Making Strides

What started out as my least favorite project, has completely turned into the joy of my service—I am talking about the Girl’s Empowerment Club at my high school. Back in October I was tasked with celebrating the first ever “Day of the Girl Child”. After an unsuccessful attempt to reach the girls, I am thankful that I didn’t decide to stop trying. I will be honest, trying to work with the girls has been a daunting task; some of the hardest days I have had here were due to do this group. For many reasons beyond my control, the girls have had a hard time accepting me.

Let me back track a little, and explain Swazi culture and why it is so important to have a female empowerment in this country. According to Swazi tradition, polygamy is still widely practiced. The current king has 14 wives, and his late father King Sobuza II had over 70 wives. To this day, you can marry as many wives as you want. Even if a man does not take a second or third wife, I can bet you 100 bucks he has girlfriends on the side. Monogamy is not something that is practiced here, nor is it an easy concept to grasp by the people. Females are also treated as second class citizens. Yes, the Swazi constitution gave women more rights less than a decade ago, but there honestly has been little change. Unless you look at the physical copy of their constitution, you wouldn’t even know it. With that said, women have very little self-respect and confidence. At home they are competing with other women for the affection of their husband. They are taught at a very young age in the home to be submissive and take orders from the man (I am not disagreeing with the biblical basis of this, but I am disagreeing with the context of how it is practiced now). Then when it comes to school and the work place, they have been silenced so much that it’s almost an impossible task for them to succeed.

In my opinion as well as other PCVs who I have discussed this with, it is almost as if the women here have been conditioned to be jealous and hostile to each other. I actually feel that this is a universal truth to be frank. But since I’m in SD, I am focusing on the issues here. Traditionally the woman’s role was to stay home, cook, clean, wait on the husband hand and foot, and make babies. So if the husband has more than one wife, they have to fight for his affection, because I mean come on—who doesn’t want attention from a guy. And when you think of polygamy, don’t think of it as the Mormon family on TLC’s show “Sister Wives”, the typical Swazi wives do not get along. They live in separate house and only see the husband ever so often. This is where the competition comes into play, as well as the gossip—typical girl cattiness really. Now imagine, you are 1 of 3 wives, competing for your husband…. yet he is still looking at random women, I would be pretty upset!  Swazi men have a terrible habit of making advances at women. Speaking from experience I cannot go a day without getting proposed to or some guy saying they love me. These men come in all shapes and sizes; young, old, married, single, police officers, pastors…. It’s just what they do. I say all of this because it’s the ugly truth, and maybe this should be discussed more often in society to prevent the very present social issues of HIV/AIDS and gender based violence.

This brings me to the whole point of my post… why there is no alliance amongst women and why it is severally needed.  Behavior change starts young. The attitudes and behaviors are something that has been acquired from their communities. If this country is to ever make a change, then more women need to feel empowered to stand up for their social justices and use their voice. They ought not to be silenced in the work place (which has even happened to me here), the home, or in their communities. They need to get out of these unhealthy relationships that I am seeing every day and start respecting their selves with the respect they deserve. I want to see them base their approval of themselves on something other than a man. 

Now that I have hopefully brought you up to speed and explained all these social issues, let me now elaborate on the actual girls club at my school. Literally for 6 months, I was trying to get this club running. After many failed attempts and soft diplomacy I had to tip toe through, I finally can say there is an actual club in existence. It’s important to say this, because many times you go to a school and they say they have all these sorts of clubs, but really…. No they don’t. So I am proud to say that we actually have a club that meets every Tuesday at lunch for an hour. With roughly 150 female students, we have an average of 25 girls showing up every week. It was a struggle to get that number, but I will take it! The first couple meetings where very impersonal, we sang our anthem, recited the clubs pledge, and then I gave a lesson. There wasn’t much participation going on. Week by week however, they girls started bringing their journals and showing me the poems they were writing. I even had one girl message me on facebook telling me how much she loved writing in her own journal.  As time went on we did more interactive lessons; these were working because the girls were at a place where they felt comfortable talking (this is two months’ time into us meeting). I then saw the girls coming early to the meetings and joking around and being silly. They started leaving messages on the classroom board, for the incoming class to read after break about how much fun they had. They even made a skit and a song own their own initiative and shared it with the group.

The past 2 weeks attendance had been low for various reasons. All of the girls in last weeks’ meeting had the same idea, they wanted to meet an extra day this week and make posters to hang around the entire school. So Wednesday we met again and had a great time coloring posters.  The other highlight of that week was I had given the girls a task- I said if you can recite for me the club pledge by memory, I will give you a treat. That day one of the girls recited it and she got her lollipop. Near the end of the meeting, 2 random girls came into the room, because it was actually their classroom for the next period. The girl who said the pledge looked at me and I told her to go talk to those girls. She went over there, talked with the girls, gave them her treats, and invited them to join our club. The most amazing part is that my girl did not know the other two; in fact she was 2 grades under them.  I can’t get over how excited these girls are about the club. They even asked me if they can go to camp (Peace Corps has our own girls camp which already happened this year), so we are planning a two day overnight camp for August.

If you read the history of the country I mentioned earlier, you can then understand why these few stories are considered successful. 1. I am having girls regularly meet where they are getting a chance to share their voice and feel empowered. 2. They are actively engaging in positive and creative activities where before, had no outlets to express. 3. They are seeing the need too and want others to join. 4. They are accepting of another female who is not of their age or race.  I have so much faith in these girls that it gets me so excited every time Tuesday comes around for our time to meet. I have met some extraordinary women in this country, and with the initiatives like this club, I see the number increasing in this country.