Last week, on Friday we conducted a training workshop for the Gender Club in the college. A few months ago we proposed that we would do a skills share activities between males and females. The aim of this training was to allow males and females to try activities that they would not normally take part in because of cultural reasons, and thereby understand that there are no activities that both sexes cannot do. Females are normally very reluctant to take part in any sports activities and males don’t do any household domestic tasks such as cooking.
Most of the students in our college come from rural areas and so have very traditional backgrounds where gender roles are very segregated. We had no idea how the students would respond to this type of activity, but we wanted to try it anyway. We decided that we would have ten females and ten males who would take part. The males would teach the females some sports skills and the females would teach the males how to cook something.
We have a fantastic Gender Club Coordinator who was very enthusiastic about our idea. But as with most things, we started planning it last minute - on Tuesday, which gave us two days to plan. So we managed to organise a car to take us shopping to buy the necessary materials on Thursday afternoon. We bought all the ingredients for the males to cook ‘chiro watt’ and we bought some footballs for the girls (we decided we’d borrow other sports equipment from the Sports Department). We bought cooking equipment from our houses like knives, chopping boards, pots and our electric cookers, I also went around a few of the houses in the compound asking if they would lend us some of these things for a morning as we didn’t have enough. (Even though I explained why we wanted the equipment they looked at me like ‘yep the ferenji is definitely weird’.)
Anyway we had twenty students on Friday morning. I introduced the session and then it was translated in Amharic by the Gender Club Coordinator. We first paired up the students – males with females, then started with the sports session. Some of the males were Physical Education major students so they were keen to share their skills. We had handballs, footballs and volleyballs and we swapped the different balls mid-session so they could try more than one sport. At first, the girls especially were reluctant to work with the boys, but after some encouragement, they worked very well together and had a lot of fun.
After an hour we moved to a classroom where we had the cookery session. We explained that we wanted the students to work in pairs and that the females were to guide the males rather than do the work themselves. The males did all the preparation, cooking, serving, and clearing and washing-up afterwards. Once the ‘chiro watt’ was made, we told the girls to sit down and the males to serve the food. (We bought ‘injera’ to be eaten with the ‘watt’.) Normally males do nothing in the kitchen and will even have a female bring water to them to wash their hands before and after meal. In our session the boys went round and washed the girls’ hands then served the food. It was great! The food was delicious, and even the Dean came to try the food which was great for the students.
The students worked extremely well together and enjoyed themselves. They gave very positive feedback and suggested that we do more activities such as this. A few even suggested that we should organise this same training session for the teacher. The training was a lot of hassle but worth it.
