Women like us

When I first started preparing for the activity with migrant women, I had no expectations other than to fulfill the classic goals of the workshop, to become aware, to show, to talk, and finally to conclude the topic. This time the goals were to be the same, with a focus on comparing East and West, cultural differences, and a focus on women’s human rights. Working with a group of women, from a part of the world practically unknown to me, apart from what I read and a few meetings with women who worked in similar jobs as me, was a great challenge for me. Of course, when we work with people in business, we already have some similarities, field of work, obligations, channels, and language of communication. But that doesn’t mean we know their culture, social settings, context.

I started planning, set goals, prepared materials, and came \"practically\", ready for the realization of the workshop. At the very beginning, when the participants entered, we set up refreshments, coffee, and tea, to make the atmosphere more relaxed. The group gathered. Sixteen women, each beautiful in her own way, neat, nurtured, smiling, cheerful, polite, talkative. In the beginning, each of the women says her name and the word that marks her at a given moment. I hear fatigue, fear, uncertainty, \"game\", faith in Allah, happiness, love, fatigue, fatigue, fatigue. I realize that I am talking to women who have traveled several thousand kilometers and now sit with me in this place, they have crossed several states, they have crossed them mostly on foot. With their feet. With kids. Some of the children were born during that thousands of kilometers long journey. In inadequate spaces, in fields, in centers, without adequate medical care, without hygienic conditions. 

What is the West for them, I ask. The West is freedom. Namely, almost all of them have completed some form of education, obtained diplomas, worked in various jobs, teacher, swimming coach, economist, the series goes on. I remain interested in their motives for going to West. \"Yes, I finished high school,\" says one of them. “My parents let me finish school, and then they married me to a man I knew, I heard something about him. But luckily we fell in love. He supported me to work. I worked as a language teacher. And then the violence started, increasing bans on women, on our movement. And then armed conflicts. That was more than 13 years ago. We left everything and headed for a better life. We are currently in the \"game\". We headed west. We have a family there. I can't wait to meet them. God willing, we will all be together. ”

I realize, in an instant, that these women, one small group I have met, who are going for a better life, are educated, strong, too strong for my notion. They are fleeing from violence, from the system, from hard patriarchies, from unrest, for a better tomorrow. They were marginalized in their countries because they are women. Now they are marginalized again because they are migrant women. Which no one sees or notices as they are, strong, educated, cheerful, able to think and worry, solve problems, women. I imagine myself and the women around me. 

We rarely hear about migrant women. Even if we are not in some way familiar with the problem of migration itself, we imagine that they do not exist. Somehow the prevailing opinion is that the women stayed in the east until the men went west so they might somehow come later to be together. Migrant women exist. There they are, near us. They live and care. They are the same as us, and we are women from the \"almost\" West. We are women from the Balkans. But in my opinion, they are much stronger. More persistent. We hear a lot about the migrant situation. But we rarely hear of any approach to the migrant crisis in terms of protecting migrant women. Not only protection but also support, friendship, empathy. We have at our disposal relevant research that talks about global migrations of women in the last forty years. As early as 1960, women made up almost 47 out of every 100 migrants living outside their countries of birth. Since then, the share of women among all international migrants has been growing steadily, reaching 48% in 1990 and almost 49% in 2000[1]. According to UN data, women make up slightly less than half of the total number of migrants globally, in 2019 about 130 million or 47.9%[2].

Migrant women need to get another approach. The first step can be very simple. Give a little time, attention, empathy, friendship. Everything that we, women, who are not migrants need. Have we, as a society, also failed in terms of compassion for each other?

Let's not forget that somewhere in some (un) organized space live groups of women with their families, who run away from everything that a normal person runs away from, looking for a better tomorrow for themselves and their loved ones. Let's give them a little attention, a little of our time. They are here. Let’s give them a little attention to make them visible.

[1]  The Global Dimensions of Female Migration, Hania Zlotnik, 2003.

[2] UN DESA, 2019