Men Against Violence, Women for Peace

On Friday I went to a day-long round table discussion put on by the OSCE with the above title. There was a session on the role of men in combating violence against women that included an interesting presentation by an American guy who works MenEngage Europe in former Yugoslavia. An anthropologist from Latvia also gave a presentation about redefining gender roles and NGO director talked about rehabilitating perpetrators. Another session focused on the development of legislation to prosecute aggressors and protect victims, and the last session was about gender issues in the Moldovan military and border guard service. There were representatives present from the Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Labor, Social Protection and Family, and Ministry of Foreign affairs, as well as lawyers, people from the OSCE, Moldovan NGOs, and foreign experts. I’m glad I got to attend and learn more about the work being done to address the issue of gender-based violence from a variety of different areas.

On Saturday night I went to dinner at a nice restaurant with an Italian lady I had met who works for an NGO that was cooperating with La Strada to conduct research on child trafficking in Moldova because she had wanted to meet again to give me the hard copy of their report. Also at dinner was a Norwegian lady I had met who works for a rule of law project in Chisinau but is leaving soon, and I met a lady who works at the Swedish embassy who was there with her husband. She just finished writing the human rights report for the embassy so she knew a bit about trafficking in Moldova. We ended up talking about gender equality at dinner as well and it was interesting to hear more about gender issues in Scandinavia. The Norwegian lady said it’s something like 40% of executives in Norway are women now and it’s a scandal when a woman decides she wants to stay at home and raise a family. Other topics of conversation included how ridiculous the Finnish language is and how a strangely large proportion of people at the table are twins or are dating someone who is a twin.

In other news, Happy Birthday to my mom and dad whose birthdays were yesterday and today respectively. I’m working on a report for the OSCE now on Winrock’s 16 Days Campaign activities and then I’m off to Timisoara, Romania on Thursday to visit a friend for a few days. Hard to believe that in a week I’ll be in Maine for Christmas!

16 Days Campaign & Town Hall Meeting

The last couple of weeks have been pretty busy because Winrock is participating in the international 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign. Click here for a link to the official campaign. The very basic idea behind the campaign is to raise awareness about violence against women, and Winrock has been participating in the campaign in Moldova for several years now. I went to a Training of Trainers organized by Winrock on domestic violence on Friday that included women from Transnistria and this side of Moldova who were students, volunteers, and employees of NGOs. We also launched a Facebook campaign to advertise events and show a photo exhibition that reflects real-life stories of violence. Click here for the link to the Facebook photo album, but unfortunately the stories underneath the photos are only in Romanian. Yesterday we set up the photo exhibition with large prints of the photos in the Sociology department of Moldova State University and about 50 students came to check out the exhibit and fill out surveys about their knowledge of gender-based violence and impressions of the event. On Saturday we had a "Frisbee Against Violence" event at an indoor gym that promoted the campaign and also promoted Frisbee as a non-violent sport. The official Moldovan frisbee team, the Flying Mamaligas, came and about 7 Peace Corps volunteers/Americans were there as well. Proud to say that the Americans won the Moldova vs. USA game at the end.

On Friday I'm going to the roundtable put on by the OSCE that will include presentations by government officials and employees of international organizations and NGOs that is meant to wrap up the campaign and talk about how to work to include men in the fight against violence so that should be very interesting.

Last night I went to the Ambassador's house for the annual Town Hall Meeting for Americans living in Moldova. The house is gorgeous and the food was incredible. Not surprising. At one point he had everyone go around and introduce themselves which was great because I found out that a bunch of the people there are working with trafficking victims and I made some contacts. They were all from religious organizations. It would be interesting to compare their projects other NGOs and international orgs so I'm going to try to find out more about the work they're doing.