Everywhere the car lurched, children with stunted growth stared. Once eye contact was made and a wave offered, their faces would joyously erupt into smiles. They wore tattered Western clothes. I saw one little girl in a shaggy tutu.

A balanced approach to providing complete solutions for poor people

While PSI is working with its partners (USAID, UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, CDC, WHO, Global Fund, UN, etc.) to protect and empower poor people’s health through medical services, education and products, Women for Women International provides literacy, hygiene, nutrition, education and job skills. An NGO with programs in eight war-torn countries, they pair, for $324 a year, a woman who can afford it with a woman who cannot. Less than a dollar a day and the money does so much!

In the midst of this ragged and doomed place is a walled courtyard filled with grass that is actually green, a garden that is actually tended, a building that is clean and proud. There were enough chairs for 20 (!) people to sit, and some tidy (if out-of-place-looking) furniture.

I was greeted with joyous clapping, singing and ululating, the great African vocalization. I ran to the throng and threw myself at them, dancing and exclaiming my hello in their tribal style. After some time discovering each other in this way, I was introduced as someone who sponsors in W4W and who was there to hear their stories and to take them to America.

We sat for hours, each woman taking her turn to stand before her sisters and me, sharing her life story. They were each so incredibly beautiful! The eyes, the cheekbones, the lips! They wore traditional, colorful dress and I so want to learn to wrap a turban like that! They were all reached by a Women for Women recruiter about the same time and have been in the program one year.

This is what those four and a half hours sounded like to me: I am an orphan. My husband was killed. My three sons were killed. I could not read. I could not write. I could not count. I lived like an animal. I have 13 children. I have ten children. I am a widow. I am a refugee. I am an internally displaced person. I fled with nothing, not even a cup. I did not know how to feed myself. I was half-mad. I was crazy. I was a cadaver. I was a corpse. People in the street were afraid of me. I begged. I scavenged in the dump. I treated my children like animals. My husband went to other women. My husband’s people pushed me from our home when he died. I was run off the land. I was cheated because I did not know how to sign my name. My children died. I have taken in orphans. I knew nothing. I was filthy. I smelled bad. I came to this area to escape violence. I carried loads with my body to earn money for food. I walked everywhere with my hoe to see if people needed my services, and if they did not, I starved. I had nowhere to go. I was dead. I had no idea how not to have more children. I was in a constant panic. I lived in terror. I could not cope with stress. I abused everyone around me. I was in a rage. The psychological trauma was so great. I was abandoned. I neglected myself.