Ali- America has often exported ideas and movements. Now, as Trump assumes power in the US, America appears to be exporting a healthy dose of female outrage. My unverified statistic is that there are womens’ marches in 600 some cities around the world, but that may be fake news from my clearly biased liberal source.
Switzerland had one organized march in Geneva on Saturday, which I only knew about because a friend is a lawyer working on immigration issues and actually really really cares enough about human rights to 1) find out about protests and 2) make an effort to go and drag along well-meaning but blissfully ignorant friends. She gave me my marching orders on Friday: make signs.
So, after a quick google search of protest signs, I sat down and created 4. Now I only have 2 hands, so that is clearly 2 too many. But I couldn’t choose between several sign creations and figured maybe there would be poor signless folk in need. 
I was particularly proud of my Electile Dysfunction sign, as there was some innovative alteration of a large Viagra pill to create the final product.
So 7am Saturday morning I head to the Bahnhof to meet the group. While there were around 10 of us -mostly from the Zurich chapter of the American Women’s Club- we were far outnumbered by dedicated skiers on the train platform. We tried to guilt a couple skiers into coming, as climate change is clearly their issue and needed some voices, but alas they chose skiing and we got to feel superior. Ok flash forward 3 hours and we are in Geneva. My blue hat was deemed inappropriate and I was quickly sold a pink hat with a funny shape on top. Several of the women were wearing them and I wondered briefly what they could symbolize until someone drops the P word. Oh. Right.
I find out later that this term has been quite elegantly co-opted by the women’s rights movement, and there were some signs to make that clear:
Anyway I became one of the pink-hatted masses as we streamed into the start. 
So the Women’s March in Geneva was classically Swiss. We went in organized groups of 50 across a bridge taking care to stay on the sidewalk while following our designated group leader. We walked all of 1/4 mile and then there were some speaches. That was it except for the fun signs
All in all there were probably about 2000 of us-or at least that’s the official count as reported by Swissinfo.ch, which isn’t an epic number, but on the other hand we are in Switzerland, which will likely feel zero impact from Trump’s policies and rhetoric. So the fact that a march even happened is pretty stupendous. 
Now I have had photos coming in from friends heading to the DC march, which is estimated to far outpace attendance at the inauguration at around 500,000. I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise as Trump won the election with far fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. We may not be able to get good turnout for elections but good to see that folk are willing to show up to wear P*~~y hats at a protest. 
