Positively Inspirational Round-up – Ebola, GAVI and Scholarships

Patricia Amira, Africa’s answer to Oprah hosted the #AYASummit

As I put this months round-up together I’m in Jersey and ready to fall over, I’m so tired and jet-lagged it is unreal. A ferry journey today has not helped but I should not be moaning as my life is incredibly blessed. Last week I was in Washington, DC with ONE for their first #AYASummit. I mentioned about the summit in my BritMums post of a couple of weeks ago and boy what an absolutely amazing time I had.

This was the kind of conference where you are in a daze for 48 hours as each time you think the last panel cannot be topped another amazing line up walks on stage and blows you away. The newly launched Women and Girls initiative from ONE put together a room full of 75 digital and media influencers and then drew attention to the issues facing girls and women in the developing world, it showcased both the progress against and challenges of extreme poverty. These challenges were presented to us by people like Nick Kristof, author of Half the Sky and A Path Appears, Clemantine Wamariya who survived the Rwandan genocide, Holly Gordon who founded Girl Rising, Cindy McCain of the McCain institute fighting human trafficking and Danai Gurira who is an actress (Michonne in The Walking Dead) and playwriter to name just a few.

Literally every panel threw up yet another star who challenged and inspired every one of us in the room. I thought this month for my round-up I would share with you some posts that have been written about the conference. We are only one week later and many of us are still in the processing stage, such was the enormity of what we saw, heard and learnt at the summit but these early posts will give you an idea of how we can all make a difference and be the change we want to see in the world.

Awesomely Luvvie wrote a post about four strong and powerful women that impacted her during the summit. Here is what she had to say about Clemantine Wamariya –

Clemantine was 6-years old when the war in Rwanda began and her parents sent her and her sister Claire to their grandparents to ensure their safety. The “noise” as she referred to it reached them too and the young sisters had to run away, walking so much that their toenails fell off. They ended up in a camp where “refugees” was written on tents. That was her first time seeing the word. That was her first time knowing that it was used to refer to her.

She told stories about how she escaped a man who attempted to assault her while at the camp. She talked about how home is the 6 different countries she and her sister went to on their search for safety. Her story is of true resilience and I was in awe of her.

Not content with writing this one great post Luvvie also published on The Root and you can read all about Saa, one of the school girls we met who had escaped from the Boko Haram group that kidnapped her and her school mates in Nigeria earlier this year. Saa was an inspiration to us all as she told us “I would rather die than be held by Boko Haram.”

Michelle with Saa

One of my favourite panels of the conference was the 90 minutes we spent talking about Ebola and learning from people who have been in Liberia recently and have seen the devastation and know the issues that are affecting those living and working there. It was a massive privilege to be on videolink with President Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia as she answered questions from delegates at the conference, including mine. This post over on Mamlode is beautiful, filled with Instagram images of real people living with the consequences of Ebola.

Nicole at Third Eye Mom has written a post which rounds-up all her initial reactions to the two days we spent together at this summit and she says she “feels more empowered than ever before to raise my voice and promote change.” Well that is fantastic as there is so much to be done and as bloggers we can make a real difference and reach a massive population, those of us at the summit had a combined reach of 45 million, that is pretty spectacular, hey?

Chelsea from Do a Little Good shares with us a really moving story of a 19 year old homeless girl called Marquesha, she has a wicked talent for poetry and read us one of her original poems about some girls who are rising above their situation. The room of mostly women were so touched by her story and talent that within a few hours a scholarship and mentoring program had been set up and there is now $3,120 in the fund ready for GetLit.com (the non-profit working with at-risk teens through poetry and contemporary spoken word) to work with Marquesha to source some permanent housing and set up an ongoing scholarship. Pretty amazing stuff what a bunch of focused women can achieve in a small amount of time.

I’ll leave you with the first of many posts that I’ve written over on Mummy from the Heart. This one is about the pressure we were trying to put on the White House to commit to putting more money towards the next funding round for GAVI (the vaccines alliance). The UK are the biggest donor to this life-saving initiative and it is time America stood up and made a bigger difference. We are hoping to reach 3000 tweets to the White House and are doing well against the target but every tweets counts, so if you can, please take one moment and tweet this –

“NO excuses @WhiteHouse Stop dragging your feet and replenish @gavi today! #vaccineswork #AYAaction”

Thanks so much for your help and I hope you have enjoyed reading about the summit. If you want to be part of this amazing community of bloggers working with ONE then make sure you sign up to give your support (which means your voice not your money).

Mich x