close
Friday March 29, 2024

Women lauded for overcoming cultural barriers

By Our Correspondent
March 16, 2018

Lahore: Kaarvan Crafts Foundation, working for the economic empowerment of the women living in remote villages of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, held a commemorative workshop at its Gujranwala Training Centre in connection with International Women’s Day.

The aim of the workshop was to celebrate the resilience of the Kaarvan’s trainees in overcoming personal/ structural/cultural barriers in their life, and to raise self-awareness on gender and its impact/implications of cultural norms.

The interactive activities of card game, renaming objects and measuring silence highlighted the paradoxical nature of gender and how it both presents opportunities and limitations to personal growth at the same time.

Themes of equality, culture, human rights, dignity and integrity from a gendere perspective were brought to the forefront through Kaarvan’s creation of empathy card game. Female trainees responded to the open-ended question prompts. One trainee beautifully articulated, "Woman is the embodiment of love, whether she is a mother or sister.

She takes care of everyone from her younger brother to guests. This brings to the front that there exist multiple truths — reality is contingent on our individual experiences. There is a tendency to generalise based on personal experiences."

From the card game, facilitators transitioned to renaming object activity where trainees were asked to imagine a rolled up paper as something else. The idea was to showcase our powers to rename, to innovate and think outside of the box.

In the last activity, the trainees were asked to study the photographs hung around their classroom and think about their level of speech or participation in the images. Through this interactive workshop, Kaarvan has began a discourse on gender, power and privilege with its trainees in hopes that it empowers them to think and decide.