Domestic Violence Workshop COMPLETE!

Well just want to update you on the important news that 17 months of hard work has paid off the dv workshop is complete! I will post up pictures soon so you can see what all your donations got you once again thank you for anything you were able to contribute. Leading up to the conference I had to go all around Phnom Penh getting books and am soo grateful for the UNFPA and un human rights women’s etc and of course GADC all these people provided so many resource to the workshop of information in Khmer and Eng.  Well nothing I do can be with out a story so its 9 at night me and makara who is part of Peace Corps staff she is one of r counter parts on this project anyways we are sitting to finally get dinner when Hannah rides her bike over to us and its like there is a huge problem the school director said he did not have some sheet of paper that he needed and that we could not have the rooms for the workshop if we did not get it to him be4 tom well its 9 at night so wtf do we do. Soo there is all these different gov branches in Cambodia the one that is in charge of edu is the POE who we gave all this paper work to their director but it got lost. I should also mention to get said paper work we had to pay 20 dollars lets just say that fee is not a real fee but a fee you feel in heart to pay when you want something done in Cambodia call it whatever you like. Poor Hannah ran all over the place a week be4 our workshop bc we found out about said paper work then. I should also mention there was a bad falling out between the school and peace corps bc Hannah went to teach else where and by Cambodian standards I guess this is face losing and peace corps did not fix it by talking to the right people so basically any chance said school director got he just screwed with us bc he could. Anyways back to 9 at night Makara saves the day makes a million phone calls get this POE directors cell number or something we get the okay after 30 mins thinking this is it 17 month of our work down the drain. After all of this we have a talk about how if we did not have a Khmer person with us their would have been nothing we could have done and how there is just some scope as a volunteer you can not fix and this is something I think the staff can forget so Makara was like I think ill bring this up at next staff meeting. The next morning we show up early to set up but the ministry did not show up until 30 mins later but hey they did show up on time so that was a step in the right direction! In typical khmer style the opening ceremony has to last way to long because we had to have every important person their give a speech o yea I guess I did not mention that the deputy governor of kampong chhnang showed up apparently this is sort of a big deal. I help Makara write up her speech the night before and I think it was pretty short and sweet got the point across of thanking people for coming give us money etc and then talking about violence being a community issues. I have to say though the director of the ministry of women’s affairs though it was really long and I understood only some of her speech was BAD ASS!  What I mean by this is she called the police out in her speech and the chief of police was attending our event she was just like the police are to slow in responding to the crises in Cambodia they ignore violence in the family and it is only breaking our society apart. Its rare for me to see any one call out the Cambodian gov for fear of what would happen to them I mean some ngos will but not usually people working for the gov bc I am told their has to be favoritism to get into some positions and if you speak to much against the party you will be disfavored. After this we separated the groups to make them into 2 diff classrooms to make it easier for them to ask question and learn. I have to say the sessions were really well done the women working with the ngo they partnered with worked well  and I think a lot more people understood aspects of violence gender and culture. In fact my gauge for how much people were liking this workshop was that they showed up early and even when it rained in Cambodia this NEVER HAPPENS LIKE EVER I ALMOST DIED. The only thing I sort of struggle with in all of this is the notion of evolution of people understanding gender and violence etc like we in the states have gone though many stages and realized our mistake in the feminist movement etc to make it not only one dimensional however when this is a newer concept to people such as in Cambodia its like you have to re see the same mistake being made. EX okay so I really do like this ngo GADC they have a lot of really good materials in Khmer etc and they train men to not be violent towards women that it’s the mans job not to hit the women vs the women’s job not to get hit. While its all well it good that they are trying to take away from victim blaming it’s a paradime shift in my option because they are trying to say this is what a real man is he takes care of the family helps his wife doesn’t hit his wife etc but its only re enforcing the idea that there is such thing as masculinity which is exactly why they are trying to fight. Despite this observation from my self most people better understood why not to victim blame etc so I guess I can not totally knock this method of teaching. So at the end of the day we set up to give out money and this was going to be a shit show bc Saeed who was going to be in charge of this got sick and we did not have names but only like health person one this village village chife so on and so forth on top of this we did not take into account how many Cambodians can not read in khmer even people that are leaders in the community so their were people singing in the wrong area etc it did not get solved until the ministry actually read out the list which ended getting things back in order. Then we had these random ladies show up and we were like who are you and they are like o we are the victims and we are like wait what how did you find out about this because it was on advertised we had to hand out invitations anyways lucky for them we did in fact have enough money to pay them as well. Then the next outrageous thing happened so after these women who were basically the last people left there is this guy behind them and I joking around turn to Hannah and am like great this is the abuser but Maraka over hears us and thinks we are serous so doing the Khmer thing she just turns and ask him and he just openly admitted yes he did beat his wife but has changed his behavior once again on idea where this guy came from. At the end of the second day I just felt relived to know we did it and made it though working with the ministry like we did is not very typical in fact I don’t think anyone in peace corps Cambodia has worked on the level we did with them which as you have seen from other blogs has not been always easy. The chief of police ended coming up to talk to me after words he spoke a little eng and I was able to speak some Khmer so we had a pretty good conversation about the legal system and crime against the state like it should not be up to a victims family etc to releases an abuser from prison and he was telling me how he wants to work harder to help victim weather this is true not sure but he seemed like he ment it and he was telling me most times when he has learned about this stuff is been though foreign ngos and its not taught in Khmer so he only understood a little but this workshop being in Khmer helped him a lot and he wants to go back and share what he learned with other police and I thought that was really cool capacity building at work! We also had Cambodian news coverage so if I figure out how I can upload it to my blog I will try and I will add pictures soon promises until next time peace out from the other side of the world!!!!