Grassroots Girls Go Global and $40 BILLION CAMPAIGN!

5 Minutes to write until the next panel.... and GO!

CEO of Vivanista (a social network of philanthropists and fundraisers), Layne Gray, asked a panel of women involved in strategic, philanthropic, and aid agencies for women and children, "Its been 10 years since the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been announced. We are still struggling with universal education (2) gender equality (3) child health (4) and maternal health (5). How do we amp up conversation about women's issues?"

With 5 years left to meet the UN MDGs, we do not have much time. At this moment, the photo in TIME of the Afghan women whose nose had been cut off pops into my head. Gender Equality for Afghanistan?

Four other women sit on the panel, clearly eager, angry, talented, and hopeful. They respond. Nainab Salibi goes first. She is the Founder of Women for Women International, who has been described as a new age Mother Theresa, only "better dressed." As an Iraqi whose father flew Saddam Hussein's private plane, she knows a thing or two about war. Her organization has touched 270,000 women and girls in conflict zones by providing access to education and scholarships, practical jobs, and other support to empower women in places like Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwanda. By offering "Women to women" partnerships where a wealthier woman sponsors another woman in exchange for letters or photos, her organization creates hope for women (ranging from Bosnian rape camps to the hills in Afghanistan) who say, "I'm too hopeless to be helped." Zainab calls for "Humility and help, and a greater interaction between American women and women abroad." Right now, $0.02 of every $1.00 of aid goes to girls/women. She calls for amping up the March 8th World Women's Day in the US. She described Women's day in Bosnia as a time filled with flowers, where a Bosniak woman can hold the hand of a Serbian woman and say "Enough is enough." For Zainab, women in the US need to say, "Enough is enough" as well. "This is the women's and girl's century. We need to speak up and speak loud, get angry!"

Kimberly Perry, the Director of Girl Up as part of the UN Foundation's campaign to meet the MDGs, replies calmly, but boldly. She has faith in the generosity of American Girls and women, why she sponsors initiatives like "High $5" where youth can encourage the donation of $5 to the Foundation. Apparently, its really "cool." 53% of girls across America are willing to donate their own money to causes and hers is one of them. But is this enough?

Nancy Lublin, the CEO of DoSomething is feisty. Her organization has empowered over 1 million kids and teens to create projects that aid others abroad and at home. She says, "If you look on Google Analytics and research crisis stories on Tsunamis or Katrina, you don't get much." When women and girls depend on the connection and story and there is simply no story, how can they help? On top of that, 10 years after the MDGs, they have not been fulfilled. On TOP of that, organizations trying to meet the goals depend a lot on the generosity of "feisty, ambitious, and powerful" women and girls in America who donate $5 or $27 here or there. "Where is the corporate funding? 10 years after the MDGs, this is a global embarrassment! God is pissed. She's really mad!" Her call? Make the STORY! BLog! Get the word out. Her message? "25,000 girls under 15 will become child brides TODAY alone. Be pissed. Tweet it! Tell the story. Do Something!"

Nancy Zhang, a teen who is an International Trustee of Key Club international. She sees that the 250,000 members of Key Club International are mostly girls. As she says, "Girls want to be popular, without standing out too much." They like to do things in groups and collaborate. When the older women on the panel ask her if she can help carry out the MDGs, she replies "yes" confidence.


yet i'm sitting here. I like the hopeful women sitting in front of me and the work they do. Its really powerful and really effective. I've worked with something like Women for Women before, called Women for Afghan Women. I know they do good, effective, powerful work.

However, these women in front of me are all asking for a change in dialogue in order to help meet these MDGs. Has the dialogue changed? They are asking me (a woman) to get angry. To talk. To tell stories. Well, I'm here to tell stories. However, as I've mentioned in my blog before, I'm a born skeptic. Buzz words like "Green" or "Think Globally, Act Locally" and "Party for a Cause" make me a little anxious. How can "party for a cause" and dialogue alone 5 years before the MDGs must be met save the 8 million young children who die each year of preventable causes, including pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, and tuberculosis? There has to be something big. Well maybe the prayers (and dialogue) of these women were answered, because this "something big" is coming today.

At 2:00 Ban Ki-Moon, the Secretary General of the UN is going to announce the $40 BILLION campaign for the Global Strategy for Women and Children's health and how we are going to meet the millennium goals.

MDG 4 calls for a two-thirds reduction in under-five mortality and MDG 5 calls for a three-quarters reduction in maternal mortality and universal access to reproductive health.

Ban Ki-Moon better offer a damn good strategy. He is making this skeptic believe.

Note: facts and figures from UN documents supplied by conference

Post-Modern, Deconstructionist, Neo-Colonial, Diverse Approaches to War

Being back in America after a summer of automatic weapons, NATO, and barbed wire really opens you up to the absurdity with which we as Americans, at home, look at war "out there."

For instance. Shopping ("choosing") classes at Yale. I was interested in approaching war through different disciplines and approaches (philosophy, politics, history, literature). What I got instead was the "Post modern, deconstructed, neo-colonial approach" to suffering, security, and war. Now, I can do academic speak with the best of them, but somehow this approach is a little... removed. And not just physically. Is it missing the mark?

Sure, I think its better to see through the fog of war when you are outside of it, when you have fog lights, and when you have the blessing of distance and reason. In war, most people would lose their minds. Search for immediate answers and solutions. Take sides. Play defense. Its a life or Death situation. Therefore, academia and logic come to support these things accordingly. Nationalism becomes an academic institution. Linguistics are part of the national agenda. Therefore, it makes sense in many ways to study war before going into it and outside of it. No one wants a general who has never studied a war before!

Yet outside the wartime environment, I wonder how we imagine (or refuse to imagine) the suffering, strategy, pain, failure, and successes (how and if they exist) in wartime? At some point in the 20th century, the existence and critique of war took a whole new turn. When, finally, in 1928 with the Kellogg-Briand Pact, 15 nations (including France, US, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan) denounced war as an instrument of national policy, it seems like the critique and protest of war took a whole new level. If war was not just "politics by other means" as Clausewitz might have put it, but indeed an instrument (is this fair to say IS friends?), its seems like there are more alternatives to war. Are other instruments there? If warfare changed drastically since Clausewitz's time with modern weaponry and weapons of mass and systematic destruction, then there must be a sort of peacemaking that must also evolve that is mass and systematic. With the new type of peacemaking and new type of war, came a whole new type of criticism of war... mass criticism.

Mass criticism. Think of the intellectuals (Einstein included!) who were dragged into the peacemaking process in 1917-1919 after WWI. Think of the journalists during WW2. What about Rebecca West, the epitome of a "modern woman" critiquing and reporting on Nuremberg. Think of Vietnam and the mass protests. If anti-war protests ever reached a peak, it would probably be surrounding Vietnam. I haven't heard pop anti-war songs against Iraq, but think of those singing about leaving Vietnam (my personal favorite being Country Joe & the Fish's "The 'Fish' Cheer" or "I-feel-like-I'm-fixin-to-die," some lyrics being "put down your books and pick up a gun, we're gonna have a whole lot of fun/And its 1, 2, 3, what are we fighting for?/ Don't ask me I don't give a damn/ Next stop is Vietnam."). Think of the deaths from student uprisings. The mass movements and social protest. For our time, when Iraq costs more than Vietnam. When we are approaching a decade in Afghanistan. Where are the protests?

Or are they even necessary? Should we bother?

As Susan Sontag explains in her book "Regarding the Pain of Others," "The argument that modern life consists of a diet of horrors by which we are corrupted and to which we gradually become habituated is a founding idea of the critique of modernity---the critique being almost as old as modernity itself." I wonder if we just got tired of the fight to even protest it. Are we in an age of Mass Apathy? Did we got too comfortable with Wal-Mart and the war games we buy from their shelves for our Xboxs and PlayStations? Perhaps we don't care enough. Perhaps we don't see the repercussions that war spending has on our economy or on the lives of the families of soldiers.

Perhaps we just got too enthralled with protesting mosques to protest wars.

Yet, when I ask most people from my generation, they don't really think about the war. There isn't a forced conscription. They have never seen or held an automatic weapon. More interestingly, they think protests and social unrest have no place or point in American society. There are other ways. Get power. Get jobs. Get sex. Get money. Get it all, but don't lose your sense of morals! Get beyond that "european" social unrest. Protests and "social movements" are for anarchists and hippies... not hipsters or preps. To many in my generation, we think our parents were just smoking pot, holding signs, and screaming at "the man" because it was cool. Just like wearing American Apparel and dancing in dingy basements is cool now. Friends have told me, "If we want to make social change, its not through a perpetual party, so why protest? Protests are irrational." I'm not disagreeing.

So, "What to do." as they say in the Balkans.

At Yale, when we are sitting next to advisors to Presidents and former world leaders, we are too worshipful of the fact they are there to even ask meaningful questions. Students want to be friends with these guys and impress them with their quotations and Washington Post knowledge. We of all people could actually say something, probe, and maybe practice asking questions that still let us sit next to them the next class without losing our integrity and respect. If anything, we should be practicing this skill of asking those questions before we really screw up in the "real world." If I ask someone why they didn't ask a probing question, they respond: "Well, (fill in the blank topic: security, IS, history, lit) is just so complicated and I didn't want to seem stupid."

Is my generation habituated to apathy? Are we too comfortable?

or are we just restless and blow off steam in other ways....

Refugees and "Ruffians": The Many Faces of Youth Work

Get ready for a plethora of blog posts. I'm catching up after a busy work week and one of the most amazing weekends of my life.

So last Monday I went to the UNHCR refugee house here in Turkey. The refugees there were supposedly under 18, all men/boys, from Afghanistan, Guinea, and Sudan. They were found on the streets of Turkey and sent here. Turkey does not recognize anyone with "refugee" status outside of the EU (funny right?) so they are illegals, without status really, living in a house in Turkey that is loosely gated. 

I went in, left my passport at the gate and proceeded to meet with the "mistress?" of the household. She told us about how the boys do not go to school, but rely on the kindness of strangers to give them classes in English, Turkish, and computers. They all try to get their paperwork done to try to go to countries that will accept them as refugees (like New Zealand and Australia)--this is a long and tough process though. 

So I go in the Computer Salon. All of the Sudanese and some Afghans are there. Its mostly separated along racial lines, except for the few "diplomats" who learned English/Turkish or the other group's language and acts as a sort of voice for each group. Some boys picked up Turkish in only one year... So bright, so intelligent... Most of the boys who come anyways have to be bright-- how else could they escape their countries and get to Turkey? 

But going back to race lines: The Sudanese seemed better dressed in athletic wear and took the computer room. The Afghans were in lounge wear and had the kitchen--they tended to be younger. The guys from Guinea were the oldest and biggest and owned the TV room. They spoke French. 

All of them had cell phones--where they got them from or who they were calling, I know not. This is something I am going back to research. Most also had facebooks and used skype. They were very computer literate and all were soccer enthusiasts--- duh. Many had casts because of serious soccer games. Ouch. 

We played some rather juvenile games with the guys, which I thought might be patronizing at first. But in the end, they were fun and brought all the races together for some fun. I liked it too. Someone asked if I felt uncomfortable being in a room with grown men (basically) who were refugees---if I felt threatened. In response: I feel more threatened on the streets of Istanbul by Turkish men than these men. I was treated with such respect. 

I was so fascinated by the dynamics of the group, the stories these boys have to tell, and how the system works. I will be returning to work with the guys some more and basically, chill out with them. Often times, Youth Work means just inspiring someone.... 

NEXT: On Thursday I ended up taking a group of young Turkish Teenagers from TOG to the Istanbul Modern Art Museum.  Now, I consider myself generally pretty good with Art History--I am in fact. Yet, there is always something refreshing about taking people who aren't "art snobs" to the art museum. There is something fresher and more honest in how they view the art. To me, going to a museum for Youth Work is an experience of somehow banging two facets of my life together: Art snobbery and frankness. 

For instance, I can judge what influences of either French, American, German or British art movements might have affected the art there. However, I know nothing of the Turkish tradition. The boys would point at pictures and ask me not about the style or period, but rather where the picture was painted. Some of them, they recognized as parts of Istanbul. Other things, like the Turkish Peasant Revolutionaries (The Kuva-i Milliye) or Grease wrestling was important. The representation and history, the Turkish identity was so important to them--which I hadn't thought of. They also touched the oil paintings, making me CRINGE, so composure was different too. 

On one painting of a nude woman, a boy took out his dictionary and said, "Contradiction." I asked why. He basically said that Turkish woman normally cover up and here she is nude! The same boy pointed out one of the artists and told me about his dislike for him as a writer apparently. 

One boy really stayed close with me and a translator, curious about sharing what he thought of some of the more modern art. He relied on my interpretations, until I told him to share his first. The way he looked at things, searching for "representation," not necessarily some other things like color harmony, style, technique, blahblahblah--you gain a new respect for the artwork and the way it speaks to each individual. Each youngster spent a lot of time with each painting, more than I had expected in some ways. Normally people just breeze through... these youngsters spent a lot of time contemplating each painting--we couldn't even get through the whole gallery on the first floor in 2 hours! 

So while my experience with youth work varies with different types of people and different places, I learned the value of listening, chilling, and the importance of just hoping you can inspire someone the way they inspire you... 

Rights and Raki: Thoughts on Youth Work and Youth

Until you are working intimately in programming sponsored by the EU, you cannot grasp the money that flows into the efforts to fashion multicultural, European, "different but equal" youth. The mission: create a unified, culturally rich Europe. The implementation: Trainings, conferences, social work. The process: Hmmmm

Working both on the funding/policy side and the project/implementation side in an NGO can inform you about both dynamic ends of the EU's project in multicultural Europe--by latching onto youth. However, when it comes to some of these projects, its really hit or miss. 

PEMBE EV ADVENTURE

Instead of going to the office and working on a report on European Youth Policy, Friday I went to the "Pembe Ev" or Youth House of TOG (my NGO) in order to start fashioning an international cultural summer camp for 16-23 or so year olds. (Yes, big age difference I know). Though I got lost after a metro, a funikuler, a ferry, and a bus, I eventually found myself on the Asian side at the Pink House or Pembe Ev. Once there, I was confronted by youth workers from around Europe and Turkish Youth, just hanging on an ungodly hot day. 

Planning these camps is no easy task. The goals are usually for a sense of participation (does this equate to Turkish or European participation and citizenship? Thinking about this...) and cultural exposure. Planning the games, workshops, events, and classes is harder than you would think. Keeping the attention of a 19 year old is hard. I speak from experience. There has to be some sort of net worth to the whole experience. Sometimes that means just chilling out and talking. (To be honest, I don't know the efficacy of the games and after reading papers about them and critical studies. I'm still learning.) 

Keeping goals in sight is important, but the whole process involves improvisation and keen observation... I knew this would have to be done differently...

TRANSPORT TO THE BLACK SIDE

After an afternoon there, I knew that my lovely AEGEE friends (plus Ivy EME alum Dimitrije!) were in Kilyos on the Black Sea for a conference. They invited me along that week so I decided to delay my visit to the Aegean Sea coast to go the opposite direction. I missed the Ferry, so I, with an unworking cellphone (for some reason it realized it was illegal...? i.e. Not turkish) I took a Dolmus (or minibus) to Sariyer then another to Kilyos. Problem. I was supposed to take another bus, which I later found out. To avoid further detail and to save this for a good dinner party story (much like my lost in the Sahara story), I will just say I eventually got where I needed to be. 

I entered on International Night of the participants (Armenians, Slovaks, Belgians, Turks, Serbian, American--me--and a few Dutch/German people). This means that everyone brings their own food and alcohol from their country to share. End Story. 

OPPRESSION IN THEATER OF THE OPPRESSED

Considering I was acting as an "Observer," I didn't feel much of a need to participate fully in the "Peace Leaders of the Future" conference... ahem. When I went to one of the workshops on "Theater of the Oppressed" (A. Boal's theory of using theater to examine the oppressor/oppressed dilemma), I grew even a little less engaged. When a trainer is trying to use "Theater of the Oppressed" on a group of students who don't live in such an obvious war zone of "oppressors" and "oppressed" trying to separate the "oppressors" from the "oppressed" and acting their roles is even more frustrating. Its not that simple. Please. Don't water down the issue. Okay for the 16 year olds, it was fine, but 24 year old students with Master's Degrees in European Studies? Hmmmm. 

I said, screw this "oppressor/oppressed" obviousness. I wanted to consider something maybe more close to home: That feeling of "self-oppression" about not being able to do enough in a world of problems (there are only so many UNICEF checks I can send), and therefore falling into apathy. When it came time to present, we were refused (we had a good skit too) because we didn't want to use the "oppressor/oppressed" thing. Call it invisible theater. I felt oppressed.

Afterwards, I kinda called the lady out on it and noted a good number of things.

1) The conference was originally for the Armenian/Turkish conflict, but due to scheduling and leaders dropping out prematurely, it became this: i.e. shit happens.

2) Don't have an age range between 15-24. Its patronizing. Why the EU groups youth like this is worrying. 

3) Value the fact that these kids are just together. 

4) Remember this is about non-formal learning. Not top-down. 

5) Sometimes some good old fashioned recreation is the best way to do Youth Work. I.e. netWORKing. 

RAKI, SAND, SUN: HOW YOUTH WORK IS ABOUT FUN

You know me. I am horrible at recreation. I bring my laptop to bars in Brussels to do work. I don't watch any TV. I am addicted to my gmail. My idea of fun is reading the BBC online. Let's face it. I am bad at sitting still and I'm bad at just "having fun." Something about this youth work business though that I've noticed is that there is nothing like a beach, some music, and a meal can do for inspiring conversation. I had much better conversations over my Starbucks at the end of the conference than I did during workshops. The intimacy that you gain at conferences is the impetus for continued dialogue. Simply put, my weekend simply solidified my bond with these amazing European students (TTYN!) and BAM! there is soft diplomacy for you. 

Though I didn't learn about who was the oppressor and who was the oppressed (though I deconstructed Boal's theory while I was bored during the workshop), I learned how to have a little fun. I also learned that it is okay to be 19 sometimes.  (Sometimes doing Youth Work on the policy end in an NGO for people my own age seems a little bizarre--I feel patronizing...) 

After saying goodbye to my AEGEE lovers as they flew back to Brussels, I went to have the biggest dinner ever with Murat, the Political Advisor and his friend and his wife at their apartment. OH!! BEST HOMECOOKED FOOD EVER. I learned more about fish, red grape raki, Mezze, and the art of cooking in one evening than I ever have. You just wait mom.... 

After 3 hours prep and 3 hours eating, I had the itis and I was so stuffed. Monday night now. I still am. 

Nothing does more for cultural understanding than food. :) Okay, maybe not.... but I like to think so. 

UPDATE ON HEALTH FOR MY WHITFIELD FAMILY: 

I realized that you all love to know how I am doing health wise. Normally I don't put this in my blogs for all of the world to see, but I'll let you know that I am FINALLY seeing a dermatologist tomorrow for my rash. That will be a whole different post... DANIELLE DOES TURKISH HEALTH CARE.