On April 29-30 the representatives of the NGO WFD Arpine Nikolyan and Armine Shiroyan had an exchange visit to Cultural Humanitarian “Fund Sukhumi” in Kutaisi.
The goal of the visit was to exchange experience with the representatives of Cultural Humanitarian Fund Sukhumi on 2 main directions of activities: community development and forum theatre.
The day started with a meeting with Fund Sukhumi staff members. The guests, NGO WFD, and the visit agenda were presented to the meeting participants.
Then a trip to the Women’s Support Center in Khoni was organized. The participants of the meeting in Khoni were 6 women, all of them being IDP. The Cultural Humanitarian Fund Sukhumi organizes trainings, workshops and meetings with the Women’s Support Center beneficiaries. The participants of the meeting told us about their problems and ways of trying to find solutions to them. The main issues they are facing in everyday life are unemployment, violence / both family and gender/, bullying as well as necessity to carry out advocacy and lobbying to the local and national authorities with a goal to find solutions.
The women were also interested in the work being done by NGO WFD in the community development direction, and we gladly shared our experience with them. They were very impressed by the small social projects designed and implemented by the rural community members of Armenia through provision of small grants in frames of the projects funded by BfdW.
In the afternoon we enjoyed the performances by the Forum Theatre group. We were impressed by the quality of the artistic performance of the group members, which is achieved in the result of the work headed by the professional scriptwriter, who is responsible for writing the scripts and organization of rehearsals. All the performances were done in Georgian, but they were so impressive and professional that the language was not an obstacle for understanding them.
We were also presented the performance of the “Shadow Theatre”. It is a new technique for us, and it is used by Fund Sukhumi Forum Theatre group to have performances in the kindergartens and primary schools.
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