Come One, Come All to REDES!

Abby and I had our first successful REDES meeting on Saturday. It was our third attempt to get the ball rolling because it takes things longer to get started here, which is so frustrating at times! Just have to keep on truckin' and tryin' I try and remind myself. Our first two meetings only a few girls showed up, and late at that, because it is hard to get the word out and well, bathing takes precedence over all here. When the girls finally showed up on Saturday, some apologized for missing the first attempted meetings, stating their excuse was they had to take a bath, ha! They literally take 3 a day, no wonder why my host family tried to bathe me… So who comes to our REDES meetings? The meeting is for high school girls, technically. In the US, that would be a pretty easy group to define. It would be girls aged 14-18, all English-speaking, all literate, and probably all fairly free of serious responsibilities. Well, here is a little different. It is more difficult to classify what a 'typical high school girl' is as illustrated by our attendance at the first REDES meeting.

Abby and I have the REDES meetings at our house. We lay out straw mats for the girls to sit on our front porch and wait for them all to arrive. We had about 15 girls show up to the first meeting, and one might say it was a diverse bunch. Some girls rolled up in fashionable outfits looking very groomed. Two others carried their babies on their backs, and before the end of the meetings the babies had fallen asleep and were cat napping on our porch as we sung and danced and let the teenage mothers enjoy their kid role again. We invited a few girls from our neighborhood, and although many of the REDES girls come from poor families, these girls were a different level of poor. They came barefoot and although they were the same age as most of the other girls, they were far behind in school progress and one was actually unable to understand and Portuguese. This took Abby and I until the end of the meeting to grasp hold of, after we had asked her to stand and talk about things she had liked to do. When she was silent, we just assumed she was shy. It turns out that this child, Rita, is an orphan who had dropped out of school in fourth grade. We had a few 19-year-olds in the eighth grade although the majority of eighth-graders who came are just 15 just to give you an example of how varied the ages in the same grade were. I point out all these differences not to look down on the teenage moms or the 19-year-olds that are taking a longer time to complete their studies than is average or even Rita who does not know how to speak Portuguese. Rather I just want to highlight that in the developing world, neither school nor much of anything follows a routine schedule as it does in the developed world. These girls have to overcome a lot of challenges we do not in the developed world in order to finish their studies—among these challenges are poverty, gender inequality, being required to do a lot of housework from a young age, and not having much or any parental support. I was excited that each of these girls showed up to our REDES group and cannot wait to see their progress if they decide to stick with the group.

The goal of our REDES group is to empower young girls and teach them important life-skills. During our meetings we are going to not only discuss how to realize a bright future, but also we are doing a number of projects. Our major three projects this year are going to a dance and theatre group, a mini-basketball league, and a sewing project. The girls chose the projects and we are going to do HIV and AIDS-related performances to educate the community in the dance and theatre group. Our basketball league will emphasize the importance of exercise. The sewing project is going to be an income-generating project and the girls will sell the clothes and purses they make in the community. Here's to hoping REDES takes off in Chibuto! These girls have so much potential, and we are hoping REDES provides an outlet to develop it.