InterPlay with Ruth Schowalter

Happy First Birthday to Sustaining International Sisters  & Happy 30th Anniversary to InterPlay! “There is a ‘we’ in me,” writes Cynthia Winton-Henry, co-founder of InterPlay.* That is, “the group” is within each one of us. However, what happens to the “we” when the individual is a refugee, a person seeking asylum, or an international visiting the United States and is feeling like a fish out of water?  Here in Atlanta, our InterPlay community is offering a way for individual international and American women to create a new sense of “groupness,” a new “we” in their “me.” We have created Sustaining International Sisters (SIS), a 3-hour monthly “play and potluck” so that women can begin to weave themselves into a new communal fabric. Each month, we are figuratively and literally stepping across cultural boundaries through movement, storytelling, using our voices in fun and surprising ways and sharing an international lunch together. The InterPlay tools an...

Connecting, Inspiring & Supporting Women from Around the World through Play & Meal Sharing A woman from Egypt, head covered in a hijab, bursts into a big smile as she enters the Little Five Points (L5P) Community Center Café in Atlanta, Georgia, for a morning of InterPlay and meal sharing. She sees a roomful of women, many wearing hijabs – and until this moment – she has felt isolated in this metropolitan city of five million from women like her. Although these other women in hijabs are Turkish, there is a visible commonality signaled by the scarves covering their heads. Likewise, a woman from Mexico, softens as she steps into the room filled with international women – she is not the “different one” as the only “foreigner” present.  Sharing Stories Across Turkish & Egyptian Cultures Over the next 30 minutes, close to thirty women arrive. They are asylum seekers, American citizens, internationals working or studying abroad. They differ in age, nationa...