Each word of the title has power within its own self. I think you will see that illuminated today during a conversation that Karen Sherman will have with barbara. I am the managing director of the Aspen Institute and it is my pleasure to step in for my boss, and mosley, who is executive director and Vice President at the Aspen Institute. Unfortunately she had a family emergency and is not able to make it but she was heavily involved in the planning. It was her honor to host this booktalk because she has known Karen Sherman as a close friend for many many years. If you know her you know her personal and professional relationships and commitments are important to her. Only an emergency would have kept her from opening this up. Thank you for being here. Im not going to spend a lot of time on introductions because you have the bios in front of you and it is important to get into the conversation. I am honored to be able to introduce her because ive known her work for a number of years. The policy program at the Aspen Institute, we need to make certain families are able to move up economic mobility. It very much is about making certain the family opportunity, their goals, their needs are really addressed first and foremost, lifted up in policy and program. Has been around for ten years. We have a Leadership Program and a network of nonprofit organizations to cross the country. 380 of them. The whole party approach. We need to work intentionally with policy programs and policy makers at the state and federal level to make certain structural barriers are dressed and make certain we take a Racial Equity and gender lens to our work. In driving the work a gender lens. Also through the work that and had done over her career. Having friends like Karen Sherman, the passion she has had really have flourished in their relationship over many years. One of the things that she is doing now is coconvening the aspen forum on women and girls which is relevant to this conversation. That is a program and an initiative she leads with teddy clark who is the executive director as well as the Vice President at the Aspen Institute, she runs a program called the Aspen Global Innovators Group and another strong policy program at the Aspen Institute. With that i want to introduce Barbara Klein who is going to be leading the conversation with Karen Sherman. There will be time for question and answer. We would like to make certain you are fully aware that we are honored to have barbara as our conversationalist for today and make certain you know that she is really talented. Dont know if you have her book yourself. But she has an amazing career not only being an actor but a newscaster for a long time globally and here in washington dc. We are honored to have you and Karen Sherman, thank you for being here. I will turn it over to you. So great to be here. A real honor to talk to Karen Sherman about her book. Her background has taken her all over the world, to help and work with them, afghanistan, bosnia, very courageous, commendable, in my opinion crazy. I want to give the broad outline to see if it is okay with you, she decides to go to rwanda for a year for work with her three sons, leave her husband in bethesda and she decides to do this for work, also to work personally on her soul, her psyche and to work on what she reveals in the book is trouble in her marriage and she is brutally honest about all three of these aspects in this book. I guarantee when you read it you will find there are times you wont be able to breeze. Whether it is stories, descriptions of women you are working with, that you have met or descriptions of your own life. And that is what the book is about. Thank you for being here and thank you to marjorie for the warm introduction. I appreciate it. Such a huge fan of all the wonderful work you are doing. It is a story i have wanted to tell even after i went to rwanda but this idea of being a person who straddles the developed and developing world for most of my professional career, i am in bethesda maryland, afghanistan, south sudan, bethesda, congo, looking at the way that women live and are forced to live in a lot of these societies and contrasting that with the lives we have here and it is not just a privilege question but how women lack voice and choice in so many conflict around the world and thankfully not just in the developing world but the developed world too. To tell those stories modified my own, an honor for me to do that. Why did you write it all down . Why did you want to share all of this publicly . I was working with a group called women for Women International the works with women survivors in postconflict zones, afghanistan, south sudan, congo, nigeria, kos of oh and bosnia. Part of my job was to take down the story, i have notebooks full of them over ten years and we took down these stories for purposes of writing Success Stories and being able, part of your monitoring and evaluation, how you do your work. You live with these stories, they dont go away. I had all these stories but there was my story, a story that felt disingenuous to write a book about other women stories, not be willing to put my own alongside that page. Host tell us a little bit about your story personally that you felt you had to work through as you are working with women in crisis. Guest i grew up in portland, oregon but it was a typical childhood. My father was very abusive and he was abusive to my mother and children, it was interesting, growing up. I identified with my father versus my mother. I carry that with me for a long time and i couldnt understand my mothers relationship, where her missing voice was, why she would stay in a marriage that was abusive. It really wasnt until i was in rwanda that i started to connect the dots between how i grew up and my mother and her family and so many women around the world live including in rwanda. It is a story i had heard over and over but i hadnt personalized it. I do want to know about how did you connect the dots . What was the connection . One of the things that was striking in this book was how honest you are, yes, your father was abusive, you get into it here. He hit you. Yes. Host tell us how that affected you and you realize again, it is in the book, but how you then who you became as an adult. Guest we all have stories from childhood, stories we live with. For me, the way i dealt with this growing up was this idea of being above reproach. I will be supercompetent and this superwoman. I will go out and get straight as, get the great job, have three kids, do everything right but there is no such thing as being above reproach. I started the catalyst really, for my move to rwanda i had applied for the ceo position. I didnt get it and i was devastated but in some ways i was unnaturally devastated and i was realizing i dont want to say it is a house of cards but the story i had told myself about everything, how i was working, things i needed to do to be this person, it started to unravel a bit. Everything i have done to pump myself up with the family and the kids and all of that became quite vulnerable. Rwanda helped me unpack all of that. Host how . Guest i think it was getting more perspective, sitting down and talking to a number of women survivors of war. I had taken down their stories but it was a job. This was about me looking at those stories in a different way. It was me interna lies in the story not just for work but woman to woman. The title is really a metaphor for how women rebuild their lives a brick at a time. For me while i was in rwanda i was deconstructing it. I was on building its like a build it up again. Tell us the story, your stories of women, individuals here whom you met. Deborah, for example. How does her story, how did you connect the dots between your life enters . Deborah is one of the really most challenging stories in the book. Deborah had lost her husband and all six of her children in the genocide, including, not to be so graphic but including having the baby she was carrying on her back, lifted up and had their neck, and she watched all of her children die. And her husband died in the water and she lay floating on the water, you know, until the kelly stopped essentially. She ran around for two weeks with basically just the clothes on her back and she was in hiding with no food, no water. She went back to her neighborhood. There was nothing left. This is like somebody who actually lost everything, husband, children, livelihood, home. We were having this conversation in her house. She went through the women for women program. She actually got trained in knitting and she got a machine, and knitting machine sent to her by relative who was living in europe and she started making knitted sweaters and things like that, then she started making some money and she bought several more machines and she was making a living. And then she had a retail shop and she had, shes making thousands of dollars. She was just talking about how she built a business and she got a bank loan and she had a house and she went into partnership with some of the people. Basically how she had rebuild her life, a brick at the time. In her case for bricks were sweaters. It made me realize if she could do that, anybody, anybody could do that. If you think that you cant survive anything and yet youre still able to live and smile and dance and find a bit of joy in life, that, you know, its just a sense of the ultimate sense of perspective is what i would say. Theres a huge leap they are from floating in the water pretending she was dead to getting being trained, getting sewing machines. She wanted to live. She didnt lose faith in life. How . I cant answer that. I cant tell you what it is inside of her that kept her going. But what i can say is, having spent ten years working with women everywhere, not just in rwanda but multiple countries, i spent 15 years working in the former soviet union. There is something inside women. Women in particular, with no disrespect meant in the room but the something inside women that keeps them going and keeps them striving. A lot of it has to do with just basic instinct for survival, but in the case of deborah, and many other women, it had to do with keeping their families going, keeping something going, and they felt this deep sense of responsibility to keep going for others. And ill give you one other story and again, not trying to be gruesome but just to contextualize this. There is a woman in bosnia, and theres a story about her where she was living sidebyside with her once friendly neighbors, and then the war happen and her neighbors basically turned vigilante. Her husband was taken away and forced into hard labor. She was taken to this empty house by her once friendly neighbors, raped and tortured repeatedly, and then the men said to her, we should kill her. Then another one said no, we shouldnt kill her. She will kill herself. Wow. And so what you said is, you know, she had a new baby boy into basically said i needed to live for him. Lest we think that the stories are all about crises shes a brutal interviewer. You know, some of these women are in crises, the rwanda genocide, the civil war in bosnia and herzegovina and kosovo here but its every day for many of the women whose stories you tell in this book. And im thinking, number one, about marriage, the fact that many are not married, and number two, specifically the story but i cant remember her name, woman whose husband parceled out the meat because having to do with how much value he thought she brought to the family. This is an everyday story. Were not talking about a political crisis or war. Tell us about it. Its just this story, and its interesting, this question of food, but it had come up a couple of times, and again not only in rwanda but this idea that these husbands were basically parceling out food depending on the perceived worth of their women. And so she was, she said my husband told me i should be fed like like a bird because and not contributing financially. So the control of food comes up multiple times by many, if you think about a place like south sudan, too, where women really are valued beneath animals. And it isnt just about food, but mean exercising all the lives of control about education, home, being able to leave the home. Its just that women are perceived in so many cultures. At again i dont want people to think this is just about africa or just about wartorn countries because ive seen this level of marginalization and other places, too. Its just less notable. In your own home when you were growing up. Thats right. You know, its in my own home but its in a lot of peoples home. How many hearing about the me too movement, the stories that women are setting inside themselves every single day . Theres a light in the book that everybody has a story, even if its just the one we tell ourselves to get through the day. I think thats true for a lot of people and to think its true for a lot of women. They are just unable to share those stories. So think about this. The statistic just kills me. One in 16 women in the United States experience rape as the first sexual encounter. One in 16 women, thats an astounding statistic. Lest we think it south sudanese women or congolese women or rwanda women are afghan women. Its all of us. It also struck me when i was taking notes in the book how important rule of law is. Because you cite one in 16 in this country. At least we know its wrong and its in our laws, right . Not that it gets played out necessarily. In fact, often it doesnt. But in thinking in other countries where the culture doesnt recognize it necessarily. You would be surprised how many countries have laws on the book. Really . You would be surprised. Its an enforcement issue. Its a reporting issue. And in many countries, and its in this country, also, women dont report, women dont talk about it, women dont have a place to go. A lot of it has to do with they dont have their own in, to be able to make different choices. And so i say in the book having to stay in choosing to stay our two entirely different things. My mother couldnt stay. When i was growing up you asked how i dealt with this, i was like i am always going to have my own income. I never want to feel like im this person who has to stay it if i choose to stay, thats up to me. Thats something you have taken to your work. Yes. So tell us about sort of the way, the conclusion that your reach, the way you synthesize all these stories, many different parts of the world, many different cultures, and what conclusion you came to as the two basic things. I mean, what ive seen end of a single country context including here in the United States is the two things that give women voice and choices are an education and the ability to earn an income. And actually education without income is insufficient to change the status quo for women and girls. And ive seen that plant everywhere. Education may give your voice but it does not give you choice. And so i think women need to have their own income to have that ability to not just leave it to be able to make different choices. This might be choices how many have saved and spent come choices around sending or keeping children, particularly girls in school, choices if youre suffering from violence or abuse in the family. Okay. So with your work and rwanda, congo, south sudan, nigeria, how did you see it possible to start giving or helping girls and women get those two things going in their lives . I mean, i think its interesting. So at women for women it was all about, it was a Yearlong Program a son job skills training, business skills, and really looking at different Market Opportunities for women to be able to earn an income. We talked about selling bananas. Incubate as simple of selling bananas. But it was about having a bit of income, a lot of these women would come i remember when i first joined the program they might buy a bunch of bananas and bring it home to the family to show that there was some value to the training, that they have something to offer. But you would be surprised, when i was living in rwanda we ran an entrepreneurship competition. Some of the women who it started these very tiny microbusinesses years ago had like 25 employees. They were doing regional tray. They are partners in uganda and kenya. So you would be surprised how little it takes to make a difference in somebodys lives it blew me away. Thats what always talk about thats the brick by brick. It doesnt take that much. And now im working with a group called institute which is also about voice and choice in creating Economic Opportunity for young women. It is the first and only Womens College in rwanda, started ten years ago and its all about, its a diploma programs linked to some of the Fastest Growing sectors of economy and its all about giving women and education and the ability to earn an income and 86 of those graduates are in the workforce in rwanda right now earning on average 11 times the National Median income. Akilah is interesting. In that countries economy you focus on, its not a college like arts and sciences, Political Science or psychology or whatever. What are the three . The three are Hospitality Management and tourism, information systems, or i. T. , and Small Business management and entrepreneurship. And i think the thinking was we started with the private sector and worked backwards. And so we made sure that the skills that these young women were developing had relevance in the marketplace. We didnt start with the supply. We started with the demand. And i think that what i think about the young women who have graduated from akilah, and by the way, these are not like the elite of the side in rwanda. 78 of them are the first and family and the fans go to college, over 50 for baroque areas. This is a life changing education for these your women at a of them as the daughters of the women for women women, if you will. I can tell you having talked to some other mothers, they gave up everything, everything so the daughters could have a College Education