Camfed‘s World AIDS Day premiere of “Where the Water Meets the Sky” (currently airing on Sundance) was a memorable evening. Guests started streaming in to the Paley Center for New Media around 6PM for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres (the caterer, Chef & Co., was superb) and the movie began at 6:30.
If you have yet to see this riveting film, it’s a must-see. It tells the story of two filmmakers (founders of Film Africa) who go into a small village in Zambia to teach the women how to create a film that captures the reality of their lives. As they’re brainstorming ideas for the movie, one student mentions a young woman in the village named Penelope, whose life has been wracked with many of the struggles that are common to women in Africa. Her parents have both died of AIDS, her sister became a prostitute to support herself and her siblings, and ultimately she dies of AIDS, too. Penelope is left to fend for herself, narrowly escaping a similar fate after dropping out of school by resuming her education and starting a smallbusiness (and ultimately by participating in this Camfed-funded project). The students ask Penelope if she would consider playing herself in a film about her life and she bravely agrees to. So “Where the Water Meets the Sky” is not the film these women make, but a film about the process of making that film. It’s beautifully told and captured by Helen Cotton and David Eberts.
After the screening, one of the teacher-filmmakers, Abibata Mahama, the former principal from Penelope’s high school, Benjamin Chama, and Camfed Executive Director Ann Cotton spoke with Ron Simon from the Paley Center about the process of making this film and the necessity of investing in education in Africa. Much of the discussion centered around how the men in the village dealt with their wives and sisters (and mothers) being absent from their regular domestic routines for two weeks while they made the film. Initially, the husbands in the village were worried that their wives would leave them because making a film suddenly made them more powerful, Mr. Chama said. But soon there was a consensus that the film (and the cathartic process of making it) was good for the entire community.
It was during this panel discussion that audience members discovered that Penelope Machipi’s life had changed drastically since she made this film. Thanks to Camfed and an initiative run by Goldman Sachs in Samfya (the Zambian village), she trained in Information Technology and now runs a computercenter there. 400 people a week use the center, which has become an integral part of the community. Earlier this year, Penelope won the Goldman Sachs-Fortune Global Women Leaders Award and met Condeleeza Rice. (Her speech is at the end of this short video.)
Abigail, another young woman who participates in the film, is now attending college and is studyingto become an insurance broker. Towards the end of the panel, Mr. Chama said that even the husbands of the village—not wanting to be left behind—have started taking literacy classes and engaging in other forms of self-improvement.
After the panel and questions from the audience and from our live streaming FORA.tv audience, we all moved into the adjoining room for more wine and conversation.
2009 has been intense for us here at JANERA. We talked to established world leaders, provocative thinkers, and bold innovators, all of whom are tackling the biggest issues of our time. See below an overview of our 2009 events, and read what’s next on our agenda for 2010.
Global Religion in February with leading Buddhist thinker Sharon Salzburg and five other leading religious figures;
Modern-day Slavery in March with Peter Buffett and Dayton Literary Peace Prize winning author Benjamin Skinner;
Global Capitalism in March with ProfessorJeffrey Sachs and the New York Bureau Chief of The Economist Matthew Bishop;
Green Transportation in May with Robin Chase one of Time Magazine‘s most influential people in 2009 and Vijay Vaitheeswaran award-winning correspondent for The Economist;
Iranian Elections in June with journalist and author Hooman Madj and Nisid Hajari, Newsweek’s Foreign Editor;
Empowering Women & Girls in September with Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Sheryl WuDunn and Camfed’s Executive Director, Ann Cotton.
Climate Change Debate in November with NRDC’s Ralph Cavanagh, Duke University’s Eric Roston, AEI’s Steven Hawyard, Reason Magazine’s Ronald Bailey, moderated by CNBC’s Dennis Kneale;
We undertook a complete redesign of our Web site and switched from being “the voice of global nomads” to “curating global conversations.” We now integrate video into the site more and think this better reflects our mission of making international affairs accessible and attractive.
And we launched a brand-new membership program with exciting benefits! We not only serve individuals with discounts to our events at our Nomad level, but we can also help causes spread the word at the GameChanger level, or even co-host events with authors, advocates and concerned citizens at the Leaders level. And this is just the beginning. Click on our Membership page and find out which level fits you best, and sign up today!
2010 promises to be amazing. We are taking the conversation to the next level by partnering with fabulous companies and individuals, and are expanding beyond New York. If you’re interested in bringing our events to your city, email us to set it up.
THANK YOU for being with us along this roller-coaster ride and HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Please watch on World AIDS Day, Tuesday December 1st 2009, Camfed‘s premiere screening of their award-winning documentary film, Where the Water Meets the Sky. The movie premiers on the Sundance Channel at 10 EST. You can also watch the live stream panel discussion which starts at 7.30pm EST on FORA.tv.
Written by Jordan Roberts (March of the Penguins) and narrated by Academy Award®-winner Morgan Freeman, Where the Water Meets the Sky tells the inspiring story of a group of women in a remote region of Northern Zambia who achieve the unimaginable: they learn how to make a film as a way to speak out about their lives, raising an issue that no one will discuss- the plight of young women orphaned by AIDS.
There will also be a panel discussion, streamed live on FORA.tv, that will bring to life the issues highlighted in the film, and explore the ways in which film can be a powerful tool for social change.
You’ll get a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the filmmaking process and the issues that the film addresses from the panelists – among them, a participatory filmmaker from Ghana; the Zambian educator who helped change the fate of the young woman at the center of the film; and Camfed’s founder and Executive Director.
JANERA collaborated in the production of this event.
Monday’s salon on “Empowering Women and Girls in the Developing World” was a big success.
As I milled about the bar at Norwood Club, I said hello to a few of our guests. Constance DeCherney, associate director of new media at Planned Parenthood sat at the bar chatting with Michael Short, a dealer at Sperone Westwater art gallery about the strange saga of Annie Leibovitz’s financial meltdown. I said hello to filmmaker Peter Mattei and shook hands with Terry Culver of Global Nomads Group. Before long, I was introducing myself to Gabrielle Bernstein, a motivational speaker, author, and life coach who is president and founder of a social network called HerFuture.com and her friend Kelsea Brennan, who blogs for HerFuture.com (and also works in ad sales).
What drew them to this particular JANERA salon? I wondered. Gabrielle said the topic of investing in women and girls’ education resonated with her, since she spends her days helping to empower highly-educated women; she was interested in finding a way for these women to partner with less fortunate women in the developing world. As she spoke, I suddenly realized I’d just read about Gabrielle and her uncanny ability to manifest her goals in the Sunday Styles section.
Before long, Ann Cotton, the British founder and executive director of Camfed (the Campaign for Female Education) arrived. Brooke Hutchinson, the director of Camfed USA, introduced us to Cotton, who has very busy week before her. Not only was she speaking the following night at President Clinton’s dinner, but she is slated to speak on a panel later in the week at the Clinton Global Initiative. She is not a woman who tires easily.
I asked Brooke about Penelope Machipi, the resilient young woman from northern Zambia who stars in a movie about her own life called “Where the Water Meets the Sky” (produced by Camfed and co-directed by Ann’s daughter Helen Cotton) and who just won the Goldman Sach’s Global Women Leaders Award in San Diego. The award includes a $25,000 grant for Penelope to reinvest in her community in Samfya, Zambia. Penelope, who lost both her parents to AIDS when she was 14, is also—thanks to Camfed—a graduate of Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women program, which trained her in Information Technology. (She has already started an IT lab in Samfya.)
“She’s very analytical,” said Ann, with obvious pride. “She’s only 22 and she’s got this incredible wisdom. It really was a cathartic process, making the film.” She apparently gave a moving speech at the Goldman Sachs summit in San Diego.
On my way upstairs I saw our second speaker, Sheryl WuDunn, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who with her husband, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff, reported on the Tiananmen Square massacres in 1989. The two have a brand-new book out called Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.
Educating women and girls is a no-brainer to most of us: teaching a girl a marketable skill gives her freedom from poverty and the ability to make a living without resorting to prostitution or worse. Also, and unsurprisingly, education has a salubrious effect on population growth: a girl who has four years of primary school has one fewer kid than her peers.
WuDunn started the discussion by asking Cotton the first (provocative) question: “What if you build the schools but the teacher doesn’t show up?”
“There needs to be a major investment in teacher training,” replied Cotton.“It’s true, you can buy good grades in some of these communities,” she said, referring to the practice of bribery (and in some instances, sexual favors). Yet, encouragingly, communities are rising up in protest when they see their girls and women being hurt or mistreated, said Cotton.
One of the most revealing moments of the evening was when Ms. WuDunn admitted that she and her husband had to relinquish some of their journalistic distance while reporting “Half the Sky.”
“Journalists are taught to be balanced, distanced, and so on,” said WuDunn. “It’s very hard to walk away from what we saw. We are journalists, but after all—we are human beings.”
One of the things that kept her going as she reported this book, witnessing atrocities such as sex trafficking, acid attacks, and obstetric fistulas, was that alongside evil, she also saw the good in people. “Women are part of the solution,” she said.
Cotton seconded WuDunn’s sentiment: “There is a real commitment to education among mothers. It’s very touching to me that women especially show such support when girls are sent to school.”
(A video of the entire discussion will be available on FORA.tv next Tuesday; we will post it on the JANERA.com home page.)
The question and answer session began with a pointed question from a woman in the back of the room named Kelly Hoey, who is on the board of two area non-profits that help women and girls who have either been victims of domestic violence (inMotion) or who are trying to exit the commercial sex industry (Girls Educational & Mentoring Services). After thanking the speakers, she asked WuDunn, “So how do we get more men in the room?”
Janera and I had wondered this same thing when the RSVPs began to trickle in: about 80% of the guests for this particular event were female.
Sheryl’s reply was telling. First, she said, there are obviously men who care about these issues—“in fact, one co-wrote this book with me,” she said. (The dozen or so men in the audience seemed to be nodding in solidarity.) And WuDunn and Kristoff are working to get the book’s message(s) out to a mainstream audience with a huge social action campaign (see here) using gaming techniques.
“But frankly, on a practical level, investing in women and girls just makes sense,” said Sheryl. She pointed out that even Larry Summers (“male of all males”), when he was chief economic adviser at the World Bank, said, “Investment in girls’ education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world.”
When guests finally dispersed around 8PM, they were left with a two-pronged call to action: make a direct micro-loan to a woman or girl in the developing world (through Kiva.org) or donation to Camfed.org (or one of the many other fantastic organizations doing important work in Africa and elsewhere) and get the message out—to men and women—that helping a girl get an education is the best thing you can do to fight poverty, disease, and the inequality of the genders worldwide.
After a tumultuous summer of change and refocusing, we are thrilled to move forward with a new look and an exciting lineup of timely and provocative salons. Our first salon for the fall, on Monday, September 21st is on “Empowering Women & Girls in the Developing World.”
The New York Times Magazine recently dedicated an entire issue to the global concerns facing women and girls; award-winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have been writing about these subjects for years and their book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide was published this week; the Campaign for Female Education (Camfed), a non-profit that fights poverty and AIDS in rural Africa by educating girls and investing in their economic independence, produced the award-winning movie “Where Water Meets the Sky”; and the Clinton Global Initiative is dedicating a panel to “Investing in Women & Girls” on September 23rd.
We, too, are focusing on this vital issue. Please join us for an intimate conversation between Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sheryl WuDunn, and Camfed executive director Ann Cotton. The two will discuss the issues that women and girls face in the developing world and what we can do to improve their situation.
Details:
Monday, 21 September 2009
6PM cocktails
7PM-8PM Conversation and Q&A
9PM Screening of “Where the Water Meets the Sky”
Please watch on World AIDS Day, Tuesday December 1st 2009, 
Monday’s salon on “Empowering Women and Girls in the Developing World” was a big success.
After a tumultuous summer of change and refocusing, we are thrilled to move forward with a new look and an exciting lineup of timely and provocative salons. Our first salon for the fall, on Monday, September 21st is on “Empowering Women & Girls in the Developing World.”
