My Mom Is Part of a Long Line of Many Women With Big Hearts, Smiles and Endowed with Great Courage!

Sonia Colasse

Author the children bilingual book: “The Adventures of Enzo”

When I look at her, she expresses a life filled with adventure, full of emotion, sometimes grief and misfortune, but I keep in my memory her bursts of laughter and her happiness.

However, I also know that before arriving at that joy, she had to demonstrate wisdom, overcome her fears, doubts, and also crossed inclement weather and fought the pain.

My mom could be Simone de Beauvoir, a French woman who was born in Paris in 1908.

“My first twenty years have elapsed between Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Saint-Germain-des-Prés without nothing exceptional happening… ” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, who would later become the companion of Jean-Paul Sartre (a writer), author of The Second Sex and in 1974 the President of the League of Women’s Rights.

Indeed, this deep, touching woman of the pre-war generation was a woman of great power, freedom and a writer. Her words and lines written on many pages even cross oceans and the languages of our world.

After her early education she continued her studies at the Sorbonne. It is the aggregation of philosophy that it stands in 1929, at the same time that a young, Jean-Paul Sartre. He was received first, while Simone de Beauvoir released second contest.

In 1943, she published her first book, She Came To Stay or L’Invitée in French.

After a few years of various love affairs, she starts a lifelong relationship with Sartre with a ‘Franchise Pact’ which combines independence and truth towards the other. She will now write the themes in her work. Her first novels teach that commitment may be an issue of the man of bad conscience (The Blood of Others, 1945) and the death, far from being a curse, based the value of our acts and our feelings by giving them an irreparable scope (All Men are Mortal, 1946). Her play, The Useless Mouths (1945) seek to define a political moral, which is “joy to exist” Pyrrhus and Cineas, 1944; Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947.

Trips to the United States (America Day by Day, 1954), and then in the China of Mao (The Long March, 1957) drove Simone de Beauvoir on the roads of the denunciation of the status of women. This position is clearly assumed in her 1949 essay, The Second Sex, a founding text of the feminist movement in France. At the same time, she falls in love with an American writer in Chicago, Nelson Algren. She sends him passionate letters and their relationship lasted until 1964.

Simone de Beauvoir signs the Manifesto of the 343, a petition signed by 343 women to demand the legalization of abortion and made public in 1971. With the lawyer and politician Gisèle Halimi, she will then be the co-founder of the movement and choose whose role will be crucial in this fight.

This woman who could have been my mother or yours died in 1986.

Another French and courageous woman, another woman called Simone will be often compared to the writer by her strength and tenacity.

Simone Veil is one of the most popular French political figures. Legalizing abortion in 1975, she was the first female President of the European Parliament (1979) and the first woman to be the Minister of Health (1993).

If I was born in Peru, in Latin America, I could have been the son or the daughter of Jacqueline Domhoff. Why?

Because her strength to live, her strength to defeat all the demons is a force that I would have liked to receive from my mother.

“Laughter is the best way to spread the love, peace and it is also a good way to cure us” says Jacqueline.

“You have cancer”,a heavy line that begins Jacqueline’s story. This statement made by her doctor, continued to explain that she is suffering from cancer of the ovaries.

How should we react to this terrible evidence?

Jacqueline answer for us: “With laughter and without tears!”

Holder of a master’s degree received in Spain, she returned to her country to become responsible for public relations. Jacqueline had everything professionally and a promising future.

“No one expects to have cancer. I realized how much life can take a dirty turn in less than two seconds. Life itself is a lesson, I had to make a choice and I chose to give meaning to my life.”

After many storms, Jacqueline tried to resume her life and become positive.

“A friend told me about the therapy related to positivism, joie de vivre and well-being which leads to an improvement of the immune system, just the gift, I needed!

Jacqueline did laughter Yoga lessons and became a therapy trainer.

Laughter yoga is a serious treatment for people with cancer. This method allows red blood cells to increase in size, and thus attack the cancer cells. We laugh and more of our cancer cells are eliminated by our positive energy.

Jacqueline is not only a survivor of cancer, today she is a motor wire and the founder of the Hospital of Joy in the emotional and spiritual improvement for more than 6,000 people in various districts in the city of Lima.

Her volunteer team brings happiness and laughter therapy in different hospital centre, houses of retreat or clinics. The laughter of Jacqueline helped about 1200 people on the Plaza Mayor of Lima Square. “We want to spread laughter and thereby to increase positivity in the world. When you change your behaviour, you change your optimism and you attract positivism. It is the best way to spread the love, peace and also to cure us.”

Lean In is the title of the book of Sheryl Sandberg, an American who wants equality between men and women and who refuses to be a single woman at home if it is not her choice. She works to ensure that women have access to power and benefit from the same opportunities as men, that they dare to assert themselves and assume their choices: challenges proposed by Sheryl Sandberg, from her personal experience. Sheryl is an example in her country, a figure among the 100 Most Influential People in the world according to TIME Magazine.

Sheryl is sincere and funny. Through her sense of humor she helps men to reveal themselves to help their wives, to support their families and to improve and gain efficiency. To make a fuller woman, she advises women that they can be a woman, a lover, and a businesswoman, while being a Bonne-Maman to not forget their independence.

Sheryl, through her book Lean In, has a non-profit foundation promoting women to realize their ambition, as well as to other charitable organizations to support women.

Sheryl is a real revolutionary woman and a real model for our future generations. And I would have been very proud to be her daughter!

Linda Forsell was born in Sweden and is a photojournalist.

I would fight by her side against domestic and psychological violence.

Linda says: “Domestic violence is widespread in the world. It makes no difference of races or of socio-economic or cultural or religious” backgrounds.

Linda said that the World Bank statistics show that violent homes hit and kill more women than traffic accidents, malaria and war together.

Linda wanted to change these horrors.

She created the project “Cause of Death: Woman”, a platform where

it denounces and capture photos and testimonials of women facing violence in 10 countries: the United States, South Africa, Egypt, Sweden, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil, Congo, Spain and Russia.

Linda is a photography activist, survivor, but also of beautiful women that tells the tragedy and the loss of loved ones. She immortalizes the suffering, the horrors these women live each day.

Domestic violence includes physical, sexual, verbal, emotional and psychological aggression, and we can add these to the list of threats and intimidation. Most of these acts are not reported because of fear of worsening the situation, no evidence, and because most of the time the aggressors leaves no trace of their actions or simply because they are ashamed.

According to the UN more than 600 million women live in countries where domestic violence is not considered to be a crime!

Although the violence was always present, the world doesn’t have to accept the appalling actions.

“Women and Road Safety: project for society ” 7 & 8 March 2014 Palais des Congrès, Skhirat – Marrakech – Marocco. Every day in Morocco and around the world, many people are killed or injured on the roads. Men, women and children who go to school or to work on foot or drivers never return home, leaving behind families collapsed.

According to the World Health Organization, the accidents are among the ten leading causes of death among teenagers and adult women.

In countries with high and middle income, accidents are the leading cause of death among the female population aged 10-44 years.

Considering the central and multifaceted role that women in the society plays as an actor that influence constructively their environment, the National Committee for the Prevention of Traffic Accidents (CNPAC) and the National Union of Women of Morocco (UNFM), co-organize the 1st World Congress on woman and road safety under the theme ” Women and Road Safety: project for society.”

This Global Congress will also provide an opportunity to remind the world the roles that women and civil society can play in the field of road safety and challenges of the future.

And I cry to the one that could give me life, this writer rebel of India, determined, passionate, courageous for the cause of Afghan women.

Sushmita Banerjee, Indian installed in Afghanistan, a nurse in obstetrics, became writer by chance and murdered on September 4^th, 2013.

Sushmita is made famous in India with her biography, a best-seller for Bollywood.

She tells her adventure, her marriage in secret in 1990 with Ankur Khan, an Afghan. The break with her family caused by the hostility of her union. She left India to join her husband in his country, Afghanistan.

A tumultuous experience, in the heart of a country that ultra conservative and sensitive to the Islam of the Taliban propaganda.

Sushmita did not become a woman submitted—she was the only woman in all of Paktika who refused to wear a burqa.

Sushmita opened a clinic and demanded freedom of expression to the women of her village.

Returning to India in 2003 after several death threats and condemnation of death by a local Taliban Court, she wrote her revealing biography on the Taliban. The same year, Bollywood released the film retracing the life of Sushmita. She wrote four other books and unveiled the horrors of the Taliban.

In 2013, Sushmita, decided to return to Afghanistan, joining her husband and her family in-law. She had a new book project, and even apparently a documentary written on the lives of the women out there. Her killers did not let her make this project.

She was only 49 years of age, when fate decided to give her wings and let her soar towards other horizons.

We will keep in memory the goodness of this sweet and courageous Indian woman.

We must support women who give life to the child of tomorrow for nine months! And let’s not forget the World Day of Happiness on March 20th, which sums up the face of our mothers when they gaze gently on their child.

Sources: Mujeres Mundi, the role of women in the development of their communities.

Translate by Bélinda Colasse

This article was published on 8^th March: International Women´s Day, in Global Education Magazine.