To meet and to ask

Today we walked around the Medina with our surveys and were positively surprised about how many people were willing to give time for discussion. Thank you for all those who participated! Also the trust we had in those conversations was something which made us feel good. In the beginning when we started with the surveys it was hard to know how taboos may affect to the answers we got. Now we are starting to have something on which to base our overview, without local knowledge it would still be hard. 

The opinions of the society live deep in the Tunisian culture. While doing the surveys face-to-face, yes/no questions are not the ones which matter at that moment. The most interesting answers come after those ones; the glimpses to their opinions after sharing the general situation, they made me listen carefully even when the talk is happening in Arabic. In those moments you just want to follow all the face expressions, and little signs which could give some information. The translation rarely reaches those but it’s about the power of meeting.

For me a stopping moment was when the discussion led us to a point when the other party was surprised that having children outside of marriage is legal somewhere. Also meeting people who personally know a victim of violence and hearing about the challenges women can face when remarrying because they will be the ones judged for the divorce, negative colored feelings about the future after the revolution, they make you think. And they make you want to continue every day. For sure we are here for a reason.

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