By Student Service Board Member Eliana Stamos ’14
Immediately following MAKERS Day, in order to keep the conversation about women as makers alive, the Student Service Board led Hewitt’s celebration of International Day of the Girl. This day, established by the UN Foundation campaign Girl Up, has a twofold mission of both education and celebration that informs people worldwide of the power and strength young women everywhere have. All of Girl Up’s efforts work toward a world where every young woman can be educated, healthy, and counted as equal to men. At Hewitt, International Day of the Girl was a great opportunity to widen our scope of discussion while still simply celebrating each other.
This year, IDOG’s theme of education called for 11 Days of Action; people all over the world participated in a series of small yet powerful actions to help adolescent girls in Guatemala, Liberia, Ethiopia, and Malawi supported by Girl Up. Here at Hewitt, we took part in a poster campaign, made announcements, Tweeted, filled out action cards to get girls on the agenda, and fundraised for Girl Up. Through a coins for change initiative, Board members collected $73.62 of spare change from Hewitt students and faculty, demonstrating the big value of a little action.
To conclude the celebration of IDOG, the Service Board showed a chapter of the 10×10 documentary, Girl Rising, which “uses the power of storytelling and the leverage of strategic partnerships to deliver a simple, critical truth: educate girls and you will change the world.” Students watched the story of Suma, a young girl born into a poor Nepalese family, who had to travel to different homes and work as a “kamlari,”essentially a slave. Although watching this chapter at times was difficult, its resolution was both beautiful and inspiring: Suma and her community of girls in parallel situations were able to break free from the vicious cycle they were born into by speaking up.
While this year’s IDOG is technically over, our celebration galvanized values and ideas that will stick in students’ heads and compel them to evaluate their own situations as girls. As Lily Landau ’14 said, “Gender equality should be a given, since women and men, (or whatever you choose to identify as), are all cut from the same cloth; we are all human. No person should be thought of as superior to another person solely based upon race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, or any other category that is beyond one’s control.” Insights like these are a testament to the impact events like IDOG and MAKERS Day have already had.
