I get by with a little help from my friends.

When I ventured out to travel through Europe in 2007 my mother told me she was uncomfortable with me going to Turkey because she did not think it was safe. I went anyway, of course, and it was one of the most beautiful and cultural places I ended up visiting.

Everything in Turkey is “friend price” or “special for my friend.” I walked through the streets eating kebabs and kumpur, sorting through carpets and turning down invitation after invitation from shop owners to come sit and have a cup of tea, “free for you my friend.”

One night while we were there a friend I made at the hostel took me and some other friends to his favourite hookah bar to experience hookah at its finest. The menu had a variety of flavoured tobacco, but we decided on a combination of lemon and mint. Divine.

Unfortunately for my good-natured trust of my fellow man it was in this hookah bar where my mother’s premonition of unsafe experiences came true.

When I got up to go to the washroom a man followed me, and upon entering the single stall room made sexual advances that would have resulted in a more traumatizing experience - had I not had the strength to let out a scream as loud as I did.

The fact is: This did not happen because I was in Turkey. This could happen and does happen anywhere in the world.

On Oct. 2 I attended The Second Annual Reclaiming Dignity: A Pajama Party in support of local emergency women’s shelters. The main feature of the event was for guests to bring new pairs of pyjamas to be donated to Osborne House and Ikwe-Widdjiitwin – two of the emergency women’s shelters in Manitoba.

But the underlying theme of the night was raising awareness of violence against women. Domestic violence, violence against sex trade workers, sexual harassment, stalking, rape and murder. Things that need to be swept out of the closet and into the eye of the public.

“Some women don’t know that sex isn’t supposed to hurt every time,” said Alicia Cooper, one of the organizers of the event. “They don’t realize that their partner is raping them every night.”

Alicia and her sister Elizabeth gave out ‘goody bags’ of important information on who to call or where to go when you are experiencing violence and want to get out.

Alicia was very passionate when she spoke about missing and murdered aboriginal women and sex-trade workers, an unknown number estimated to be in the thousands, across Canada.

She and her sister feel that by raising awareness of shelters and by letting these women know that there is support for them – that there is a safe place for them to go, that they have a friend – that the number of missing and murdered women can be substantially reduced.

“We need to go into the world and make a difference,” said Elizabeth Cooper. “Even though there’s so many horrible things happening in the world – there is always hope.”

We are lucky to have safe and supportive shelters so widely available to us in Manitoba, friends who are there for us when we are in trouble.

And for that, I will always appreciate having my friends who stood beside me that night at the hookah bar.

For more information on the event, see my article here.