into the front office with a familiar look of determination.

Not one to sit around and wait, the wife, mother and heavy equipment operator gets right to the point: ``Where to today?''

In the months since the Haiti earthquake claimed an estimated 300,000 lives, women like Guillaume have been on the front lines of paving the way for this broken nation's reconstruction.

Theirs are the anonymous hands that steered the dead and dying to unmarked graves in black and white government dump trucks, tunneled through the rubble for foreign rescue teams and cleared debris from hundreds of blocked roads.

In the process, they are challenging the notion of a woman's traditional role in this machismo society, and restoring what many thought they had lost in the rubble: faith in the future.

A Saudi mother with five daughters and three sons has not been able to find place to stay except the mountains near Al-Fayha land plot close to the Makkah entrance from Jeddah.

She was escaping from her own brother who threatened to kill her and her children.

Human Rights Commission member Muhammad Al-Suhaili told Arab News that he spotted the woman and her children in an open and deserted area near a mountain close to the entrance of Makkah.

Al-Suhaili, who is a staff member of Umm Al-Qura University and the imam of Princess Sheikha Mosque, said he went to them and asked the woman why she was in this deserted place that is unsafe for women.

He said the woman told him that the general court in Jeddah divorced her from her husband, who is the father of her eight children, after the court received sufficient evidence of his constant abuse. She said after the divorce, she stayed in a shelter home in Jeddah but after some time moved out to stay with her mother.

Perched on a stool in a cavernous warehouse in north London, a model with bright blue eye make-up carefully adjusts her top as a photographer works the light around her.

She is dressed in a beautiful, sleek, black satin shirt, topped off with a simple, unadorned hood.

Frustrated by the presumptions people made about them because of their nationality, two Emirati women are using social media to break down stereotypes.

Last November, Heba AlSamt, 26, and Hanan Huwair, 24 launched Emiratweet, an online forum aimed at uniting young Emiratis.

Now they host regular events and consider it part of their national duty to change the image expatriates have of their generation.

“The small events in Dubai for networking were always being organised by expats,” Ms AlSamt said. “When I went to one, people looked at me as if I was from another planet, but I loved the atmosphere.

"I thought I wanted to create a community of Emiratis who socialised like this. All expats had social groups they belonged to, but we didn’t.”

Ms AlSamt (@angelistiic), and Ms Huwair (@eleganzic), came up with the concept of Emiratweet, a concept that began as a simple Twitter account.

It has something to do with the way she wears her red tunic and trousers, her short cropped black leather jacket, and the way she chews gum and rolls her eyes.

"What are you here for?" I ask as we sit in a makeshift beauty parlour, surrounded by a group of Afghan women in less flamboyant attire.

"Should I tell her?" she asks the other women with a mischievous grin.

"Bad character," she says after a moment's hesitation. She suppresses a giggle then doubles over with laughter. Everyone giggles with her.

Sorarya doesn't explain what that means. But almost every woman in this room has been accused of "bad character" of one kind or another.

Missing school

We are sitting in Badam Bagh, or Almond Garden, Afghanistan's only prison for women in the capital Kabul.

The prison is a window on a world where, outside these walls, women are constantly judged against a standard that makes many of their stories difficult to fathom.