New Kurdistan Magazine “For You”

by Cherrie Yu and Kavya Padmanabhan

Hanar Marouf, in Washington, DC for a few months, visted the WIFP office and told us about the exciting project that she has launched. Marouf describes the magazine as “the first English magazine for women in Kurdistan.” Marouf sees the need for a women’s magazine because she noticed the amount of magazines, especially in politics, that did not give a space for women to talk and  express themselves. 

Marouf describes one of the projects that she undertook with For You Magazine: “We sell the magazines and all the money goes to shelters, women’s shelters; it goes to refugee camps. We recently opened a library in one of the refugee camps for women. I was visiting them and I was like, ‘What do you want, girls?’ Most of them were crying and they said all they need[ed] was to finish their education. And I said, ‘I’m not the government to provide that, but I can promise you [that] I can open a small library, so you can read books there and continuously educate yourself. So we collected the money, and we had a cooking day for fundraising, and we bought three hundred books for them. And at the camp, we opened a place for the books. They were so excited.”

The publication is mainly written by youth. But, Marouf explained, the magazine goes to female members of parliament and women in business to interview them. She explains her reasoning, “So people understand they are normal people as well, especially the members of the parliament and women in politics. People are always afraid of them. We have a stereotype. We are trying to show them, no, these are normal women! And they have family, they have children, and they are not different from us.”

On the subject of female genital mutilation, Marouf made the following comment: “I tried for every issue or every other issue to have a real story on something. We published these stories in Kurdish because we want the Kurdish society to know more about how the girls were being treated in the villages.”

You can learn more about For You Magazine by going on to the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/For-You-Magazine/710734552276601