No means No worldwide!

„…There is this special day, which they call "Very Special Day" where a man who is hired by the community comes to the camp and sleeps with the little girls. Imagine the trauma that these young girls go through every day. Most girls end up pregnant. They even contract HIV and AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. (…) On the other side, there is this girl. She's amazing. (Laughter) (Applause) I call her amazing because she is. She's very fabulous. That girl is me. (Laughter) When I was 13 years old, I was told, you are grown up, you have now reached of age, you're supposed to go to the initiation camp. I was like, "What? I'm not going to go to the initiation camps…“

Girls in Malawi and other African countries have to cope with a lot of problems. Memory Banda is a leading warrior for Girls´ Right and has given an inspirational speech at TED conference that gives you a good picture of the everyday situation of girls in Malawi:

http://www.ted.com/talks/memory_banda_a_warrior_s_cry_against_child_marriage/transcript?language=en

No means No – campaign

Good luck, that we meet Glory from the campaign „No means no worldwide“! The campaign fights for girls´ rights in Africa and is supported by unicef. „No means No“ is a campaign by the organization Ujamaa Pamodzi Africa and started in Kenya.

Link to the website of the campaign: http://nomeansnoworldwide.org/

No means No Malawi (Facebook): https://www.facebook.com/nomeansnomalawi/timeline?ref=page_internal

I asked Glory in private, if they could also come to our school, even if we were not governmental. And they came!

We gathered all girls from Standard 4 up to Standard 8 in the school hall. The girls from No means No teached them first in theory about Girls´ Rights, Sexual Assault – later the girls got practical lessons in self-defence: real boxing and shouting and fighting! We all had fun and learned a lot!

I am shure if you contact them, they will help you out with materials or maybe come to your school.

Beauty-Meeting

Every girl likes to dress up and feel beautiful!!!

 Preparations

a) We invested some fundings in beauty-items:

• Make-up Powder (Black Opal Nr.3)
• Lipssticks
• Nail polish
• Eyeshadow
• mirrors

b) We searched nice fashion pictures in the internet, got them printed and made some „fashion-magazine-sheets“ to show to the girls

Especially nice pictures were found at the vlisco (fabrics-factory) homepage: http://v-inspired.vlisco.com/fashion/

The Meeting

We divided the girls into 3 groups. Each group sat down at a table with a teacher and discussed one of the following topics, after 20 minutes, the groups turned tables and teachers. After 60 minutes, every group had spoken with every teacher about every topic:

(A)  Fashion

We looked at the fashion pictures and spoke about dressing:
Why do we dress up?
How should we dress for school? How can we dress up for a party? Why is there a difference?
How can me match clothes and accessories?
How can we save money?
How can we make our hair or wear a head band (Chichewa mpango)?

In a seperate activity, we took some learners out of the classes and showed them how to fix their torn clothes.

(B)  Hygiene

What is personal hygiene?
Why is personal hygiene important?
What is menstruation?
Why do girls bleed once a month?
How can we help ourselves during menstruation?

In a separate activity, we planned to show the girls how to sew their own sanitary napkins, but we didn´t find the time. Nevertheless, the materials needed is only old cotton clothes and there are plenty of sewing instructions in the internet. Also I knew some development programs in Malawi, with whom I could have started a cooperation.

(C)  Make-up

One of our female colleagues was very enthusiastic in styling. So she and and the girls had a lot of fun painting themselves with the make up-items that we had bought.

I regret that we didn´t take more photos which we could have displayed in the dining hall or somewhere in the school later, because the girls were very proud of how pretty they looked, and they absolutely love PHOTOS!