November 18, 2009

I have been holding off posting another blog entry until I had regular work to do and a clearer understanding of my responsibilities, and I did not want to appear needlessly negative. Unfortunately, so far I have been under-whelmed by my experience with Helwan Community Development Association. I attribute this largely to the great language barrier—I barely speak any Arabic and the rest of the women speak very minimal English—however this has not been the only challenge. I had not had a consistent project to work on until as recently as two weeks ago. At first I was supposed to be doing marketing for the Bashayer project, which makes and sells crochet products, but then I was reassigned to an after-school reading project, and then the next week I was supposed to fill out a grant application, and the following week I was back on marketing. I haven’t gotten the impression that I’ve been at all helpful, and I worry that my six to eight hours a week with my organization had been a waste of their time.

I voiced my concerns to Development Support Center, that I had such difficulty communicating and understanding what exactly my job was, and was told that there would be another intern, Khadija, who would be joining me and who could speak both English and Arabic. Unfortunately, we must work on different days because I haven’t met her yet.

Luckily, two weeks ago a former constituent of the NGO volunteered to act as a translator for us and was able to clarify what kind of job I was supposed to be doing. As it turned out much of my work the past few weeks had not been very useful, as the project to which it related was still in the preliminary planning stages, although I had been under the impression that it had already been approved. So, I’m back working marketing. My responsibilities now include contacting fair trade organizations that would be willing to work with our organization and sell our products as a retailer.

So far I have contacted several stores, and while many are reluctant to establish relationships with new artisans and are hesitant to acquiesce to unsolicited requests to meet, I have scheduled a meeting with a store in Zamalek to show some of our samples.
In past weeks I’ve been left pretty much alone to work on a project I had only a general understanding of, but this past week the translator came with me to meet the women who actually make the product. We met in a mid-size room on the entrance-level of our building with around twenty women involved in the immediate production of the Bashayer handicrafts and interviewed them for approximately forty-five minutes.

There was near unanimous agreement that the program had been a force for positive change in the participants’ lives. When asked what they thought the biggest benefit or drawback to working with Bashayer was, many women said that it provided them with a means of contributing to their family, created a support system amongst the women, and above all, provided them with a newfound sense of self-esteem that comes with taking pride in one’s work. Many of the women in the program also cited that the program gave them the confidence to combat and awareness of legal avenues of recourse against spousal abuse. While some women said that their families disagreed with their decision to go to work, the majority said that they felt supported by their families and felt empowered by their ability to contribute.

I found this experience to be very humbling and helped me realize how fortunate I have been that I’ve never been in the situation many of these women found themselves in before they came to the program. While the practical experience as a whole has left me without much insight into the way NGOs are run, these interviews gave me a primary-source look at the concept of empowering women and the effects of such programs on the individual. While crocheting tablecloths for six hours a day may not inflict large-scale impact on the Egyptian social structure, the program has brought positive change to the lives of the employed women on the individual level. In this particular case, this exemplifies the feminist theory of development, and that economic empowerment is a conduit for political empowerment and social advancement.