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| July 19, 2008 |
I will blog when possible. This trip will be amazing!!
Dear Friends,I am at a Paris airport. Long wait for my flight to Bangkok.
I'm a little jet lagged even now, but very excited about the trip and about meeting my remarkable traveling companions. Once I get to Thailand, I will be traveling with the Nobel Womens Initiative. We will meet at the Bangkok airport and travel together to Chaing Mai, Mae Sot and Sukhotha- on the Burmese border in Thailand. From there we will go to South Sudan (via Addis Ababa) and finally to eastern Chad. The delegation will be in Chad for 3 days but I will stay on after they leave, traveling along the Chad/Darfur border for 12 days. The group will include my pal Jody Williams, who founded the ICBL (International Campaign to Ban Landmines). Land mines were banned in 1997 and she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Prof Williams led a high level mission on Darfur for the UN's Human Rights Council.
We met in Abece (eastern Chad) in 2007 and wrote a piece together for the Wall St Journal.
Wangari Maathai is the Nobel Peace Laureate of 2004 for her work in conserving the environment in Kenya and empowering women by improving their quality of life.
Prof Maathai has helped women plant more than 30 million trees on their farms and school and church compounds across Kenya. Prof. Maathai was elected to Kenya's parliament in 2002
Dr Sima Samar is Chair of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. In the face of threats to her own safety, Dr Samar has defied the Taliban's edicts that deny women their basic rights in Afghanistan.
She established and runs 4 hospitals and ten clinics and provides medical training courses. Dr Samar runs schools in Afghanistan for more than 20,000 students and 1,000 refugee girls in Pakistan. Her literacy programs are accompanied by mobile clinics, food distribution, information on family planning and hygiene.
Dr Samar is the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Sudan.
Leymah Gbowee is the Director of Women Peace and Security Network Africa based in Ghana, with chapters in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Liberia. The group works to ensure that women who bore the brunt of violent conflicts have a place at the table in peace processes.
Ms Gbowee also founded Women in Peacebuilding Program to address the trauma faced by the Liberian people during the country's brutal 14 year civil war. Ms Gbowee served as a Commissioner Designate for the Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Qing Zhang founded China Programs Director for Verite. She oversaw the interviews of 5000 women factory workers focusing on the exploitation they experience. She organized an annual conference to identify legal violations in Chinese factories. She has developed programs on worker education/sex education, prevention of HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, SARS, nutrition, overtime working conditions and micro-entrepreneurship.
Rev. Gloria White-Hammond, MD, is the co-Pastor of Bethel AME Church in Boston and a pediatrition at the South End Commmunity Health Center. She founded "Do the Write Thing", which serves over 550 young women in Boston's public schools and two juvenile detention facilities. Rev White-Hammond has made 7 trips into south Sudan where she has been involved in obtaining the freedom of 10,000 women and childrem. She has also traveled to Darfur. . Dr White-Hammond is Chair of the Save Darfur Coalition.
This is gonna be AMAZING. I will try to blog wherever I have internet access.