To start off with our update on our 'Syrian Women Empowerment Programme' we would like to first off wish you a very, warm, healthy, peaceful and happy New Year!
What is happening on Lesvos and with our project during this time of year?
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Hello everyone!
We are pleased to announce our updates on the Syrian Women Empowerment Program!
Ladies Night
This is an event which is becoming more and more successful amongst the women in the camp. We allow them to come and they are allowed to bring their children if they are the only caretakers of them. Its an evening for them to relax, let loose in a fun and safe environment. We are seeing that this is a fun night for community buildig, beacuse the women get to know each other better through these weekly Ladies night inside our community yurt.
Digital Learning Lab
We are setting up another inspiring activitiy for the women on our camp - the digital learning lab!
This is a project about trainings on how to become more technological. This is a unique opporutnity for women to harness their skills or to learn entirely a new set of skillset which can benefit them in the future on their next journey. We are doing this thanks to the sponsorship of 20 new Sony laptops. We have a team of volunteers who are now running these trainings weekly and which we are now integrating as part of our Syrian Women Empowerment programme for the women to receive these trainings.
Cooking Activities - Eid Mubarak!
With the celebrations of Eid recently, we celebrated with the community and through the women's programme, the women were able to cook for the rest of the entire community. Using traditional Syrian receipies inside our Giving Food truck, we were able to cater for a large part of the community. This was a project that was very well received by the women from Syria who were cooking, who could share their receipies and celebrate as if they were at home. They used all traditional dishes and recipies. The rest of the community greatly enjoyed the flavours. It was a peaceful and grand set of cooking events for the community.
Situational Changes
Due to a large influx of people coming into the island, the dynamics are changing. With other camps outside Kara Tepe becoming over populated, we are creating more space inside of Kara Tepe to be able to accomodate this. For this reason, we expect more Syrian women to come into the community. We are ready to integrate them into part of our projects and activities.
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It has started!!
We are proud to say that our Syrian Women Empowerment Programme has kicked off!
-Soup Cooking (x2 per week)
We begain by running the soup programme for the women. We have four women already cooking on The Giving Food Truck (industrial mobile food truck www.thegivingfoodtruck.nl) from who helped make the soup with receipies and spices that are and we will have more and more women joining to help with the cooking. The soup was distributed to about 50 women afterwards who gathered together with their children.
We have also commenced with the following activities:
-Cookies & Conversations (x1 per week)
We purchased snacks and welcomed women from the camp for an informal conversational afternoon. We did 'ice breaker activities' and began one on one as well as group conversations. The goal of this was to have informal lanuage practice for english, for women to get to know each other, speak about their skills and most importantly also their needs. This is creating an open environment for conversation. It is important for women to come together for a distraction, create bonds and friendships, a stress relief, an opportunity to practice their english, and it is important for us to gather more information on their needs. The activity ran thoughout the entire afternoon and we are very enthusiastic about running them weekly.
-Sewing night (x1 per week)
The women were extremely enthusiastic about this activity as well as begining new sewing projects. Many of them were already familiar with sewing and they were very grateful to pick it up again. We so far have seen the biggest turn out for this activity already in the first sessions.
-Cinema night (x1 per week)
We have all of the equipment set up, got a projector, 'fat boy pouffs' to sit on, and are able to run the production of films in the community center we have. Our group of volunteers have researched and selected films which are appropriate to the audience. Many of the women end up coming with their children so the films are also children friendly. It is truly beautiful to see a cinema night happen. Its moving to watch them enjoying the film together, laughing and distracted in the same way that families across the entire world do. These are precious moments of 'normality' as they are not very often.
We have a team of up to 10 dedicated volunteers at any given time who are glad to continue running these activities as well as engaging more and more of the women to continue participating.
So far we have had a very positive reaction from the community on the kickoff for the activities. We are very positive with their developments and increasing attendence rates as well as the expansion and diversification of activities.
We look forward to keeping you posted about the developments of this project thought the coming weeks and months.
On behalf of Movement on The Ground and the community on Kara Tepe, thank you for making this possible!
