Your voice from the frontline

I am Nadra Mahdi, assistant to the chief editor of Al Watan newspaper, and graduate of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Khartoum. I have a high diploma in communication from the University of Khartoum

I am a resident of the capital of Sudan, Khartoum, where I have been working on political and diplomatic issues and with organizational projects for four years. Recently, I have also started working on projects related to gender, development, and the environment.

I began my career in journalism as a poet, and then after passing the professional exam for journalism, I became a professional journalist .

But why would I want to be journalist and not just a writer? Or even a poet?

Dear All,

I was a single mother for 6 years. In was a very difficult time for me. Like most single mothers in Ghana, I was treated badly because I had a child and no husband. Here, a single mother is accused of being irresponsible, dirty and she is shunned by her community. Even the church often excommunicates single mothers. Pastors and priests make the mothers feel awful. Even woman pastors do the same. You would expect the female pastors to have compassion for their sisters in need, but they also do the shunning. Sometimes women hide their babies, giving them to grandparents to raise, in order to present herself as a respectable person in society.

Dear Linda,

Ms. Anjali Gopalan is the founder and executive director of the Naz [Urdu word for pride] INdia Foundation Trust, a Delhi-based NGO dedicated to fighting HIV/AIDS. In the early 1980s, Anjali began working on HIV/AIDS in the gay and minority communities in the United States.

From 1989-1996 and from 1999-2003, my country of Liberia was in a civil war. By the conclusion of the final war, more than 250,000 people had been killed and nearly 1 million displaced. In July 1990, I was captured by a rebel group and held in a prison camp in Ivory Coast. They were also running away from the escalating fighting that was going on because peacekeeping forces had landed in Monrovia. Because I was educated and had been so nice to them, cooking and cleaning and letting them win at card games and Chinese checkers, they took me and my three companions with them. I insisted-in my mind there was safety in numbers. We could return when the situation was right and be in the government as their representative/sponsor/bread-winner - more the latter.

After reading about the women at Warmi ("woman" in the Quechua language), I was excited to begin my internship and experience women empowering themselves and taking action to ensure a stable future for themselves and their kids. I was intrigued that these determined women started a soap factory, which led to a vibrant community center with day care, scholastic support, library, workshops on literacy, math, business skills, and other areas. At first I struggled to think of how I could contribute, but I realized that what inspired ?me, their story, can inspire other people. I conducted interviews with these amazing women and completed a marketing brochure exclusively about the women, relating how their lives have been transformed by their experience at Warmi.

As a UCLA graduate student in anthropology Birute Galdikas met Louis Leakey, a world renowned anthropologist who discovered humankind's earliest ancestor. In 1971 Leakey sent Dr. Galdikas to one of the world's last remaining wild places, the Tanjung Puting Reserve in Borneo to study the great red ape.

When I was a young girl, I, like many women around the country and the world was a victim of a dysfunctional family, including incest. Not only was I very, very poor. My nature, however, is strong and I became an attorney to improve my status. Now at this point in my life, I want to help women empower themselves, so they can tap into their inner strength.

Last month, women from the far reaches of Africa came together in Cape Town, South Africa, just at the same time as the world was witnessing Xenophobia in our region of the world. My dream has been realized. For months, I had planned the launch of the Leading Women of Africa.