These two blog entries are cross-posted with permission from the blog of Young Women for Change, a women’s rights group in Afghanistan:

Posting Our Voices on the City Walls

Friday, December 23, 2011, Young Women for Change (YWC) filled the streets of Kabul with posters about women rights messages.  It was another day of history, for the first time Kabul streets have seen women rights posters posted by Afghan men and women. We started poster advocacy from our Facebook page and website. Later, we decided to post it on the Kabul streets walls so it reaches every Afghan that crosses those streets.

I, like any other YWC member, was nervous about it, but as we moved through the city I felt stronger. It was rewarding when school students and every person on the street would read it, if they couldn’t read it, they would ask others to read it for them. After reading poster on the wall people would ask us to post posters on their cars.

I felt like my heart was going to melt down when we posted a poster and a shopkeeper who was there watching us posted it, couldn’t read it, and asked other person to read it. When he learned what the poster said, he started fixing the poster and glued it harder on the wall. Two policemen walked to the other side of the road to read our posters.

Others thought we were working for money and belonged to a foreign organization, without knowing the fact that we are an Afghan group and this project is funded by individual Afghans.  Maybe there are not to blame. We, youth, have not had much of ground level work and in the media, youth complain about what the government or others have not done instead of talking about what we can do.

The poster day was an example of how and with whom YWC wants to work. We want to reach every Afghan individually and work with them to change the stereotypes and bring the positive change to our country, ourselves. It is time we realized our responsibilities.

— By Anita Hadiary, YWC Co-Founder, 20

One Step Closer

The poster initiative began on Young Women for Change’s Facebook pages. Every week, we would post a poster about violence, street harassment or other forms of gender-based discrimination online. There would be debates on them. Many times, followers of our page would get into heated discussions with other Afghans who were favorable towards violence against women or practiced victim-blaming. The debates would reach to one hundred or more comments and tens of people would share the posters to their own Facebook pages or groups. It was striking how there were people among the so-called “educated people,” who had access to internet, and argued that it was somehow okay to beat a woman or disrespect her on the pretext of her clothing. At one point, a Kabul University student wrote, “my mother has her own place, but if my wife ever dares to disobey me, she will not be safe in my house.” Shocked, we shared the comment with others, and many women and men raised their voices to condemn it.

The amount of ignorance and misogyny we witnessed among the small percentage of people who had access to the internet and claimed to be intellectuals and educated, led us to believe in the need to do more advocacy in Kabul. To do this, we used our own money to print out posters, created some glue using ground wood and walked to the streets to post our views on the walls of Kabul city.

Today, about twenty five people, men and women, got together to glue 700 posters about violence against women and education for women on their city’s walls. Members of Young Women for Change and YWC Male Advocacy team led the initiative. A few members of other youth organizations, like Hadia and Afghan Intellectuals Network, also joined as we exited our modest office at around 11:00am. Four people had volunteered to give us their cars for transportation during the poster event. Ice was still shinning underneath our feet as we walked to the cars, divided up posters, brushes and glue among the groups and drove towards Sakhi Shrine in Karte Sakhi.

It was crowded there. Shopkeepers, laborer children who attempted to sell us gum or Bolany, a delicious Afghan dumpling, and women who had visited the shrine gathered around us as we organized and decided which areas to cover. We divided into four groups and each group hit one corner. Soon, one or two posters could be seen at the beginning of every street.

My team and I went to the front door of the shrine. We approached a shopkeeper to ask permission to post one of the posters on his wall.

– “What is this?” he asked me.

– “It is a poster about violence against women.”

– “I am against women. Don’t put this one on my walls. A man is a man. If he is angry, he beats. That is what men do. I am against this,” he said angrily.

I smiled with sadness and tried to convince him to give me permission to at-least glue the poster about education to his wall. I kept forcing myself to smile at him. My mother had warned me earlier in the day, that during the poster project I should keep my cool. “If you laugh about things, they will laugh too and eventually they will agree. If you are serious, they get angry more quickly thinking you are criticizing them,” she had said.

-“Let me study. Only one out of ten Afghan girls graduates high school,” I read the poster to him.

-“It is still about women,” he said.

– “It is about little girls. They need education otherwise our country will never be build,” I said with a smile. He shook his head reluctantly. My colleagues and I glued the poster to his wall.

Often, many we meet tell us we should do this sort of thing out of Kabul because people in Kabul are more educated and aware, but our conversations and encounters usually prove this statement wrong. Even in Kabul, the level of acceptance of a woman as an equal human is low. This encounter and many others during the day made us more confident that what we were doing is essential.

We went to Karte Char, Makrooyan, Taimani, Shahre Naw, Qalaye Fatullah and Khushal Khan Meena and we met many men and women who showed interest in our work, in addition to the ones who would oppose us. In Qalaye Fatullah, several laborer children gathered around a poster about early marriage and tried to read the poster to each other. Then, they ran over to the cars they were washing and told more kids about the posters. An old illiterate man, who polished shoes in Taimani, asked his friend to read it to him. Later, we saw him fixing the glue to save the poster from falling to the ground.

From the children who practiced reading with our posters, to older men and women who helped us and even to the men who argued with us and said that they did not want the posters, the hundreds of people we met and spoke with on Friday motivated us and gave us more energy. The reality that twenty-five Afghan women and men sacrificed their Friday, a weekend day, donated their money and resources and even endangered their safety to raise awareness among their people was another example of how Young Women for Change inspires Afghan youth to unite for creating a better Afghanistan.

– By Noorjahan Akbar, YWC Co-Founder, 20