An unfinished project, now complete!

I've written pretty extensively on this blog about my work related to gender issues and women's empowerment as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco (if you're new to the blog, you can read some of those posts here). About halfway through my service in Morocco, I started a project with an amazing group of young Moroccan girls from GlobalGirl Media, an organization that empowers young women from underserved communities by teaching them new media and leadership skills. 

These girls were passionate about creating a video on an issue that affects girls and women in Morocco and in other countries throughout the world -- sexual harassment. I wrote a grant for their project, to cover the costs of filming people throughout Morocco - women and men, old and young, in small and large communities - as well as the editing and production of a video with their findings. Unfortunately, the filming took longer than expected and I left Morocco before the project was completed. I'm happy to say though that these dedicated individuals remained committed to the project along with other Peace Corps volunteers and have completed an amazing 3-part video! It's really exciting to see what these girls have been able to accomplish and to know that I played a role in helping them to express themselves and to stand up for issues in their country.

If you are interested, the 3-part video can be viewed on the below links (they have English voices dubbed over):
Part I: Is this Normal?
Part II: Let's Talk about Normal
Part III: Time for a New Normal

In other news, Justin and I are enjoying our time with the adorable Katie and exploring DC as much as possible when it's not covered in snow. We're counting the days until springtime, cherry blossoms, picnics and bike rides! More updates to come soon.

Some of the work I've done recently

You might already know that International Women's Day was last week - If you didn't, you can read a bit more about it in my blog post from last year. This day marked the culmination of a few fun projects that I've been working on, so I wanted to share them with you!

My role as the Chair of Peace Corps Morocco's Gender and Development (GAD) Committee is to help motivate Peace Corps Volunteers to plan gender awareness activities for women and men, boys and girls, in towns throughout Morocco. The Committee tries to create resources to provide Volunteers with ideas for projects and helpful information on gender-specific language, cultural ideas, and current events. As International Women's Day is a great opportunity to do gender awareness programming in Moroccan communities, we wanted to focus great effort on motivating and supporting Volunteers during this time. So here are some of the things that we did:

• Created a toolkit for Volunteers with 5 different types of activities that they could do during International Women's Day, with topics ranging from volunteerism to leadership, harassment to empowerment. If you are interested in seeing the toolkit, you can view and download it here.

• Partnered with the "Division des Affairs Feminines" (the Division of Women's Affairs) of the Moroccan government to plan a special event to celebrate women and to symbolically launch a week of gender programming throughout the country.

• Partnered with the U.S. Embassy to print t-shirts that we distributed to Peace Corps Volunteers who committed to leading a gender awareness activity during this time. We also printed stickers to match the t-shirts that Volunteers could give out in their communities.

I'm so excited to say that almost one-third of the Peace Corps Volunteers in Morocco committed to leading a gender awareness activity in their communities! Which means that if each event has 20 people, we will have reached thousands of people with programs ranging from leadership to volunteerism, running to empowerment, women’s and girl’s health to film screenings, harassment to art, women's rights awareness to employment, self-esteem to gender roles and stereotypes… and the list goes on and on!

Yesterday, I attended the event that I helped to plan in conjunction with Peace Corps staff and the Moroccan government. I was asked to deliver a speech at this event on behalf of the Peace Corps, highlighting Volunteers' gender-focused work in Morocco during this time. The most exciting part of the speech, for me, was that I chose to challenge myself and deliver the speech by myself in ARABIC, instead of with a translator. I wrote the speech in English, translated it into Moroccan Arabic, then sat with a friend to review the speech line by line (special thanks and a shout-out to Abdellah Boutahar!). I was really happy to see that I was able, fairly successfully, to write most of the speech by myself, and when an American started delivering a full speech in Moroccan Arabic, the crowd was blown away! I gave my speech alongside several Moroccan government officials, and I was told that many people thought my speech was the highlight. It was a massive language challenge and I'm so excited that it was a success.

So that's what I've been doing lately! Justin and I have a few other projects up our sleeves in the coming months, so you'll be hearing more about those soon. Enjoy a few photos from yesterday's event:

Schmoozing with the Minister of Youth and Sports,
along with the Peace Corps Country Director.

With other members of the GAD Committee, showing off our t-shirts.

Dancers from Casablanca perform at the event.

Last minute language prepping before my speech.

Delivering my speech!

I love this paparazzi shot - I am being audio recorded,
video recorded, and photographed all at once!

Winter holiday!

It’s a winter break from school in Morocco and Justin and I are using the time for work and for play! We finished up our fall/winter session of classes and had small parties with the students to celebrate the completion of our “semester” – check out some photos below from some of our classes:

Our adult conversation class

Justin and 2 students from our beginner class for young students.

Our beginner class for high school students and adults.

We’ll be starting a new semester of classes in February, but in the meantime, some new experiences and adventures: First, I am currently in Taznakht, (a small town near Ouarzazate, in the south of Morocco) helping a Peace Corps Volunteer to run a girls-only leadership and empowerment camp called GLOW (Girls Leading Our World). The camp is geared towards girls in underserved rural communities, and includes 4 days of programming aimed at building leadership and self-confidence, developing a safe and supportive community, and teaching girls valuable lessons related to gender roles, health, and future planning. I’ll be running one program about gender roles and another about sexual harassment. I’m extremely excited about this unique opportunity and can’t wait to share more with you in February!

After the GLOW camp, Justin and I are taking some time to explore some parts of Morocco that we have not yet seen! With less than a year left we still have a long list of places we want to visit, and we are going to try to get to as many as we can. More on these when we return, I promise with lots of photos :)

Feeling inspired

Just came back from an inspiring few days! This week, I attended the quarterly meetings of Peace Corps Morocco's Gender and Development Committee (GAD), which helps to provide support, encouragement, and resources for Peace Corps Volunteers in conducting activities around gender roles and empowerment. (You can read some older GAD-related posts here.)

In each GAD meeting, we review activities in the country and plan new initiatives for the coming months, but for me the real highlight of the meetings are our invited speakers. We are constantly trying to reach out to individuals and organizations in Morocco who, like us, seek to build awareness of and respond to gender issues in the country. We have spoken with professors, students, movement leaders, and association members, all of whom share our passion for working towards gender equality in Morocco.

The speaker for this meeting was the dynamic, driven, inspiring Majdoline Lyazidi, the 21-year-old founder of SlutWalk Morocco. If you haven't heard of the SlutWalk protest marches - they started in Toronto in April 2011 as a movement against excusing rape by referring to a woman's appearance - and have since grown into a global movement. For Majdoline, the movement in Morocco is about raising awareness of sexual harassment in Moroccan society. The group is no longer called SlutWalk - they chose to adjust the name to one that ties closer to Moroccan culture, beliefs, and language - but they continue to do amazing work in the fight against gender-based forms of violence and the way that women are treated in society.

I hope that you've been inspired by her, too! With that, I will leave you with a few quotes from Majdouline:

 "The message is very clear: Stand up for yourselves

and demand respect, shame has to switch sides."

And, in response to a question about the best advice received since beginning her journey (I love this):

"It's a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote that I go by: 

'Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.' "

Women's day, every day

This past Thursday (March 8) marked an internationally-recognized day called International Women's Day. In 29 countries throughout the world, it is considered a national holiday (the U.S. and Morocco are not included on that list). International observances of this day date back all the way to 1910, initially having started as a Socialist political event, and then gaining traction in the West many years later with a declaration from the United Nations in 1977 to proclaim this as a day for women's rights and world peace. If you are interested in learning more about the day and its history, you can read more here. And if you are wondering (as I was) if there is also an International Men's Day, there is.

One of my English students in class tonight echoed my thoughts on the day - why are we just celebrating one day? Shouldn't every day be Women's Day? I enjoyed reading this opinion on the day, and here's a quick excerpt:

It’s not my day because I am a woman every day of the year. I don’t want 24 hours to remind the world that I will speak what’s on my mind, make my own decisions and not be objectified, simply because I don’t need to be given what’s mine to begin with anyway;  health and safety, education, equal opportunities and control over my body and life choices.

So here's what I'm doing to celebrate women every day. I have just launched a website for Peace Corps Morocco's Gender and Development Committee. The site has been 3 months in the making, since I joined the committee back in January and felt that there was a need for resources and information to be more accessible to volunteers. The site is intended to help connect volunteers in Morocco and to give them the tools to develop programming throughout the year, for both women and men, to address gender equity issues. Here's a screenshot of the website but please go check it out and tell me what you think! I'll be making lots of changes/additions over the coming months, so if you have any thoughts, please let me know.

 
I'm also planning a party for women in my community next Saturday. Most of the time in our Youth Center, there's a very small ratio of females to males - probably 10 males to every 1 female. I really want women to feel more comfortable going to the Youth Center and I also want to meet more women in the community, learn about what they like to do, and possibly discuss activities that I could do with them over the next year or two. So I decided to start with a somewhat laid-back activity to get to know each other - a henna party. Girls here seem to love henna and it should (hopefully) create a relaxed atmosphere for just hanging out with each other.  Here's the front of the invitation - my host sister helped me write the words but I typed the Arabic all by myself - I looked like a grandmother at the cyber cafe, staring intensely at the keyboard, typing 1 key every minute or so! But after a long while, it came together. I'll let you know how it goes!

Tomorrow morning, Justin and I are off to Marrakech for a quick touristy trip. You can be sure to expect a new post next week (with lots of photos) on the sights, sounds, and smells that we will encounter. Hope everyone is doing well!

Gender in Morocco

Last month, I spent a few days in Rabat doing planning for the year with Peace Corps Morocco's Gender and Development Committee (also known as GAD – as Peace Corps loves their acronyms!). At the end of our training in November, my group elected me to represent them in GAD, something I was really excited about as gender issues (particularly for women) are in a state of change in Morocco and it's really exciting to learn more about it and to help provide resources for other volunteers. 

The GAD group works to support all Peace Corps Morocco volunteers (about 250 throughout the country right now) in  understanding and appreciating gender roles in Morocco, and provides resources and initiatives geared towards gender and development – from pairing with nonprofits, to creating women's empowerment camps, to developing small one-off programs. I am working on developing a website to house all of GAD's resources and to provide a space for volunteers to better collaborate together and share best practices. More on GAD in a future post, but today I wanted to talk a little about women's rights in Morocco and to provide some historical context based on what I have learned so far. I have been fortunate to meet with both a professor and a PhD student from the Center for Studies and Research on Women at the Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University in Fes, and a lot of the below historical background and cultural insights come from them. 

I'll be talking a lot more about gender roles from my own experiences in future posts, but to start I thought it might be helpful to have a bit of context on the history and culture. A lot of people know about Morocco's recent constitutional changes, but perhaps might not know some of the steps leading up to it and the challenges still facing women. Bullet-pointed to make your history lesson as painless as possible :)

• 1996: Changes in Morocco's constitution grant women equal civil and political rights related to freedom of movement, opinion, and association, as well as access to public office, employment, and education. 
• 2002: 35 women are permitted access to Morocco's Chamber of Representatives, and the percentage raises from less than 1 percent to 10.8 percent.
• 2003: Morocco's new family code is adopted (called the Mudawana, based on a school of Islamic Law) and emphasizes equality in relation to the family – Both women and men share joint responsibility in the rights of marriage, property relations, divorce, repudiation, child custody, and inheritance law provisions.  You can read an overview of the Mudawana provisions here.
• 2004: The Nationality Code is developed, in accordance with the Mudawana Family Code (see 2003). Women who are married to foreign Muslim men now have the right to pass on Moroccan nationality to their children. (In case you are curious like I was about the use of the word “Muslim” in there – I asked and learned that men have the right to marry non-Muslim women, but women cannot marry a non-Muslim man, from Morocco or from another country). 
• 2009: Responding to a minimal decrease in gender-based violence in the 5 years following the Mudawana (and protests from women's rights groups), Morocco begins to create special information centers for women on domestic violence, along with judicial assistance to women who are victims of violence, and special training for lawyers in women's rights. 
• 2011: Starting with the February 20 movement and ending with a draft passing on July 1, the new constitution is intended to provide men and women with equal civil, political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights.

So these are all clearly strong advances, but there are a number of challenges that Morocco continues to face on implementation:

• Illiteracy rates are very high (35-40% for women), which is preventing many women from full knowledge of their change in rights.
• Poverty is a big problem when it comes to legal fees and the means to get around.
• Cultural norms inhibit implementation: Discriminatory gender practices, the archetypal man in Moroccan culture in a commanding role, and limited social mobility for women.

With all of this happening, it's an incredibly interesting time to be living in Morocco. The gender-related issues that I and other volunteers face are very deeply tied to cultural norms here, so my role with GAD is to help volunteers to acknowledge these cultural norms and challenges and to develop strategies in the classroom and in their communities to engage in open dialogue and empower both men and women to think about their roles and relationships. I'm looking forward to sharing my experiences with all of you to help you better understand the role of gender in Moroccan culture – so more to come!