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Negotiation Skills Training for Syrian Women

During one of our perception exercises to help the 'other' understand different sides to a story, Nesreen told us how she helped children overcome their barriers to communications. She was a school teacher in Damascus and five weeks after the revolution started, she wanted to find a creative way to show the children in her class that opinions can be confusing and that each person's interpretation of the revolution might be different, depending on where that person was standing. Nesreen was concerned that the media propaganda machine was filling the children's heads with 'bad things' and she wanted the children to express what was going on inside their heads.

In order to help them understand different opinions, she decided to use an exercise in her classroom using a large sheet of paper which she placed on the floor. In Arabic, the number 7 looks like a V and the number 8 is an upside-down version of the V (that is Λ). Nesreen drew a V on the paper and put two students standing on either side and asked them what they saw. Obviously, one of them saw 7 – V, and the other one saw 8 – Λ. These young students then knew what it meant when they were asked - Is this true or false? They were learning that the answer depended on where each of them was standing.

Nesreen then recalled the words of Hadeel who said he was dreaming of a freedom window where he could see hands outside stretching out to him and waiting to help him become whatever he wanted to be. Another child, Mouhammad, saw himself travelling on a train but people were not interested in what was happening to him even though he was trying to find a green forest. All of them had dreams, she said, like Walaa who saw a white patch in the sky and asked Nesreen "is this the port we will go through to get to a new civilisation in Syria". Tears  fell down her small thin face as she remembered their beautiful dreams.

In giving these troubled children permission to express their feelings, Nesreen was accused of using her classroom to spread propaganda and was fired from her job. Today she struggles to support her mother, her aunt and the rest of her family having lost the job that she loved so much.

She is doing whatever she can to build the democracy in which she so strongly believes. Our hope is that all the women who participated in our programme will build peace in Syria.

Istanbul WDN Training Event - Dec 2nd 2012

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