Day #4-12/22 - Amman, Jordan

Early this morning, we drove to the Ahliyyah School for Girls in Amman, as I was to give a presentation to the 12^th graders on human trafficking, in response to an invite by Mrs. Haifa Najjar, the Superintendent of the School. It was a 45 minute session, with probably about a 1 hour Q&A session with the girls. They had many, great and thoughtful questions about trafficking, and how pornography creates a demand for it.  I was very impressed by the thoughtful questions. Although they were aware of trafficking, they did not know it occurred in Jordan, and had not seen videos and weren’t aware of the extent of the problem around the world. Their guess was about at a max maybe, 1 million slaves in the world when I asked them to guess the number of human trafficking slaves in the world today, nothing near 27 million was guessed.  They were astonished by this number. I also informed them that there were many groups in the U.S. who were fighting to bring clean and family friendly media to the world, and they even applauded loudly when they heard that the Playboy Club television show had been taken down. That should send a very loud message to NBC and Alta Loma Productions (arm of Playboy that worked with NBC to produce the show) and the pornography industry that your extreme junk is not wanted or welcomed in Jordan even among the youth. This thrilled me, as their response, and to be able to enable these girls with the knowledge and information in knowing this is key, and was my main objective, and would be up to them to take this information and do what they can to investigate and to be a change maker, which I encouraged them now to do.  Many, many questions were asked after the session, and several girls came up after the presentation to ask me even more questions and find out what they could do to get involved in the fight. This warmed my heart.  Many positive comments were received by the teachers and the head of the school afterward, and it seemed like it was very beneficial to them. We also discussed body image for girls, and what the media portrays continuously, making girls feel that they must be a certain type of body, in order to be accepted, and had a discussion around anorexia and bulimia, as several of them had struggled with this in the past.  The girls continued to follow us around the school as we met with other teachers, and school administrators, and we even had an impromptu discussion around Mylie Cyrus with the girls, as the girls seemed to love her, and we discussed who is and who isn’t a good role model for girls in American media. The girls are very influenced by these younger girls in Hollywood, they look up to them and will even defend them and their bad actions. This aspect did surprise me. It makes it even more important to have good, values-centered younger girls as rolemodels in Hollywood, because the whole world is watching them and what they do, and young girls worldwide imitate these teenagers in Hollywood and really would like to be like them and have their lives.

A very fulfilling day, and I hoped that the girls would always remember this day, and what they were told and shown about pornography and human trafficking and all the little girls in the world who live in torment on a daily basis as sex slaves, and I hoped that I instilled in them a sense that each and every one of them can change the world, and that just one can make a difference, to have a passion in life and to help the greater world with something that is important to them as a cause. I was very impressed by the thought that went into their questions. This was probably one of the main important reasons why I was in Amman, and the one event that would matter the most to influence these young girls, and to take away that their values are very important and not to forget their values because they might be unpopular or may not mesh with what Hollywood is telling them, and I included the quote by Ghandi which I’ve always felt sums it up best: Be the Change you want to see in the World….