PRT Baghdad
Baghdad ePRT North Hosts Youth Activities for 5,000 Students
Three youth programs sponsored by Baghdad embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team North attracted 5,061 students, including roughly 2,000 girls, from August through October 2009. The Arab-Kurdish Youth Exchange, Summer Youth Program for Elementary and Middle School Students, and the Summer Youth Program for High School Students, all funded by the Department of State Quick Response Fund, offered athletic, artistic, inter-cultural exchange and project planning experience otherwise unavailable to youth from the rural areas of Taji and Tarmiyah North of Baghdad.
The youth programs highlight the security gains achieved in the province of Baghdad this past year. Last summer’s ePRT counterinsurgency focus limited summer youth programs in Taji and Tarmiyah to remunerating boys and young men for picking up trash and cleaning the streets. Capitalizing on increased safety and the addition of a Public Diplomacy Advisor, the ePRT worked with Iraqi education officials and three Iraqi NGOs to redesign the summer youth programs for 2009 to include girls, female instructors, and elementary age children in activities that enhance academic performance as well as provide an artistic, athletic and cultural outlet for students.
On the first day of camp the NGOs encountered resistance at several high schools to the inclusion of girls in activities such as music, drama, art and athletics, even though it was the education directors and local leaders who requested the changes. The NGOs respected the narrow list of approved activities including English, computer skills and poetry, yet quietly placed a laptop on the edge of the lunch room to play videos of Iraqi girls and boys attending camp at other schools in the Taji and Tarmiyah areas where girls were not restricted from the other activities.
Transfixed by images of other Iraqi students enjoying a wider range of activities, the girls began to demand the same program. In this instance, the will of distraught teenage girls defeated cultural restrictions. Soon, parents requested their daughters be allowed to have the same activities as girls and boys at other schools. By the third week of camp, the high school age girls benefitted from the same program as high school age boys and girls at the other schools in Taji and Tarmiyah. At the end of the two-month camp, the boys and girls turned the schools into art galleries and treated parents, teachers, local council members, and Department of State and USAID representatives to a two-hour variety show of poetry, music, and dramatic performances. The girls proudly displayed their newly acquired thespian skills while posing as sheikhs and police officers in humorous skits.
In an effort to extend programming to younger students, the summer camp for elementary and middle school students provided four weeks of art and athletic activities to boys and girls aged 7-12 in Taji and Tarmiyah. The camp concluded with art contests and athletic competitions. Once again the NGO experienced resistance to the inclusion of girls in sports, yet reached a compromise allowing girls to play table tennis. This was a small but important step forward and the girls embraced the sport.
The most ambitious ePRT youth program, the Arab-Kurdish Youth Exchange, brought together Sunni and Shiite Arab students from Taji and Tarmiyah with Kurdish and Christian students in Erbil during a sequence of four week-long exchanges promoting reconciliation through group collaboration on small projects. During each week-long exchange the students were divided into mixed groups to design small environmental projects, research and write a scope of work and a budget, and present their final project to the entire assembly. The exchange included cultural and community building activities, conflict management sessions, visits to Kurdish tourist sites and the Salaheddin University, and performances by student-led and Kurdish theatrical groups.