Protect Them B4 Abuse Begins: Students ages 5-17

We need to make friends with failure because it is a part of life. We do not need to necessarily embrace it or accept it, but it is just a part of life. What we do with failure is a completely different thing: will it crush me and make me crumble? Or will it make me more resilient and stronger? Failure in my friend, it is my opportunity. Failure has been a part of my journey  with Not Guilty. As other non profits in Egypt call me, I am the rookie. I started my non profit at age 52 after being a medical doctor for 20 years and a trainer  and counselor for 10. Yet the passion for abolishing sexual abuse made me forget about my age.
Since 2009 when we started Not Guilty as just a group of friends that want to change our society, to 2012 when it became an official non profit, things were going pretty well in spite of opposition due to the sensitivity of the subject we tackle in a culture that clandestinely accepts sexual abuse.
Being a pediatrician, I believe that prevention is better than cure, so after feeling our way and getting more acquainted with the needs of our society, I started designing an anti sexual abuse school curriculum in the hope that we will implement it in all government schools in Egypt raising a generation that will refuse abuse, respect boundaries and decrease the  mushrooming of abusers.
This is when real opposition began, and from whom? From the ministry of education itself. The minister of education signed an approval on January 11, 2015 for Not Guilty to train 32 government schools within one year. We were elated. But then came one failure after another, for the second row at the ministry were adamant to prevent us from entering government schools.  They need to do a security check on anyone that goes into schools, and since non of us has any political affiliation or any security issues we were sure we will have no problem, but after six months we were refused by security from entering schools, so much so that they banned us from getting into any school by sending a letter to all schools in Egypt. The ministry did not tell us the real reason; they just said that we needed to change the non profit papers to read training of students instead of training the public.  We started on the tedious task of changing the papers. It took us four months during which we could not work or do any trainings. Failure loomed in the horizon, we were shunned by schools and treated like scum.
During that time, our funding went down to almost nil and we started seriously thinking of closing down. In fact 3 out of the five employees found other jobs and we  informed the renter that we will no longer be renting starting beginning of 2016.
In January 2016 a friend of mine who was working as a projects manager at Nestle Water, together with another lady who is a designer said they were willing to volunteer for six months to try to bring the organization back on its feet.
Feeling like a failure, yet being resilient by nature, we started putting other plans for fund raising and for reaching the students in other ways other than going into their schools. Why not take the students out of the schools for fun days? Why not do bonding days for students and parents? Why not work with private and international schools? Why not work with nurseries? We started putting a strategy and new ideas immerged, including designing a mobile app for kids; designing game stations; doing cartoons, approaching the corporate world and putting our heads together. During that time and because work  and ideas started flowing, and work started coming in with schools asking for more trainings, the last two employees could not handle that work was coming in: they had gotten used to laziness. In fact, these two started procrastinating so much that they started reusing to tell us about opportunities that came our way. They had to be let go. We started with a whole new team with all what this brings of fear of failure; fear that the new team do not know anything of the strategies of the work.
In April 2016 there was a big scandal in an international school of a guard molesting four six year old boys. The new minister of education called me and made a big show on the media that e wants to implement my program in all schools. After the media stopped talking about the matter, the ministry stopped the project again in its tracks. I went on public TV and spoke abut what was happening, and one week later I got a phone call from the consultant to President el Sissi, the Egyptian president. I went to the presidential palace and met him and told him all that is happening. I am hoping to meet the President and get his approval for this program to be implemented in all government schools. In the mean time, I will keep working with plan B
In 2016 we have had a lot of new partnerships with orange: the biggest cell phone company in Egypt; with Ashoka going into 10 government schools under their name and training 300 students and 40 teachers. It doesn't really matter whose name appears, and whose logo is on the banner as long as we do what we believe in. Then we started into a new venture that no one dared before and that is working with the handicapped. We partnered with Hope Village in Alexandria, and trained 35 social workers working with handicapped children. Now we are raising funds to make our curriculum handicap friendly.  We are launching our anti sexual abuse app next October.
If you will fall, you might as well fall forward. Keep the faith; persevere, never give up. God will never waste a failure, a hurt or an experience but will always use it for your own benefit and for others… if you let Him.

Dr. Laila Risgallah PhD
Ashoka Fellow
Not Guilty Founder and President