Mighty Fingers- Facing Change
http://www.mightyfingersfacingchange.com/ is a two-part experiential art
project designed to engage and inspire adolescent girls worldwide. Starting
November 11th, 2012, a group of women, including me, will be
traveling to fifteen to twenty locations around the world to create a
collaborative piece of art with adolescent girls in effort to empower and unify
them (maybe insert photo of Mighty Fingers here?). As we travel around the
world during the next year, I will be writing about female friendships in
different cultures around the world from a teenage girl perspective.
In preparation for the project
launch on November 6th I met with a seventeen-year-old girl from Afghanistan who is studying in the United States. We discussed everything; life and death,
family and friends, war and peace. In regard to friendships I asked her these
questions:
·
What do you and your
friends like to do for fun?
·
How do you choose who to
be friends with?
·
When girls have
relationship problems/friendship difficulties/drama in your country, what is it
most often about?
After
hearing her answers I thought about how drastically different they would from
the average American girl, so I asked the same questions to a sixteen-year-old
girl from New Jersey.
When the girl from Afghanistan was asked: “What do you and your
friends like to do for fun?” she explained that there isn’t much socialization
outside the family. Girls get sold off to a man once they go through puberty
and they then become his property.
“When we are little we do normal
things like swing and chase each other, but once girls reach puberty they don’t
spend much time together.” Sometimes families will have parties and once
everyone is gathered the girls and the boys separate and girls make
conversation with each other until the party is over. Girls do not watch movies
because it is uncomfortable or embarrassing to see women from other cultures
who act so differently than they do.”
When I asked a teenaged girl from
New Jersey what she does with her friends for fun she said: “We do whatever. We
watch movies, walk around town, go get coffee.”
The question: “How do you choose who to be friends with?” was answered
very differently by both girls as well. In Afghanistan,
oftentimes girls do not choose their friends and will spend time with
close families or relatives at parties but they do not really develop extremely
close relationships outside of the family. “For many teenage girls in Afghanistan something to be proud of would be how rich
your husband is,” the young woman I interviewed said.
Unlike Afghanistan,
choosing new friends in the United States is very common among teenage girls.
“Friends come and go, they don’t
always last too long so deciding to be friends with someone is not a huge deal,”
the 16 year old girl from New Jersey explained. “I’ll be friends with anybody
that I can relate to or has a good personality.”
In Afghanistan, girls do not have many girl-to-girl relationship
problems because they are usually inside, with their husbands. Most
relationship problems are between the husband and wife, and they are kept
inside the family because telling people would be disrespectful to the family.
When girls and women are being mistreated by their husbands and they try to
seek help, people often find out about it and the problem gets worse.
If the girls or
women are caught trying to get away from their husbands they are publically
stoned to death. According to my source from Afghanistan,
this system ends up causing many girls to choose suicide over living
with the brutality in their marriage.
“It is common for
girls to cover themselves in petrol and light themselves on fire,” she
explained.
In the United States, most fights
or drama between girls are about boys.
“It’s always about a boy,” my
interviewee stated. “If one girl wants a boy and another girl does too they can
never be friends.” Girls are also much more vocal about their difficulties In
the United Sates, “There are never any secrets, things always gets out and it
always causes a lot of drama.” she said.
Girls in the United States are
vocal because they have the freedom to be. This was a freedom that was hard
earned by the women who came before us. There are brave girls in Afghanistan fighting for these freedoms right now but it has to
be done in a much more secretive manner to avoid death threats and persecution.
The entire conversation was incredibly interesting and it made me look at my
own life in a new light. It made me realize how lucky most girls from the
United States are to be able to choose their own friends, their own husbands,
and their own path in life.
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