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!