Bringing Change to Our Community: Reflections on International Day of the Girl

I was part of organizing and delivering an assembly for International Day of the Girl. This experience was truly remarkable. It gave me satisfaction to watch my peers in the audience as they made a connection to us as presenters as well as to the videos we played about girls’ education across the world.

My role in the assembly was to read a piece from my essay “Confusion,” which discusses intersectionality within my life and in connection to feminism. I had expected that sharing a personal essay with an audience of peers would make it difficult for them to relate my story to the assembly, but I left the stage with a strong feeling of connection.

I could tell that the audience felt my pain when I talked about delicate moments, such as my grandmother exclaiming, “Thank God she is white!” when she first saw me after I was born. Furthermore, I strongly believe that my role, and that of everyone else in the class who read her intersectional essay, was especially important to getting our message across that girls today are still mistreated, even in America.

This truth is something that underlies our society’s basic conventions. I believe the fact that these essays were so personal made them have a bigger impact, and helped the audience realize that these issues affect all of our lives.

Watching my peers in the assembly was certainly what made me understand the importance of what we were doing. When we screened the Girl Effect video, the expressions of my peers in the audience were both mad and shocked, especially when they saw the parts about how girls around the world might be married and pregnant by 14. If they survive childbirth, in order to provide for their families, they might have to sell their bodies and be exposed to diseases such as HIV.

However, I noticed that the audience members also became hopeful when they learned that there is a way out: instead of forcing girls to live that horrible truth, we can give them an education.

I could see my own reaction within my peers’ expressions, and it made me feel as if what we were doing by organizing the assembly was truly important. It made me as if people were getting it, as if they were not simply feeling pity for me, my peers, and the girls in the videos, but were instead supportive of us and of the issue as a whole.

However, when my classmate Adam mentioned that “40% of India’s children aged six to eighteen do not go to school,” the solution of education offered by the Girl Effect video became less obvious. Privileged people tend not to think about their privilege; they often assume that opportunities such as going to school are naturally handed to everybody.

Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz, an Arab-Jewish feminist says in her essay “Organizing 101” in the book Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism writes: “We live in a white supremacist culture that banks on dichotomous thinking to keep people divided and fragmented within themselves.” Her point is important because it suggests that society is committed to divisions between certain groups. As a result, people are inclined to assume that what they have is available to everyone else, in turn leading others without these privileges to feel that they do not belong. Indeed, we often to look upon other communities as lower than we are, as lesser. Here is when the human connection stops and the hierarchy of oppression begins.

And yet, it was clear that when Adam’s facts were absorbed by the listeners, they began to develop deep feelings about the issue. That is why being part of the IDG assembly made me feel like part of a larger celebration across our school and the world; it made me feel as if the day was truly important and something to remember.

It felt as if we – girls and boys, were both part of and not part of the feminism class – as well as the girls at our partner school, Shri Shikshayatan in Kolkata, India, were together with everyone else in the world. We were all celebrating one thing, united, marking the importance of girls and the magnitude of girls’ issues.

During the assembly itself and the time spent organizing it, I was hoping most to make an impact, an impact strong enough to lead people to take action for girls’ rights. As Somaly Mam, a Cambodian woman who was forced into prostitution, says in the documentary Half the Sky: “We can all make a change, we can all just do one thing, [we just need to] start from what our heart wants.”

She is indeed the best example of this. After being freed from the brothel she was forced into, she opened the Somaly Mam Foundation to help children who have been forced into sex slavery as she was. She rescues girls, rehabilitates them, and reintegrates them into the world as strong, independent, Cambodian women.  Her foundation is based on her motto, “Envisioning a world where women and children are safe from slavery.”

Now, after having presented the assembly, I feel as if we accomplished exactly that. We did something, and even though it was just within our community, my hope is that it will lead others to do become involved in the injustice perpetrated against girls all over the world.

International Day of the Girl is once a year, but that does not change the fact that girls are in need for their basic human rights every day. As Somaly Mam would say, “we can all do something,” small or big, and it will make a change.