Geekette and Proud

As many of us took these few last days of 2015 as a break to get some fresh air and relax, some others prepared themselves to cross path of a warrior, in other words, the “Parcours Du Combattant”.

On December 26th, year 2015, at In-Tuition school in Algiers, was held the first edition of Dz GeekGirls Day, an event to gather all the special girls out there who have the same love for gaming, watching japanese cartoons, watching tv series, reading sagas, without having the cloud of judgements hanging above their heads, ready to storm at every moment, on that day, the Geek Girl community gathered to share one love, one goal, one passion : Geeking.

The event was full of activites : workshop about problems and solutions for the geek girl community ( divided in four teams by colors ), a gaming tournament, cosplay performances, witch box and even karaoke, however , all of these lovely things wouldn’t have taken place without an organization behind , so let me draw you the little fragments to make all the puzzle clear :

The organizing team is mostly from Costantine( and a few from Algiers), very young and energetic girls, with no much of sponsors, except the school, and no loaded personal bank accounts, yet they made it, they gathered the equipement for the gaming, they printed themed posters for the decorations, they made communication medias ( pins, videos, even posters of the event…), they settled everything for the unique comfort of the fans, they went through all the struggles and the difficulties, they’ve put sweat and soul into it and they made it, because, above all, they believed in each other.

I can tell you, as a participant, that I never felt acceptance in an event until that day, the atmosphere of the event was incredibly friendly, fluffy, lovely and simply wonderful, and i found that one sentence getting repeated by every geekette : “ i thought  I would end up in my corner, all alone, because usually, the others don’t accept what I am, but today is different, today, we’re all embracing the geek inside of us, we’re breaking the wall between us.” , and here are some feed backs i randomly picked from the facebook group

Through the workshop, we understood that one the major problem to our community is the external judgments, starting from our personal circles, our friends, family, usually tell us to grow up, to wash the dishes and do laundry instead of playing with an Xbox or watching OnePiece, and we have come to understand that we should speak up about what we do, we should invite the community to check what we do, to share a moment into our passion.

Another thing was that, we see that there aren’t enough iniciatives in such domains, we don’t have gaming communities in Algeria, and the few gamers we have are usually split up, there’s also a very few events, and again, the community finds a way to criticize the one or two events we have, the first thing to know is that, there are events, maybe not next door, but the organizing team of GeekGirl Day is proof that sometimes, brushing off the dust and stepping out comfort can open an unlimited range of possibilities.

I learnt from the geek girls day, that in order to get accepted in a community, we first need to accept ourselves, and second, we need to make our voices audible for our society, as you read this, I’m proud to tell you I Am a Geekette, and as the pink team said : “ Keep talking, I will keep Geeking” .

By Sabrine Bouras