WOMAN CREATES GROUP TO ENGAGE WOMEN IN NIGERIAN DIASPORA

Lola Omolola’s Female IN Facebook Group is meant to be a safe space for women from the Nigerian Diaspora to share their experiences with other women and create a sense of community and kindness. Photo provided by Lola Omolola
Lola Omolola’s Female IN Facebook Group is meant to be a safe space for women from the Nigerian Diaspora to share their experiences with other women and create a sense of community and kindness. Photo provided by Lola Omolola

 Woman creates group to engage women in Nigerian Diaspora

BY TIA CAROL JONES
    Lola Omolola decided to create a Facebook group for women in the Nigerian Diaspora after young girls were kidnapped by armed guards in Chibok, Nigeria in 2015.
     She said she realized something every time she watched the story on the news - that there was nothing being mentioned about the girls who were at the center of the event. “Not even the name of a single one of the girls was mentioned. I just couldn’t find anyone putting any character, placing a face,
placing a story, of even one of close to 300 girls,” she said. “In a bigger story about terrorism, the girls had become a footnote. It was like they didn’t exist as humans, there was no life to them.”
     Omolola said it was easy for people to be upset the young women and girls were taken and to just forget about it. She said it directly led her to create the group, Female IN. She said she wanted to find women who felt what she was
feeling, that something was not right.
     Omolola said she went to Facebook, because everybody is on the social media platform. She said she was not expecting it to grow as much as it has grown in the last five years. It started out as a secret group, where you had to be a member to participate. She said, she added women who were passionate about issues related to women in Nigeria and the Diaspora.
     “I wanted to only find women who were close to me and see if they could add other women who were close to them,” she said. Omolola added that she had no expectation that the group would ever grow beyond including more than 1,000 members. “If we had only gotten 1,000 women in the group, I would’ve felt like I was extremely successful,” she said.
“That would have been 1,000 women who were haunted by the same thing I was haunted by because those girls could’ve been my daughters. Those girls could’ve been me, I was born in Lagos, Nigeria.”
     Omolola said she wasn’t expecting for the group to resonate with so many other women in the past five years, but the group has grown to more than 1.8 million members in more than 100 countries around the world. And, those women would have a story to tell, so the Female IN group provided a safe space for these women to tell their stories, she said.
     “It was the beginning of a movement where a lot of women were coming together to establish their existence in the world. If the news or new media or anyone was not telling our story, it was because we were not telling our own stories,” she said,
adding, that it was how they were raised to not tell their stories.
     “From a very young age, whenever a girl shows any sign of self-awareness – you want to talk, you have an opinion about something -- someone pinches and shushes you.”
      Omolola said she is not the only one creating a safe space for the women. She said it is something they are all doing together in the community. She said it is the only place a
lot of them have had, in their entire lives, where someone will listen and someone will care.
     The women in the Female IN are called FINsters and they have a connection. And, there are FIN connect events that take place around the world. Omolola said there is a strong
sense of connection, a strong sense of social consciousness.
     Omolola said she had an understanding
that she had to create the right atmosphere and the right conditions for women to speak up. She said she created a culture of kindness, that she described as a “wave of kindness.” She said members notice it right away. There are also rules, paramount above them is: do not judge. And,
there is a clarity of purpose. Omolola has to remind the members why the community was created. She said she
is constantly refining the message.
     “I’m always like, ‘hey guys, this is why we created this community because we don’t have anywhere to tell our stories and when we don’t tell our stories, it’s like we don’t exist.
And, look what happened to our sisters who got abducted’ … nobody was talking about them, even in global news about their lives,” she said. “We want to be better. We want to tell our stories, we want to be able to shape the world, to shape our families with our experiences.”
      Omolola said everyone who is able to, should create a community that has compassion and kindness at the center of it. She said she is very compassionate about community building, as it is our saving grace.

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