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Letter 22, April 5th, 2004 - Girls Empowerment Conference |
| Dear Fam, Hello! Well, the girls empowerment conference has come and gone and I survived it, so that's good news. Actually, the whole thing was pretty successful in the end. We started on Thursday evening and ended Saturday night. Desderia, a Tanzanian female lawyer who works with the U.S.AID came to help Mr Tamba and myself facilitate. She has so much energy and a really interesting background, and was great at keeping the girls excited. The theme of the conference was "Wasi Chana Wanaweza," which roughly translated means "Girls can do anything!" Throughout the conference someone would yell "Girls how do you say?" and the girls would answer "Girls can do anything!" Then we would ask them "How?" and each class would stand up and yell a word "Justice/Rights (Haki), Education(Elimu), Equality(Usawa), Ability(Uwezo), Strength(Uguvu), Gender (Jinsia), and Intellect(Akili)". It was great! The whole conference was done in Kiswahili, so all the girls could understand. Most of the time, all 350 girls were together in one big group, but they also split into smaller groups (by form) where they went to learn different life skills (resisting peer pressure, value (equal) of boys and girls, delaying sex, and goal setting), taught by the sixteen girls in my Peer Leader Group. With everyone all together in the dining hall, Desderia talked to the girls about the difference between sex and gender and women's right in Tanzania. Two nurses from the hospital in Masasi came to talk with the girls about their lives and their jobs as did the District Planning Officer and several Headmistresses from nearby Secondary Schools. The girls also got to play some sports. A local NGO that sells condoms and mosquito repellent for nets came and did a video show concerning HIV/AID and STI's. That was a great treat for the girls, but unfortunately PSI (the NGO) was really late, so the girls didn't go to bed until after midnight and were extremely tired for the final day. The second video they showed was really graphic - I'm not sure if it would be allowed in schools in the U.S, but then again maybe - It basically consisted of close up shots of the male and female genitals of people who had contracted different STI's and left them untreated for a long time. Also, it showed different people who were at the final stages of dying from AIDS and some babies who had been born with AIDS, and a child born to a mother infected with a venereal disease. So yeah! - graphic........... One of my favorite parts of the conference was a Banner Project that the girls did on the last day. All the girls had to try and write 100 careers that women can have in their notebooks, then they made a list as a class on flip chart paper and we made a master list for the whole school. Then each girl picked the career they wanted and traced their hand on a big piece of fabric, on which "Girls can do anything" had been painted in big letters. Inside their hand prints they wrote their name and career they wanted. As there were 350 girls, the entire fabric was covered and the effect was really neat! We closed the conference with a candle lighting, with the headmistress being the first person to light her candle and first person to blow it out at the end. The effect of being in a completely dark room being lit up slowly with 360 candles was pretty awesome and beautiful as well. I took a lot of pictures, but I'll have to wait to see how they turn out when Colleen comes back from Dar in a few weeks. One of the best things outside the excitement I could see in the girls this weekend was the excitement I saw in the Head Mistress, Mama Machinga. I don't think I have ever seen her smile so much before around the students and her "pep talk" that she gave the girls at the closing was pretty neat. Really, my only complaint would be that it was near impossible to get any male teachers involved in the conference except for my counterpart. The whole thing was extremely tiring though - manage to catch a cold, thank goodness Colleen came up from Masasi to help - This week I'm Teacher on Duty and then I can really concentrate on my teaching again. That's what I'm really looking forward to - getting back into the classroom. The first night of the conference something happened that made me reflect yet again.............how different things are here for a lot of these girls. About two hours into the conference a loud screeching sound came outside one of the windows of the hall we were all sitting in. It was probably just a cat/or dog, but it caught me off guard and I jumped about a mile in my seat. The sound scared the Form 1's (Who were nearest the window), so much that they started running/stampeding out of the hall. This in turn caused the other three hundred girls in the room to stampede as well. Girls were screaming, benches turned over, utter chaos. It turns out a lot of the girls have heart problems or will go into shock if they get scared like that and we spent the rest of the evening with about 15 girls in the dispensary, who were yelling, convulsing, crying, one even foaming at the mouth, while about twice as many girls tried to calm them down by fanning them, loosening their clothes, etc........During this and after, it hit me I will probably never get a realistic grasp of all the problems people here face - Just when I think I've got it figured out, I find there's something else just beneath the surface I didn't catch on the first, second, third, and fourth time around. On that note. I want to share with you guys quotes from two books I've read recently. (I do a ton of reading here, and if any of you have any good books lying around, feel free to send them my way, they will be very much appreciated!) Jessica
Bruck , Ndwika Girls, P.O. Box 427 "You're
Americans...You're not used to seeing tragedies. You pity us,
yes, because you can later go home to a comfortable
life and forget what you've seen. For us, this type of disaster
is commonplace. We have so many people. This is our life, always
a crowded bus, everyone trying to squeeze in for himself, no air
to breath, no room left for pity". "You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something!" - Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Those two quotes pretty much seem to sum up a lot of what's going on through my head these days. If nothing else, I've learned a lot about myself from being here. Until next time................ Jessica |
Copyright © Jessica Bruck