You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I have been honored to be a group facilitator in the Writing for Friendship program serving young women from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and fourteen other nationalities represented among the students attending the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh. The university's mission is to serve women whose higher education has been severely restricted in their native countries. In groups of five or six, we gather together for ninety minutes over Zoom to write once a week for six weeks. We breathe in the relative calm of our collective pause, and we share moments of beauty or experiences of kindness we observed over the previous week. And then I invite them to write, to give words to their strengths, their stories, their dreams. After the writing portion, we listen to each other's writings “as if listening to a poem,” and we share what resonated or what we appreciated in each group member's unpolished yet remarkably poetic writing that we've just heard.
It is extraordinary to feel their joy and sense of discovery as they experience how writing can be therapeutic, can forge connective tissue among previous strangers, and can encourage and allow them to hear themselves.
“I'm so happy I found a chance to go to myself and search.”
I have the honor of witnessing firsthand how moving it is for them to hear how their own reflective writing touches others in the group, builds connections and courage, and helps to reduce the sense of isolation that often comes from being far from family and culture.
“Someone to hear us, from deep heart.”
There is an atmosphere of discovery as soon as I share a visual image or poem and invite the young women to share their thoughts and feelings in response. We all benefit from their varied perspectives as we follow the guideline that there are “