Girls: Better after quake

The aftermath of the earthquake can still be felt in the air of Kharanitar as most of the families try to rebuild their lives from scratch. The adolescent girls, who are the most vulnerable band of population during disaster, have made the most compromises - discontinuation of schools, added daily chores, lack of toilet facility to manage menstruation, breaching of privacy, early marriage trafficking etc.

In the past two years, the adolescent girls of Kharanitar have been unleashing as social champions under the mentorship provided by Visible Impact. This has enabled them to achieve great results in their personal lives, family and community. But, something was missing. The girls at several times kept mentioning that they feel insecure and anxious about their life. We understood right away, what is needed to complete that pie of their life.

We provided our adolescent girls with a fun filled, interactive workshop about mental health - how to identify them, importance of understanding them, identifying if their kiths and kins are looking for psychosocial support, and who to approach in case of support required. Due to taboo, mental health is overlooked most of the time, but are imperial especially in disaster settings. With this program, we emphasized on enabling girls to be able to talk about mental health with their peers and families and help comfort people. The girls at the end of the workshop shared, "We thought insanity is the only mental problem and discriminated them, but never realized there could be other forms of psychosocial support. This workshop is going to be embedded in our life for a long long time. We feel enlightened!"

With the fund from Global Giving, we are going to do more! We will provide the girls with seed grants so that they can conduct creative activities to bust their stress. The girls have expressed desire to read books, enroll in dance classes, computer classes, music classes, science laboratory classes, taekwondo etc.

We are excited that these girls have received this platform to discuss and alleviate their psychosocial problems. In a few months, we will update you regarding how the seed grants is serving the girls. Till then, please keep supporting us!

Links:

• http://www.visim.org/

Did we tell you all that we just recently received funding from GlobalGiving to add psychosocial support component to our Girls: Better after quake program? What that means is that along with providing leadership support to our earthquake affected girls, we will now be providing them peer support and training on psychosocial support throughout the next year, and provide them with seed fund for entrepreneursip!! I hope you are as excited and happy as we are. 

Also, the girls are continuing  to receive leadership support, participating in safe space meeting through social mobilizers, enhancing their communication skills and discussing possibilities with their community leaders. Next month they have a special session with their local government, where they will discuss the challenges they are facing to becoming social champions. You should definitely stay tuned with us to hear more about that from us. 

Like you can guess, the path to achieveing this is not easy. Working with adolescent girls, we have to be mindful of their expectations, have sessions keeping in mind their classes, work with their gate keepers, and show them the impact on their lives so that the community can witness them. 

Thanks for your support that we have been able to make this difference for them, and we hope to receive continued support from you!