International Women’s Day Observed

 The International Women’s Day Celebration program for 8th march 2014 was planned in a way that maximum numbers of Gun widows, women violent victims, women survival and women who are in isolation could attend and participate in the celebration program
 The participants of the International Women’s Day celebration are Women promoters form different villages covered by RWUS, WinG promoters, Gun widows, violent victims, and members of WinG networking partner in Churachandpur district.
 Inmates from Pricilla Home not only attend the program like the other year, this year they could entertain the participants by preforming a short play (drama).
The program was hosted by Mrs. Lalnunnem Faiheng, she start the day program with a word of prayer and she quoted out a verse from the Bible expressing her thoughts that Women are created by God with a special purpose, special idea and a special structure to take good care of their family and husband in turn should love and affectionate their wives knowing that they are the ones God sent them as a gift from heaven. Women are compared with a brittle pot in Bible because they are bound to be given special care. Ms Nissi conveys welcome speech and Keynote addresses. She speaks about the history of how IWD was celebrated all over the world every year, she also said that Inspiring Change the 2014 theme for our international women’s day encourages advocacy for women’s advancement everywhere in every way. It calls for challenging the status quo for women’s equality, vigilance and watchfulness inspiring positive change. The vast array of communication channels, supportive spokespeople, equality research, campaigns and community responsibility initiatives means everyone can be an advocate inspiring change for women’s advancement.
Speech from Darthangmawi: She was extremely happy and excited to be a part of the International Women’s day celebration and was truly speechless to see many Youths, young widows and women from different community who come together to celebrate the special occasion. She thanks the organization and the working partners of RWUS who come up with the thought of organizing such a program for women.
She shared that is high time that we accept change in our Family, Society, Church as well as political organization. We are more backward comparing to the other parts of the world, the reason behind is that women in Northeast India feel really difficult to accept change. There can be two simple definition for change; one reason ‘Change for a good purpose and the other change for a bad purpose’. Today by inspiring change we mean change for a good reason.
Women have many opportunities to join hands together to make a change even though it looks difficult, at least we should try our best to make our society gender equity where women feel free to raise their voice for the betterment of the society. Many laws and amendments are made for empowering and upliftment of women in India and even at the international level but the implementation level at ground level is poor, we can see many laws and amendments even in the Bible it’s the work of the Christians to follow them. In the Bible we see many women who are agent of change, taking an example of Tirza and her sisters who claim for their own property rights after their father’s death. After fighting for their rights new laws was made like ‘A family without a son to inherit their father’s property should transfer their rights to their daughter not to their paternal uncle’s. .’
She suggested certain steps to be followed to bring out change for a better purpose for inspiring change-
1. Making space for the vulnerable women to come up and stand up for their rights
2. Should have a generous heart giving priority to others
3. To uplift the poor and assist them with whatever resources we have in us
4. To mold the younger generation not to have inferiority complex as they have more access to the new technologies and have more mobility.
5. Should be self determined, straight forward and have patience
6. Have a specific vision, mission, objective and a clear thoughts how to move forward
7. Should be self sustain instead of depending on others
Ms Vanlalkung shared that she feels happy to be a part of the IWD celebration and thank RWUS for inviting her and remembering her. She was hardly invited by any NGO or any people for such an occasion after her husband was killed by an insurgent group. She was humiliated and was isolated by the villagers, but she strive forward to her best to look after her family and with the help of God she could now stood up in front of others and make speech. The whole house was amused by her speech, how could women be so humiliated after their husband passed away?
Ms JL Sawmi shared that we should be proud of our special day (IWD) and we all need to joint hands accept change and inspired each other’s to bring positive change in the family, Society and so on.
Mary Beth Sanate Secretary, RWUS shared that we should not only focus on those leaders who are great agent of change but we should also keep in mind and focus on the women who make and contribute for a change. We need to know what we have done at our own level to bring and inspire change and also we all can be a change agent at our own level.