Camp Diary of a Shy Girl to a Confident Young Woman: Part 1

She sat down and reflected on where she had come from, a tiny girl who was shy, timid, and whose life had shown her that it couldn’t be sweet, it had slapped her so many times that at some point she had wished that it would come to an end. She reflected on how many times she had tried to end it herself but she would always wake up in the morning, disappointed it didn’t work.

The chain of thoughts that rushed through her mind were always negative. She would always have a smile on her face but deep inside she felt as if knives were piercing at every inch of her skin. The voice in her head was always telling her that she was always on the wrong and that she deserved everything that came to her. All the people who mistreated her and made her feel small, as if she was a mistake, were justified.

She got a chance to attend a programme, the person who told her about it said it was something to do with women. At the point, she was open to anything that would free her from her agonizing thoughts.

She met new faces that day, with whom she had been told to interact with freely because they were all sisters. She didn’t understand what that meant but she tried as best as she could to fit in. That night they had a personal story sharing session. Nobody forced her but the session they had had all day about the self and courage had made her feel that she was in a safe space where she could express herself and no one would judge her. She volunteered to go first and shared her story, the most amazing part was as she narrated it, some of the girls in the room cried along with her, as if they had taken her burden and put themselves in her situation. They didn’t know it but that day, they had aided in the birth of a new person, a person who had discovered that crying was not a sign of weakness, a person who wasn’t ashamed of her background and in a way had given her strength to achieve what she had set her mind to.

The next day, she went back to her usual self, the one who didn’t like talking and she thought because she had shared her sad story, everyone would just pity her and would let her stay in her comfort zone as she tried to cope with her situation but she was wrong. The facilitator asked a question and she kept quiet. She thought that she would leave her alone but she insisted that she had all the time to wait for her to answer. She was true to her word. The silence in the room built pressure on her because she knew that everyone was waiting for her. When she finally garnered the courage to answer, her voice came out very low, she hadn’t even finished her sentence when the facilitator threatened that she would send her to a nearby tree and ask her to answer the question at the tree. She thought about it. That would force her to stand up and that would attract attention towards her and also she would have to shout thus that would make her feel even more uncomfortable. Her hands were all sweaty, she considered her options and preferred to be more audible. The answer she gave was correct and the facilitator asked her what was stopping her from giving it initially. That is the day when her voice was born.

Article by Esther Wambui
Alumni

My Experience Volunteering with OXFAM for the African Women Leadership Symposium (AWLS)

The past 1o days have been an eye opening experience for me. I spent a week in the OXFAM Nairobi Offices volunteering with a team of great young people to make the African Women Leadership Symposium (AWLS) which was held in Safari Park on the 24^th and 25^th August a success.

If you follow what happens in the women’s movement closely, then you probably know that this was a huge symposium that brought together powerful women leaders from all over Africa to Nairobi including our very own Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Amina Mohammed and Cabinet Secretary for Defense, Raychelle Omamo.

Preparing for such an event has its ups and downs/pros and cons. The pros include the experience and the exposure you get of course dealing and meeting with high profile women leaders across Africa, the less empowering moments and experiences, well, read ahead!

The week at the Oxfam offices was intense, among other tasks included, putting up a list of all the women who would be attending and their details, including their flight details, organizing for their airport transfers, et al. We had a team from Oxfam who we worked directly with led by Saida Ali who was the project manager for the AWLS, who did a difficult job really well and set the standards for us.

One of the Cons according to my experience was the fact that we spent too much time working on the list that some of the other critical issues as the AWLS drew nearer fell through the cracks. For example, the final list was to have been sent to the printers for name tags printing sooner than it actually happened. At the beginning, part of the tasks the volunteers were given was to provide logistical support which included picking guests from the airport. This didn’t go as planned and due to some miscommunication, some guests arrived without having people to meet them at the airport, there was a case of a guest who arrived and found that she had no transport waiting for her at the airport, which resorted to her making her own arrangements to get to the hotel. At the same time, human is to error, but as a great mentor always tells me, some errors are expensive. If you ask me, this was an expensive error!

I met and networked with different women leaders, Ministers, former ministers, executive directors, etc. I have to say however, leadership is not a position or a title, it is action and example. In my leadership training, I have learnt to be very keen and observant in my environs and surroundings, and honestly, I did not see the actions and the examples in some women I interacted with. I think I gave my total commitment and dedication during the symposium, I worked extremely hard, including late nights and early mornings to ensure that I delivered and that I did not disappoint the team I was working with

Over the years, I have learnt to always pursue excellence in everything that I do and getting reaffirmed goes a long way to ensure that excellence is pursued. Collectively, we got reaffirmed a lot by the Oxfam team we worked with during preparations of the AWLS.

I don’t know about the other individual volunteers but during the symposium, I met different women leaders who appreciated the support we were giving them to settle in, find their way, among others. They were polite and thanked us. But there were others who felt enough was not done for them and perhaps because of their status or professional positions, would feel offended if asked for their names or even denied a second conference bag. Which begs the question, isn’t leadership making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that the impact you make lasts even in your absence? Just as some Sisters were pleasant, others were dismissive and arrogant and made some of us volunteers feel very inadequate.

All in all, the Symposium was a huge success and I got very inspired by the stories told by younger sisters and older sisters. I took advantage of the space to network with powerful women in various sectors and learn from stories told and shared by different individuals. For this, I sincerely thank Saida Ali and the Oxfam team for such an opportunity for exposure, learning and experiencing African women’s leadership in action!

The Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of any agency.

Article by
Ivy Nyawira
RCWG Staff and Alumni 

SEX SLAVERY IN THE 21st CENTURY

WHEN readers hear about “modern slavery” in America or abroad, they may roll their eyes and assume that’s an exaggeration. Slavery? Really? Modern slavery?
If you’re one of the doubters, then listen to Poonam Thapa, a teenage girl I met here in Nepal, where she is putting her life back together after being sold to a brothel.
And if you think, as Amnesty International suggested recently, that the solution is to decriminalize the commercial sex trade around the world, then pay special heed.
Poonam was poor and uneducated when a woman offered an escape in the form of a well-paying job. “You can have a better life,” Poonam remembers the woman saying. “And if you make good money, you will be respected by your father. You can help your family.”
So Poonam, then age 12, ran off with the woman. When Poonam was eventually deposited in a brothel in Mumbai, India, she was puzzled. “I didn’t even know what a brothel was,” she recalls.
The brothel owner, a woman, dolled her up in a skimpy dress, equipped her with falsies, and gave her heels. Then the owner sold Poonam’s virginity to an older man.
“The man raped me,” Poonam says. “I didn’t know what he was doing. But I was bleeding and hurting and crying.”
The brothel owner sternly told Poonam to buck up — she had paid $1,700 for Poonam and needed to recover her investment. So Poonam was locked inside the brothel, forced to have sex with 20 to 25 men a day, and more on Sundays and holidays. There were no days off, no trips outside the brothel, and, of course, no pay.
One day Poonam was hurting and refused a customer. She says the brothel-owner beat her and burned her with cigarettes; she showed me the scars.
Poonam thus became one of 20.9 million people worldwide — a quarter of them children — subjected to forced labor, according to the U.N.’s International Labor Organization. In the United States, tens of thousands of children are trafficked into the sex trade each year.
Men visiting Poonam’s brothel paid $2.50 for sex and were sometimes oblivious to the brutality, flattering themselves that the girls liked their work. They see girls who often smile; no one is holding a gun to their heads.
Poonam responded with what so many others have said: The smiles are on the outside, even as girls are crying inside.
“We were told to smile, because a smile is money and will pull in customers,” Poonam said. The girls were also ordered to say that they were over 18 and working voluntarily.
Then one day police raided the brothel. Warned by the brothel owner that the police would torture her if they found she was a child or trafficked, Poonam claimed that she was 23 and working voluntarily, but the police could see that she was a child and took her to a shelter.
What makes me sick is that there are "customers" who relish this sort of thing. Surely that man who paid for her virginity knew what he was...
Indian authorities returned Poonam to the care of Maiti Nepal, a leading anti-trafficking organization. Now Poonam is studying to be a social worker in hopes of helping other trafficked girls. A new study suggests that post-traumatic stress disorder is frequent among those who have been trafficked.
Anuradha Koirala, founder of Maiti Nepal, notes that there has been a bit of progress against sex trafficking of Nepali girls. A crucial step, whether in Nepal or the United States, is ending the impunity for pimps and traffickers, and Koirala says that Maiti Nepal has helped prosecute 800 people for involvement in trafficking. In America as well, we need to prosecute traffickers rather than their victims.
Plenty of well-meaning people back Amnesty International’s proposal for full decriminalization of the sex trade, including of pimps and brothels, and it’s certainly true that some women (and men) work in the sex trade voluntarily. Yet in practice, approaches similar to Amnesty’s have ended up simply empowering pimps. And while under these proposals human trafficking would remain illegal, the police would no longer have a reason to raid brothels to search for girls like Poonam. Both Poonam and Koirala think that full decriminalization is a catastrophic idea; if it were in place, Poonam might still be enslaved.
“There is no protection to the powerless,” Koirala said of full decriminalization. “All the benefits go to the perpetrators and exploiters.”
The blunt truth is that no strategy works all that well against trafficking. But maybe the most successful has been Sweden’s, cracking down on traffickers and customers while providing social services and exit ramps for women in the sex trade.
That’s what human trafficking is, an ugly form of exploitation that at its worst amounts to modern slavery. In the 21st century, isn’t it finally time to abolish slavery forever?

GELIK=ANDERS FESTIVAL. THE AMSTERDAM EXPERIENCE Supported by MAMA CASH

Our first day in Amsterdam!! I had expectations and I was excited about it all. Being my first time to travel out of my motherland Kenya; I had heard so many things prior to this trip about how people lead their lives abroad, what they eat, how they dress and the thrill of all this hearsay was the fact that I was going to see and experience it all first hand.



On arrival, we were met by an Intern at the Mama Cash office called Heather, who would be our guide for the day. I noticed how clean the city was and that there were a lot of people cycling in the city and the bikes were even more than the people themselves. I have never seen so many bikes in my life!


We boarded a bus, different from how we do it back home of course, there is a more organised and systematic process to the transport system in Amsterdam and apparently in all of Europe, that I wish we could adopt back in Kenya. The bus took us to a stop near the hotel and from there we had to walk to the hotel which was about 5 minutes away. When we got to the hotel, we met other mama cash grantees who had come for the festival, Faith Phiri and Memory Banda, from Malawi.
We went for dinner with three of Mama Cash staff and Heather and there we got a small briefing of how the following day would be and what to expect.
The following day on Friday 26th June we were escorted to an Arts school which would be the venue of our rehearsal. We met two theatre and art directors Khadijah and Lennie took us through the presentation and delivery of our stories.
At the theatre we met Amber and Charlotte, from the Netherlands who would also be participating in the presentation at the festival. Our rehearsal session started by introducing ourselves and sharing our stories, which the art directors would then guide us on how best to deliver it.


I shared my inspiration to the group, which comes from a character called Akoko in the book the river and the source. Akoko is the daughter of a chief who married her off at 19. She got married to a chief as well and was unable to bear more than three children, and for that she was accused of witchcraft making her husband consider getting a second wife.
This did not sit well with Akoko and in her husband’s absence, she left and went back home something that was not very common among women during that time. Her courage, confidence and bravery to defy the harmful traditions bestowed upon her is one of the main things that inspires me.
This is because we are always taught to be like Akoko at the camp. To be confident and to be courageous, and most importantly to transfer the same skills to other girls who do not get the privilege of attending the camp.

FESTIVAL DAY…GELIK=ANDERS!! EQUAL IS DIFFERENT!!

The day I had been waiting for, the day I had heard so much about, and worked hard to prepare for was finally here! The theme of the festival was Gelik=Anders meaning Equal is different. This was such an exciting day and I was looking forward to the activities that would happen and most of all, the presentation I would be part of titled ‘NEXT GENERATION FEMINISTS’. We arrived at the venue earlier than the sessions were scheduled so as to do final touch ups on our rehearsals, which went very well and everyone had mastered their part of the presentation.


We were thereafter directed to the official opening of the festival which was done by the director of Mama Cash, Nicky McIntyre, and after that people went to different sessions by different festival organisers and participants.
I went to a session by Girls Rights Watch which reflected on issues on the post 2015 Agenda and whether youth should participate. I was not sure and I am still learning about what the post 2015 Agenda is, but it was a great session and also the fact that I got to speak despite the fact that I was the youngest in the room. I felt so empowered!!
Then came our session, ‘THE NEXT GENERATION FEMINISTS’. We headed to the room where we would be presenting and started getting ready and preparing and we waited for people to start coming in. In a few minutes, the room was already packed!! We had a great turn up for our session.


I was a bit nervous, but I was ready! I knew I would make my fellow sisters back home very proud. After everybody settled down, we started our presentation, Memory, went first and I followed. I gave it my all and represented the Akoko very well and I was also very proud of myself.
A Q and A session followed after our presentation, but Ivy, who accompanied me on this trip and Faith who accompanied Memory Introduced themselves first.
One of the questions asked was how people view Feminism in our countries, especially by men. Ivy responded by saying that most men identify with feminism ideologies but never get to say it out loud. She continued by saying that feminists are seen as these women who never go to the salon, or dress nicely or even get married. She gave an example of how she was even told to leave her feminism at the door before getting into the house by someone a while back.
The session and the presentation in general was received with very positive echoes and people were tweeting a lot about it. I was very happy about our presentation and the fact that we had done well!
I visited the Sex Museum the following day and went for a walk through the red light district, and this was a lifetime experience. I actually think I was very shy walking through the museum and the red light district. I was surprised at how liberated the Dutch people were about Sex!

This is not something you can find In Kenya and especially Machakos where I am from. I kept wondering how I would start explaining to my parents especially because of the culture of silence about sexual matters in African societies. This I must share with my sisters at the Camp during our Aunty’s box!
My last day in Amsterdam, we were invited to the mama cash office. They hosted us for lunch and I was very happy to meet the partners working with RCWG to support the camp program.


I also saw my fellow sisters from the camp in the june’s mama cash newsletter. This was very exciting especially because we were on the Cover page! Yaay!

The mama cash family was very friendly and welcoming and I was very proud to be part of such a great initiative.
I don’t take it for granted that I was chosen to represent more than 250 girls from the RCWG program, It was such an honor and I am very grateful to the Resource Center and Mama Cash for this wonderful life changing experience.


THANK YOU!!!

By Joy Mwende Kikuvi

BREAST AWARENESS & EXAMINATION

October is considered to be pink significantly as it is the month women across the world strengthen their sisterhood bond by creating awareness of breast cancer and cervical cancer. Survivors voluntarily offering to become mentors and young women volunteering their services to promote this agenda.

With the prevalent cases in increase of breast and cervical cancer, promoting their awareness through the media, social networking sites and outreach programs provides the common citizen with information commonly ignored or brushed aside.


BREAST EXAMINATION


The resource center in support of Breast cancer and Cervical awareness program, is encouraging its beneficiaries in participating in open programs sponsored by medical hospitals within Nairobi such as Mater Hospital - BuruBuru and South B, and have free check-ups and learn how to perform a self examination by themselves and how to detect lumps.

The following is a demonstration of how to correctly perform a self breast examination

If you do not know your own body, who else will.

Be aware of your body

SISTERHOOD

 A sisterhood is my key to happiness.

True sisterhood is beautiful and rare,

It cannot be measured in gold or silver.

Good sisters are treasured for life.

As the heart needs a sister, all the time, 

To heed to love lost and Sisterhoods ended,

To admonish, guide, advice, and to cherish, 

In my best and worst moments.

 Sisterhood is love without wings,

Builds my confidence and makes it soar.

Sisterhood means caring and loving

Without judgment;

Sisterhood makes me feel special,

Race, size shape, background, and culture,

Don’t matter.

Sisterhood brings joy to all my days,

As it’s generous in loving;

I’ll sow, nurture and grow it,

My purest spring of life.

 Author: Caroline Mbinda

'I want you to make more Lego girl people and let them go on adventures'

Below is a story of a young girl who was tired of seeing male lego toys in stores. She made sure her voice was heard. She criticized the manufacturer of the toys through a handwritten letter that she sent to them saying that she wanted to see more lego girls. Please see more below on how this young girl influenced the lego toy store to manufacture female toys which sold out in three days!!!

 

A Lego toy set that shows female scientists hard at work was released by the toy company on Friday and is out of stock. 

'The Research Institute' includes three female minifigures: a chemist, an astrologer, and a paleontologist.

Included in the set are pieces that form a telescope, a map of constellations, a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, a microscope, and a laboratory station.

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Sold out: 'The Research Institute' includes an astronomer, a paleontologist and a chemist

In January of this year, a letter shared on Sociological Images revealed that a girl named Charlotte Benjamin criticized Lego for its female-oriented toy options. 

'[...] I don't like that there are more Lego boy people and barely any Lego girls,' the 7-year-old wrote. 'Today I went to a store and saw Legos in two sections. The pink (girls) and the boys (blue).

'All the girls did was sit at home, go to the beach, and shop, and they had no jobs but the boys went on adventures, worked, saved people, and had jobs, even swam with sharks. 

'I want you to make more Lego girl people and let them go on adventures and have fun ok!?!'

Lego's website says its recently-released set was '[c]reated by real-life geoscientist Ellen Kooijman.'

Elite Daily pointed out that Lego said Kooijman's idea was under review before Sociological Images published Benjamin's letter. 

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Science rules! The astronomer is seen next to a telescope with a chart of constellations behind her

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Charlotte Benjamin's letter criticized Lego for its female-oriented toy options

Kooijman tweeted on Friday 'Just bought #LEGO Research Institute set at LEGO Store CPH. So awesome to see your own idea on the shelves!'

The scientist also positively reviewed the Lego set, which was based off of her original designs, on her blog. 

Though only five reviews are currently on Lego's product page, those customers also gave the product top marks.

A parent wrote, 'I made my first visit to a Lego store just for this set. It is great to see my daughter really enjoying this set.'

Another customer said 'I would love to see a second scientist set in the future from Ellen Koojiman, she did a beautiful job designing this one. I loved sharing a set with my daughter that focused on women in fields of science.'

Story from the MailOnline News