Happy International Women’s Day!

I had one of the happiest moments of my placement yesterday. For the second year, we managed to get the use of the fields for the entire day in celebration of Women’s Day. Usually, because boys and girls can’t be together, the boys get all the gym classes. The girls only get to go out on the field at the girls’ recess, and lately, even then, the boys’ volleyball and soccer teams have been using the field while the girls sit and watch. So they were pretty excited to actually get to play some sports yesterday. It was incredible to watch them laughing and screaming and running like crazy in their long robes after the ball. The girls are all pumped up now and eager to continue playing, so I’m planning on setting up a schedule for their break time. Hopefully the director will back me up on this one and we won’t go back to the girls watching the boys when it’s the girls’ turn to play…I sense a potential battle in the air…

The rest of the week went well. On Monday, the girls handed in their Women’s Day posters and poetry and we put them up on the walls in the boys’ building. Unfortunately, some of the boys didn’t like them and a few were torn down and torn up. But we caught on to this quick and spoke with some boys and asked them to keep an eye on things. After that, most of the posters remained untouched. One of the poem styles that I had suggested was to use the word “women” and write words or sentences beginning with each of the letters. At first, they didn’t catch on to this. Some of the words that they tried had just been randomly chosen from the dictionary and were pretty ridiculous. But in the end, we had some really nice poems. “Winningly winsome” for the letter “w” was my favourite line.

Tuesday, we had a Women’s Day quiz, involving both the boys and the girls. We posted some facts about Eritrean women as well as some things about students and teachers at our school and then we gave the students a quick multiple-choice quiz. After Monday’s negative reactions, it was great to see the boys reading all about women just so they could win a prize.

Today is International Women’s Day, a national holiday in Eritrea. My director, who enthusiastically supported all of my requests for activities at our school, requested all the teachers, including the women, to come in and hand out report cards this morning. So, women are working on their weekend and on the national holiday in their honour. It appears that there is still a bit more work to be done in this area! There will be speeches, songs, and plays at the stadium this afternoon, but as I’ve done that once already and it is getting to be really hot, I’ve decided not to attend. We’ll spend our afternoon relaxing and sharing cakes over tea with Saba’s family.

Kim, Lukas and I had a nice weekend in Asmara. We were there to attend a VSO
teachers’ workshop involving our co-workers, which was a big success. While there, we heard about the recent events with hostage taking in Ethiopia. Though Eritrea soldiers were somehow involved, everything seems pretty peaceful here.

It’s “aqat” time again. Everyone is gnawing on the small, hard nuts off the palm trees, a taste that none of the Eatburns has developed. The boys do enjoy the tops that they make out of them though. All the kids in the neighbourhood are busy now battling their tops. We’ll try to bring some home with us and we’ll see whether they’re as big a hit in Canada as they are here.

I’ll sign off with a request. Anyone who would like to support our girl students in their soccer efforts can do so by sending off a small donation (like ten American dollars, anything smaller would be hard to change and Canadian dollars aren’t useful) in an envelope to us care of:

Anseba Islamic Institute

P.O. Box 71

Keren, Anseba

Eritrea

You might want to include a short letter to us at the same time. It’s been a long time since we’ve heard from anyone besides our families and it would be nice to get news from home, You could send off soccer balls as well but it’s cheaper probably to send money. The soccer balls don’t last long here because of the thorns, so it’s not worth sending a fancy ball.

Guess that’s all for now,

Take care,

Barb