I firmly believe in the work that CARE does world wide and I've been supporting them financially for the past two years. They focus on empowering women on the theory that if you educate girls and provide opportunities for mothers and wives and all women, the entire community is stronger. I've a link to CARE over on the right side of this page. Please click it and surf around their site.
I'm excited about this film that you see above. It's coming to Warner Robins and I will be there. If you live near here, won't you join me?
Celebrate International Women's Day with A POWERFUL NOISE Live!
On the evening of Thursday, March 5, CARE and ONE
will present A POWERFUL NOISE Live in 450 movie theatres nationwide.
This special one-night event will feature the acclaimed documentary, "A Powerful Noise," followed by a town hall discussion with Nicholas Kristof, Christy Turlington Burns, Dr. Helene Gayle and others broadcast live from New York City.
Here's a synopsis of the film:
Hanh is an HIV-positive widow in Vietnam. Nada, a survivor of the Bosnian war. And Jacqueline works the slums of Bamako, Mali. Three very different lives. Three vastly different worlds. But they share something in common: Power. These women are each overcoming gender barriers to rise up and claim a voice in their societies. Through their empowerment and ability to empower others, Hanh, Nada and Jacqueline are sparking remarkable changes. Fighting AIDS. Rebuilding communities. Educating girls.
* Hanh learned that she had contracted HIV after her husband and daughter died from AIDS. Bouncing back from despair, she started a self-help group in Vietnam, called Immortal Flower, to give people living with HIV/AIDS a place for support, counseling and health care.
* Nada is a working mother of three children. As a refugee, she survived the Bosnian War. Her women’s association, Maya Kravica, is helping ease hostilities between Serbs and Bosniaks in a region marred by war crimes and massive destruction. Nada is building an agricultural cooperative to offer employment opportunities for war widows, and fair trade markets for families to sell their crops and livestock.
* Jacqueline, better known as “Madame Urbain” fights forced labor practices in the slums of Bamako, Mali. Madame Urbain stands up for the rights of powerless girls who are often abused in the workplace or on the streets of the big city. Her organization, APAF, provides girls a basic education, teaches them vocational skills and places them in safe jobs
Women and girls are the most impoverished, discriminated-against group in the world. Consider the following:
* Of the 1.3 billion people living in absolute poverty around the globe, 70 percent are women and girls.
* Women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours, yet earn only 10 percent of the income.
* Women produce half the world’s food, yet own only 1 percent of its land.
* Women make up two-thirds of the estimated 876 million adults worldwide who cannot read or write; and girls make up two-thirds of 77 million children not attending school.
In most societies, women face discrimination, exploitation and exclusion that limit their access to resources and assets. This disempowerment is a universal factor in extreme poverty. Rather than working with women as victims of poverty, more and more non-governmental organizations are working to empower marginalized women to challenge and change the contexts in which they live.
Women's empowerment offers a pathway out of extreme poverty and toward dignity and security – for women, their families and whole communities.
Women in the developing world cannot lift themselves up alone; they need the support and solidarity of women in developed nations to do so. Movements like this have historically proven to give a voice to the voiceless and create substantial and long-lasting societal change. One need only look to the women’s suffrage movement in the United States more than a century ago and the civil rights movement of the sixties as examples of what can be accomplished through the strength of solidarity. Because the majority of the world's poor are women and girls, the success of this women's empowerment movement is vital to achieving the UN Millennium Development goal of halving poverty by 2015.
A Powerful Noise takes you inside the lives of these women to witness their daily challenges and their significant victories over poverty and oppression. Their stories are personal yet illustrate larger issues affecting millions of marginalized women worldwide. A Powerful Noise is a meditation on the inherent potential of women to change the world.
If Blogger will cooperate, here's a link to the film: And of course, Blogger doesn't cooperate, so you'll have to cut and paste it into your browser. http://www.apowerfulnoise.org/about.html I've thrown it up in the links on the right side of the page, too.
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