The Female Lead Page 6

  I was the seventh child, and the last girl born in the family. I am considered the baby and I received a lot of love and care and grew up in a very positive environment. When I was a teenager, I joined the order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. My brothers didn’t want me to go,

  but my parents said, ‘Leave her to follow what she wants to do.’ So I followed the call from

  God and found what I wanted to do in my life, which is to care for children and the vulnerable.

  My family lived just at the Congo border and, when I was growing up, there were already a lot of problems in the Congo. I experienced running to safety with my parents and having to sleep in the bush. Throughout these experiences what I always kept in my mind, and can still recall, is the love and care that I felt from my family. The women at St Monica’s have been through terrible atrocities and pain in their lives. A lot of them were abducted by the rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army when they were young and trained as child soldiers. They were made to fight and, not only that, these girls were also turned into wives for rebel commanders who were much older than they were. They were treated as sex slaves and many of them had children through rape. A good number of the young women who were not killed managed to escape and come back home. They came with their children, but the difficulty they faced was that their community was not ready to take them in and would not accept them, or treat them with joy.

  The women at St Monica’s have been through terrible atrocities and pain in their lives. A lot of them were abducted by the rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army when they were young and trained as child soldiers.

  I looked at the situation of these women in towns around Gulu and I decided that we would open the school gates to them. I told them to come with their babies and children. These women needed someone who could love them and help them to love their children. Of course with no one to care for them and accept them, it was very easy for them to turn violent towards the children who had been the result of sexual violence. But we could teach them to love their babies. We offered the women love and they started loving their children.

  Every year we take at least 200 girls and the majority are between the ages of 15 and 17. We not only take girls who have been child soldiers, we also support women who have dropped out of school because of the conflict in Uganda or who are disadvantaged for any reason. We do not tell them that they have to leave after a certain period. The time they stay with us depends on their situation. If you have a girl who has gone through a lot of trauma and we see that she needs a lot of care, we will keep her as long as necessary before she’s ready to go. But, as a rule, we keep them from one to three years.

  We not only take girls who have been child soldiers, we also support women who have dropped out of school because of the conflict in Uganda or who are disadvantaged for any reason.

  While they are at St Monica’s we give them the dignity of supporting themselves through employment. So one day they can say, ‘I am going to live by myself with my children,’ because they have the skills to be economically self-sufficient. There are so many things they can do – they make purses, which are sold internationally, and we teach them agriculture and how to construct houses from plastic bottles.

  I am not alone in these ambitions, when I work, I have others around me who understand what I am trying to do and we work together.

  I am committed to doing small things that can bring transformation in society, for as long as I am able. I always say that my prayers – and my cup of coffee – keep me going! I am not alone in these ambitions, when I work, I have others around me who understand what I am trying to do and we work together. In 2011 we built a second school in Atiak. I am also setting up an orphan village, which consists of family-based homes for boys and girls. So a number of children will live in one house with one mother. I have already got five houses built and I hope to build five more and take in 80 children. Then I will build a primary school, which will also be open to the community, so that the children who are orphaned and disadvantaged will not feel that they are by themselves. They need to know that they are in a family and also in a society.

  Mother Teresa is my role model. I look at what she has done and think, ‘What a good person, I can do what she has done.’ But there are a lot of people who have helped me on the way to becoming who I am – my mother especially has been very important in my life.

  Sister Rosemary’s Object

  A bag [purse] made from pop-tabs. The pop-tab purse project is very significant in the process of rehabilitating the women at St Monica’s. In 2012 I taught the girls how to make purses from pop-tabs. First I learned how to do it and then I started teaching them – and now they are much much better at it than I am! It is one of the practical skills that we want women to have, so that they can earn money for their families. For me, the purse is significant because it is something beautiful that is made of pieces of trash – pop-tabs that people just discard. The women with whom I am working were once considered trash but, with their paid work, they gain dignity and can begin to come to terms with their suffering. They are literally stitching the purses and mending their broken lives.

  SISTER ROSEMARY NYIRUMBE

  Director, Saint Monica Girls’ Tailoring School

  NELL MERLINO

  Nell Merlino grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, and is now based in New York. She began her career as a union activist. After that she set up her own communications business and has worked on various political campaigns, and on many projects that support women in business and leadership. These include Take Our Daughters to Work Day, which she created in 1993, and which has inspired millions of girls – and, since 2003, boys too. In 2006 Nell launched Make Mine a Million $ Business with Hilary Clinton to help women grow micro businesses to million dollar enterprises. She is also the founding chairwoman of the Personal BlackBox Trust, an organisation on a mission to unlock the value of people’s personal data.

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  Women need their own money. I started out as a union organiser, helping women to get a better wage, so I was aware from the beginning of this need to have enough money so you are not dependent on anyone else. It became clear to me that the greatest opportunity for that kind of freedom was owning your own business. Starting in business makes it possible to live the life you want to lead. I am not interested in money for the sake of money – I am interested in freedom.

  People are so afraid of making the wrong decision. You need to be guided by yourself and that involves trying things.

  What this brings to mind is the importance of parents and teachers in helping girls to focus on what they are good at. Girls need to look at the careers, businesses and opportunities that exist around the things that they enjoy doing. Sometimes people know early on what they’re going to do – I knew I was going to be an activist – but things can change, and that’s important. People are so afraid of making the wrong decision. You need to be guided by yourself and that involves trying things, in school, in an internship, as a temp. Pay attention to how you feel and what turns you on intellectually. Look for things you might not necessarily have been aware of previously.

  I have witnessed stunning progress for women in my lifetime, but I still see this hope, a wish, that somebody else is going to take care of things for us. As long as you have at the back of your mind that someone else is going to take care of you and provide what you’re seeking, we’re in trouble. You see the manifestation of this, for example, in how women prepare for their wedding as though it’s the most important day in their lives. I got married late, and I’m delighted I got married, but that choice was never going to be the making of me.

  Powerful social and cultural mores still exist, and how women survive and make their way in the world is often too closely tied to the person they’re with, as opposed to their own selves. Girls need a real emphasis and value placed on figuring out who they are and what they are going to do, not how cute and beautiful they are – which, yes, we are! But it doesn’t carry y
ou far enough. You have to have some kind of internal strength, and from that you have to make a living, survive, thrive, look after other people if that’s what you choose. But it’s down to you.

  You can have it all, as long as you don’t do it all. This is the importance of having the wherewithal – it allows you to strike a balance. There will be years in your life when it’s impossible to do everything – someone’s sick, or there’s a new baby. It’s a fallacy to think you can move through those times without challenges, but, barring those times, you have consciously to set up your life so you are able to work in concert with other people – family, co-workers, community. You need to focus on the management of your time rather than asking, ‘How am I going to do all this?’ Find what works for you.

  One of my kindergarten school reports said I was bossy and when I later met the teacher again, I said to her, ‘You wrote on my report card that I was bossy. You were right. I’m now a boss and a leader.’ When you’re a leader, people listen to you. You see things and call them out and people are glad you did, because they were thinking the same thing. Then you keep working at it. With Take Our Daughters To Work, I knew it was going to be OK because everyone was talking about it, writing about it. After the first magazine article, we had 10,000 letters. So many people felt something was wrong, and girls needed to be seen in a different way. I’d seen something that I shared with a million people. The key to leadership is exposing parts of yourself and of your thinking that give other people permission to act.

  When you’re a leader, people listen to you. You see things and call them out and people are glad you did, because they were thinking the same thing.

  The people who inspired me first and foremost were my parents. They were extraordinary leaders themselves, my father a politician, my mother in the arts. They were activists, so you could almost say I’m in the family business.

  One of the women who stand out for me is Judith Jamison, who was out of the context of anything I’d previously seen in dance. My image of a ballet dancer was an emaciated Caucasian woman. Judith Jamison is very tall, very dark. That image is so strong for me because of being different – I’ve always been overweight so I thought I didn’t fit in and that’s tough for girls.

  Then on days when I feel I can’t do another thing, I think about what Hillary Clinton’s doing. Gloria Steinem [feminist, social and political activist] is extraordinary, and all the women during the Watergate hearings. For the first time, we were seeing women who held elected office on television every day.

  For the future, I would like women to realise the power of their own personal data. Digital natives have an opportunity to shape the world. We can now quantify our lives, all the work we do, including unpaid, at home. We have the opportunity to say, ‘This is what we contribute to the economy and this is where we want to take it.’ We never had the numbers before, and if we want to be driving the bus, these are the numbers we need.

  What happens when women’s voices aren’t heard makes me want to be involved, to make sure we’re heard and seen. We make up half the population, we have to speak up – and when we do, things change.

  Nell’s Object

  A hair dryer. That’s the object that immediately came to my mind, which really surprised me. We all need something that helps us to be our best selves. I don’t think there’s any leader who doesn’t have some kind of practice or ritual before they go and do the things they do. If I’ve had my hair done before I go on stage, or on television, or into a meeting, I feel prepared, and I feel as if I’ve made an effort to present myself.

  I’ve done an enormous amount of television talking about women and girls. I want to look the part of a leader and one of the things that helps is a hairdo. If you see a woman with screwy hair, that’s all you remember when the point is to listen to what she says. If I know I’m going to look OK, I can concentrate on what I’m going to say. It’s not vanity; it’s being in the zone.

  NELL MERLINO

  Creator of Take Our Daughters to Work Day

  VIAN AND DR DEELAN DAKHIL SAEED

  Vian Dakhil Saeed is a member of the Iraqi parliament and a representative of the Yazidi community, an ancient religion and culture of Iraq, centred on Sinjar in the north of the country. The Yazidi, frequent victims of persecution, are considered infidels by the Islamic militant group ISIS (also known as Islamic state or ISIL), and were brutally attacked by ISIS soldiers in August 2014. ISIS fighters systematically shot the Yazidi men; women and girls were kept alive as malak yamiin (spoils of war), kidnapped and enslaved. Immediately after the initial ISIS attack, Vian pleaded unsuccessfully in the Iraqi parliament for intervention; a week later she was badly injured during an aid mission when the helicopter she was travelling in was brought down by desperate Yazidi refugees attempting to escape their plight. The United Nations stated in March 2015 that the ISIS attacks on the Yazidis may constitute genocide. In 2014 Vian received the Anna Politkovskaya Award, which recognises women who defend human rights in conflict zones. On accepting the award, she said: ‘It is a pleasure for anyone to be honoured with an award, but it is rare to see a Yazidi person who can feel happy from the bottom of their heart, due to the fact that our girls, women and children are in captivity as hostages of the most dangerous organisation in the world. I make no secret of the fact that I’m proud to be honoured with your esteemed award, but the real way to honour someone is by protecting their freedom and rights. It is by bringing our prisoners back.’ She continues to campaign for the Yazidi people, despite personal danger; she has been called ‘the woman most wanted by ISIS’. Asked about this at the 2015 Women in the World summit, she responded: ‘I don’t matter. It is nothing for me, because now I am not thinking about my life. I am thinking, “How can I help those people, those poor people? How can I help the minority in Iraq? How can I help the Yazidi in Iraq?” I do not think about my life. It is not important.’ Vian’s sister, Deelan, is a doctor and works in the refugee camps with girls who have managed to escape from ISIS captivity.

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  Deelan: A week after ISIS attacked my homeland, Sinjar, my father said we had to leave our home in Erbil city. I didn’t want to leave; I didn’t want to end my hopes and dreams there. We were terrified, children were crying and we had to escape and leave everything behind. It was the worst feeling I had ever felt – but I was among my family: my mother, my father, my sisters and brothers. What came into my mind were the innocent people forced out of their homeland after witnessing ISIS killing their fathers, assaulting their sisters and kidnapping their mothers – how did it feel to them? This changed my thoughts, my goals and my beliefs.

  Vian: The Yazidi are a minority; we live in Iraq, this is our land. The Yazidi religion is a very old religion, from 5,000 years ago, before Christian, before Judaism, before Islam. It’s not a part of any of those religions. On 3 August 2014, ISIS attacked Yazidi villages in Sinjar, killed all the men, kidnapped the women and killed their children. The Yazidi community ran away towards the Sinjar mountain; now 420,000 Yazidi people, 90 per cent of the Yazidi community, are refugees, living in tents and camps. There is not enough food, not enough water, there are no healthcare centres, no schools for the children. The Kurdistan region is helping people to escape ISIS, but we still have 3,000 people, almost all of them women and girls, who have been kidnapped by ISIS. More than 1,000 children aged between three and 10 have been taken by ISIS, separated from their families, and kept in special schools where they are taught to fight and made to convert to Islam. We are afraid for the future of those children as I think they will become a new generation of ISIS terrorists.

  When you don’t feel you are alone, it gives you more strength ... All these girls are our sisters and daughters.

  Deelan: I work with girls who have managed to escape from ISIS captivity so I witness a lot of heartbreaking stories. These girls have suffered so much. ISIS soldiers are torturing and assaulting them. I witness a lot of physical injuries, not only psychological. And there
is psychological destruction. From the start, when ISIS started to take the girls and women, they separated them from their families, and kept them in big halls and in schools. The soldiers separated the virgin girls from the married girls. They started by assaulting only the virgin girls, and after that they started selling those girls between themselves. The girls have a lot of issues and problems. They feel shame, it’s like a stigma to them. One of the best things we have witnessed in the community is that families welcome back their girls (who manage to escape) and make them feel they should not be ashamed. They have been taking care of them, of their emotions and feelings, and most of the girls who have managed to escape have since got married.

  Vian: I am asking the Iraqi parliament and government to help the escaped girls and to help the Yazidi community but unfortunately no one has helped them until now. Many organisations in Iraq, especially in the Kurdistan region, are helping refugees in general, but it’s not enough. When we asked the UN for more help, now we have about 4,000 families living on the road because we don’t have enough camps or tents, they said ‘We don’t have money to give more.’

  Deelan: [The refugees] are in a safe region but they have nothing. They don’t have money, they don’t have jobs, they don’t have any source of funding to rebuild their own community. They are living in camps so they can’t build houses. It’s a whole community destroyed. Maybe if some day we defeat ISIS, they can go back to their homeland and rebuild their community, with international help.