International Women's Day

International Women's Day is March 8th. It's a big deal here we even get Monday off from the university. So today Friday the sixth we had a little 2 hour woman's day celebration at the American Corner. About 20 girls/women came and listened to a woman guest speaker from a local NGO focusing on Tajiki women and leadership. Then we did a "conversation cafe" for an hour. We wrote 5 topics on 5 different sheets of poster paper they were: a. Tajiki women in leadership b. domestic violence c. Tajiki women in politics d. women in education e. arranged marriage.
Then we put each of these posters on a seperate table and asked the women to walk around the rm. for 10 min. and write their comments about the the posters about the topic written on the poster. The topics were written in Tajiki and Eng. to avoid confusion.
Then after they had 10 min. to write down their comments we told them to sit at a table around a poster and a given topic and discuss the topic. They could choose any topic they wanted and discuss it for as long or as short a time as they wanted and in any language. Surprisingly most young women chose to have all their conversations in English and most wrote their comments in English. These young women are great young people- very active and good in school.
The goal was just to give women a chance to talk and listen to each other and think about these important issues. I didn't participate but I did listen and observe I was the only man allowed in the American Corner for these two hours. I wanted to jump in a few times and say something though. There were a lot of good ideas and it was interesting. I took pictures and I'll put them up later.
The usual women's day program here consists of reciting poetry, dramatic scenes, dancing, singing, and games. Ok but not earth shattering. I love the substance that our program had because there is a lot of talk about and I don't want to shy away from it.