In April 2008, in coordination with Khedija Arfaoui, the Association of Tunisian Women for Research and Development, we organized a 3-day workshop. There were 20 participants from civil society: NGOs, university professors and journalists.
Tunisia was particularly problematic because of State Security in spite of the fact that we took permission from the government to organize the workshop. They had prior knowledge about it and have taken our workshop agenda. Nevertheless, on the first day we had security officers preventing the organization of the workshop. We followed up with several telephone calls and showed the letter of approval in which case the officer asked us if he could attend the workshop with us. While we agreed, he was himself embarrassed because it was all female and he left. Following this one incident, the workshops continued as planned.
On our way leaving Tunisia, my camera was confiscated.
One of the main problems in the Tunisia workshops in particular was the variance in knowledge and disparity in levels of previous technology training in spite of technical assessment forms sent out to participants prior to the workshops. This was because it was a first time training workshop unlike the ones in Cairo and Morocco and constituted a learning curve for the organizer as well.
