Yesterday I went to a village about 80 km south of Chisinau to give a domestic violence and anti-trafficking seminar for 7th, 8th, and 9th grade girls. A Peace Corps volunteer set it up for me with his colleague. I was a little stressed about it because it was the first time I would be leading this kind of an event and I had to do it all in either Russian or Romanian. I ended up doing a little bit of both languages. I spoke primarily in Russian but the girls answered questions in Romanian and I had a lot of materials (handouts, brochures) in Romanian as well. Almost everything I did in the first part came from previous Winrock trainings. At the beginning of the class I had each girl (there were about 30) come to the front of the room and something she is good at. Common responses were dancing, drawing, writing poetry, and singing. Then she had to write something on the board under the heading "Good thoughts about women." After that I had one girl read a story from the "16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence Campaign" that Winrock participated in back in November. The story was a pretty shocking retelling of acts of domestic violence. The idea behind putting these 2 activities together is to give the girls a sense of pride in being a woman from all the positive thoughts they gathered about women and then to show how distressing it is that so many women endure this kind of violence. Next, I had printed out statements about domestic violence and the girls were split into groups to discuss whether or not the statements were myths or realities. They then read their statements to the class, gave their opinion, and then read a paragraph that gave reasons for whether the statement was true or false.
The second half of the seminar focused on domestic violence. We watched a very powerful film, "Lilya 4 Ever" that has often been used for trafficking awareness and is also just a great movie. We stopped halfway through for them to answer questions and then had a discussion at the end as well. The seminar continued for over an hour after the end of the school day so I was really pleased that most of the girls decided to stay even though they didn't have to. It was great to go to a school in a village that is so remote and difficult to get to because they don't get the attention from NGOs and government projects that other areas receive. I wish I had started doing trainings like these earlier on in the year because they are a bit difficult to set up logistically and I probably won't get around to doing another one in the next month.
To give a better sense of how difficult it is to get in and out of the village, I wasn't able to get back to Chisinau last night because there was no transportation. The only bus out of the village to Cimislia (a bigger town where you can get buses to Chisinau) leaves at 7 am and is always full. It's a huge bus from the era of the Soviet Union that has an exhaust pipe on the inside that blows exhaust into the face of one unlucky passenger in the seat in front of it. It took 45 minutes to go 7 km because the road is so bad from Cimislia to the village Cenac where I was staying.
There is no high school in the village so if you want to continue your education you have to do so in Cimislia. Since there is no viable transportation, your family has to be able to pay for you to stay in dorms during the week. This means that a lot of young people in Cenac stop their education after the 9th grade. I was really impressed with the middle school though. They have a nice building and some great projects and activities for the students to participate in.
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