CARE

I’ve been attending the CARE conference for several years now and I find them invigorating every time, even if I glaze over just a wee bit during certain info sessions I’m already familiar with. But this year, I traveled with a few women for whom this was their first CARE conference. In fact, it was there first experience learning about global poverty eradication and how women’s and maternal health issues are integrated with all that. In essence, they were baptized into humanitarian work at this conference and are now ready to take on the world. In turn, I feel more energized and engaged with the mission we’re all committed to, both at CARE and at Every Mother Counts – to improve lives for girls and women, make it safe for them to have babies and make the world itself is a better place to live.

Despite our focus on global reach and far away places, I’m reminded time and again how very small the world is. My recent conversation with actress, Amy Brenneman revolved around her recent trip to Peru with CARE (one of our favorite humanitarian organizations), and served as a reminder that the world is only as big as you want it to be and most of it is common ground.

To the billions of people who don’t adhere to the harmful traditional practice, female genital cutting (also called female genital mutilation and female circumcision) is unthinkable, brutal, and incomprehensible. Many of us have daughters and can’t imagine putting them through anything so violent and painful, so permanently destructive to their physical integrity, health and wellbeing. But to the approximately 140 million women around the world who have undergone FGC, it’s a necessary tradition that’s been handed down for generations. What’s unthinkable for them is the idea of not cutting their daughters. That is, until they learn more about the damage it does.

All we asked was for 10,000 signatures and you guys blew us away. Right along with Brigid McConville of the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood, Helene Gayle of CARE, Christy Turlington Burns and the Every Mother Counts team 15,800 of you signed the pledge, telling our leaders that you believe all women have a right to safe pregnancy and birth.