In my community, being a girl is like putting together a really difficult puzzle. Being a girl can often mean that the different pieces of you don’t quite fit together. You should not be well-educated, and your place is in the kitchen. You...
Stories
Every woman and every girl inspires us. We are deeply grateful to those who have shared their stories about breakthroughs in their lives, the ways in which they have overcome fears, beliefs, or events that once kept them from connecting with their inner strength and recognizing their amazingness. Some of these stories are stories of pain and how a women or girl triumphed over it. As you read these stories, rather than focusing on the pain, choose to focus instead on the triumph and the ways that others have overcome what may once have seemed impossible to overcome. Let's celebrate their triumphs!
Early in my childhood, my parents separated and eventually got divorced. My sister and I went to live with our grandmother in rural Jamaica. We lived in a farming community called James Hill, down a rocky road at the foot of a hill called...
When I was 15 years old, I joined Youth for Youth, a Romanian non-governmental organization working on youth sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). I became a volunteer and a peer educator, and I went into the role with very little...
As a girl growing up in Kenya, a patriarchal society with a strong cultural heritage, I knew from the onset that achieving my goals was not going to be a walk in the park. Most of the time, I often considered myself a coward for the decisions I...
I first uncovered the inequalities and challenges that girls face at a very young age. When I was a girl, I loved basketball. It made me feel free, fast, strong, and in control of my own power and body when I played. But I learned really...
During the three decades I have lived as a woman, I have experienced, felt, and witnessed many discriminatory practices, especially harmful traditional practices such as female genital mutilation and child/forced marriage against women and...
I started my work as a volunteer and I still volunteer. Late at night, in the weekends, travelling in and out of my city alone for 10 hours for both work and volunteer work, sometimes I get to travel in groups and that is much more fun and...
I believe that every woman is powerful, and just needs to explore her inner strengths. This is a story of an ordinary woman who opened her eyes in the very normal middle class family, where no women was allowed to seek/find and or explore her...
For the last eight years I’ve been working on HIV and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) in Mexico but also globally, and I really feel that I have one of the most beautiful jobs ever. How can I say that this is the most...
We create and re-create our life in the stories we tell others about ourselves and in the stories we tell ourselves. Several years ago I heard Ben Zander, conductor of The Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, speak about the impact of our answer to...