This week is International Education Week and all the Fulbright scholars were invited to give presentations at the Educational Advising Center where I hold a weekly conversation group. I decided to give a presentation titled “Preparing Women for Global Leadership: The Albright Institute Case” that would focus on the strategies that Wellesley College has used to empower women and would describe the activities and goals of the new Albright Institute. In addition, I hoped to have an engaging discussion about the challenges of being a woman in Moldova and how to support women so that they can improve their lives and also become leaders in society. Seven extremely bright and ambitious young women came to the presentation and they really got the wheels turning in my mind so the afternoon ended up being much more interesting than I expected.
A couple of the women had a pretty heated debate about the benefits and disadvantages of a single-sex education and that started off the discussion. Then they brought up the point that women are in a tough place in Moldova because they are expected to have careers, raise children, cook, clean, and do everything else all at the same time, whereas it is expected for me to just go to work then come home and relax. Of course this is not a problem unique to Moldova, but the women said that it’s difficult to cope with it here because young women and girls do not have any role models to look up to. They feel all this pressure and know that they have to do all these things but have no idea how to accomplish everything and stay sane and healthy because they can’t look to an example of how any other woman has done this. One of the women was very open and shared her story of domestic violence in her family, saying that women need to speak up about this more in order to stop it from happening. On a side note, she actually works for the OSCE and is going to be a great contact for me in the future. She showed a strong interest in volunteering for Winrock as well.
It was really interesting for me to see this group interact and engage with gender issues. It felt very Wellesley to have a small group of women from different backgrounds (who have never met) come together to debate each other with contagious enthusiasm that made them all feel like they wanted to go out and do something to change society. I think it would be amazing to create a network of young women like this who are working or volunteering for NGOs or just have a strong interest in women’s issues to get together once a month or something like that to exchange ideas, participate in debates, and collaborate on new projects or find out about various opportunities to volunteer and make a difference. I wonder if there is anything like that in place in Chisinau. I think I have mentioned before that there are something like 300 NGOs in Moldova that have some sort of focus on gender issues/anti-trafficking efforts and a lot of times their programs overlap and could be more effective if there were more collaboration on projects. Logistically, this just seems very difficult. At my presentation, however, the girl who works for the OSCE was able to invite the others to the play on domestic violence that I went to (there is one more performance) and I was able to interest them in the 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence campaign that Winrock is participating in that most of them had never heard of.
The more people you meet, the more opportunities you find out about and it’s much easier to join an activity or volunteer when you have already know a person who is working for that organization and has personally invited you to participate. In addition, if young women like this continued to meet and expand their networks, I have no doubt that they would inspire each other to do important work in Moldova. As one of the participants today mentioned, there are many brilliant women in Moldova but if they don’t speak up and share their knowledge and experiences you would never know it. There are so many intelligent and talented people in Moldova that it is a real tragedy that there are so few opportunities to make a living in any field here. If these people join forces and try to have a positive outlook rather than a hopeless one, then maybe, someday, something will change and the country will be able to move forward.
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