After intensive training sessions that lasted for 3 days, the trainees were obliged to submit contributions about sexuality issues in Egypt .The trainees are free to choose whatever they like to tackle in the various issues of sexuality , how they want to contribute in whatever  module they want and for sure they were free to  keep their anonymity or not .

The follow up phase is coordinated by Fatma Emam and Ramy Raoof; we are offering the trainees technical and academic support.

We have received 4 posts from our trainees and looking forward to receive more in the upcoming weeks.

We are happy with what we have till now, because the outcome showed that the trainees were able to benefit from the training, that they managed to start 3 new blogs and they also managed to start questioning their own deeply rooted norms about the appropriate gender roles and other related issues

I do not want to be over optimistic, we still have more to do, however the beginnings are really promising

Nazra team is implementing phase one of the training, the training took place from 5 to 8 August 2010. The hot weather and upcoming Ramadan heated the perpetration of phase 1; we were doing our best to hold the first group of training before the holy month of Muslims.

The training was divided into three categories in the three squeezed days, day 1 was conducted by Bassam Mortda, and he offered the trainees insights about the citizen media, video blogging and how to create a visual post.

Day 2 the heated day, the theoretical day which was conducted by Mozn Hassan and Doaa Abdelaal, the trainers opened a disscusion about the sexuality theory and its manifestations in the Egyptian society. Nazra team was insisting on securing a safe place for the trainees to question the taboos and to lead a participatory non hierarchical debate where the trainees feel encouraged to suggest initiatives and discuss whatever they like freely.

Frankly, I was really excited that day that I found many noteworthy statements and arguments have been raised, so I tweeted live in this day.

And the last day was gain technical and was conducted by Ramy Raoof about social media and digital security

This a brief for the training of group 1, stay tuned to know more about the follow up pahse

I have many updates to write about, let's start with the call of applications and the selected applicants. The project started its phases with call for application for participation. We tried to examine the attitudes of the applicants in the application, we asked about certain issues related to sexuality to know whether the participants will be open to discuss these issues or not and we got different answers, some showed rigid attitude refusing to discuss these taboo, other said they can discuss it within the acceptable societal norms and others showed ability to discuss it freely.

The answers were clear enough to know who will be able to participate and who can not, we set this criterion because Exploring Taboos is not awareness raising training, it is advocacy and technical training and it needs participants with minimum degree of openness about the topic.

Many meetings took place, some between the team of the project to coordinate the tasks and other meetings were held with Rising Voices representative Eddie Avila , who visited Cairo to meet with the three grantees of Rising Voices. In this meeting Eddie informed us about the role of Rising Voices in empowering and supporting its grantees and Nazra team tried to share its ideas and inform Eddie about its plans.

Eddie met three applicants as well, that was important to hear different point of impression about the project, personally I was happy when I met the applicants, although the applications help to know about the applicants , but dialogue is a magical tool to know more about people, I know more about three of our ten participants and I am really happy about what I discovered

We announced the accepted applicants, and we are planning to hold the training this week, we are really in rush not only because we want everything perfect, but we want to settle everything before Ramadan.

Looking forward to start the training in Thursday and looking forward to fruitful discussion.

There many taboos in the Egyptian culture, we can sum them up in three main categories: religion, politics and sex. Protection zone created of traditional ideas are surrounding these taboos and because of that, they are not questionable .however there are attempts to break the silence and create societal dialogues about political issues, but still the religion and sex are guarded taboos that a minority dared to discuss.

Nazra team is interested to study the dynamics of gender politics, by this we mean how and why the gender relations and roles are shaped in certain ways and how does this affect the public and private sphere and how the state and society are interfering in the individual life through imposing regulations of conducts and behavior rules

  Nazra team is trying to dig in the societal norms and traditions for better understanding to the gender politics in the Egyptian society and through that digging we came across the sexuality taboo and how it is a crosscutting issue with many other subjects related to gender roles, traditions, norms and values.

We decided to break the societal silence not only by debating but by using alternative social media to create a momentum