I am not sure how to even begin to talk about the event of the afternoon. I guess I’ll describe what happened and everyone can use imagination to gather what I must have felt sitting in a room at the U.S. Consulate with women leaders from Brazil, some of whom traveled quite a ways and all of whom took time out from very busy schedules to share with us a little bit about a country they are very proud of. The event was the welcome briefing for the Professional Fellowship Program: Women’s Empowerment (Brazil Women’s Health).
The five of us arrived at the U.S. Consulate just on time (traffic, yikes!) to surrender our passports, phones and cameras and be tagged with the words “this person must be escorted from this point on”. The afternoon was one of powerful, exciting, ambitious, bright and dedicated women all gathered in one room. We were greeted by Maria Estela Correa, Cultural Affairs Specialist for the U.S. Consulate General Sao Paulo. After a half hour of meet and greet, a phrase that pales in comparison to the conversations that were going on, a panel of four women provided us with an overview of some of the issues women face in Brazil.
Vera Golik, a writer for leading women’s magazines in Brazil, presented a project that she has created with her husband, a photographer. After learning in the same week that her sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer, her brother with lymphoma and her mother with ovarian and uterine cancer, Vera struggled to find her place in the family and decided to use her gift of journalism and her husband’s gift of photography to create a photo exhibit that educates the public about the breast cancer journey that women take. I have seen many cancer photo displays over the past 12 years and I have to say that this one is the most powerful. Listening to Vera’s story, wrapped in humanistic views of diagnosis, treatment and survivorship, I was not sure how to keep myself from shedding tears from the FRONT ROW. Her show has been seen all over Brazil and, with the help of the Susan Komen Foundation, it was brought to the United Nations in New York City. IMHO, it should be seen by everyone as it provides a clear message abut the human aspects of all illness. To add to the power of the presentation, Vera’s sister, Andrea, was in the audience and we had time to talk to her in a very meaningful way both before and after the panel.
Rossana Camacho is a specialist in domestic violence and is the chief of the Police Department for Women in Marilia. I felt her gift of bringing softness to a world of such hardness. Rossana has worked hard in a world where there was no framework for dealing with the domestic violence she saw every day. She sought and found small loopholes in the laws and poked her way into those loopholes to create the cracks needed for women to assert some rights in their struggle to be set free from abuse. In 2006, Brazil enacted the Maria da Penha Law, a law to restrain domestic and family violence against women. Rossana’s hard work was rewarded with a legal instrument that codified her dream for a background within which women can assert their rights to be free from the threat of domestic violence.
Claudia Luna is the president of the Brazilian Vital Voices NGO Women by Women: Voices and Action of Women. She is a lawyer on the Brazilian forefront of Sao Paulo State policies for women and human trafficking. Using the history of women in political positions throughout the country of Brazil as a backdrop, Claudia presented a view of the importance of understanding what it has meant historically for women to be in positions of influence within the government of Brazil.
Maria Fernanda Teixeira is the president of First Data Corp in Brazil. FDC is the largest company in the world in the area of electronic processing of payments. Maria spoke as a woman with a mission and a strong clarity around what it will take to achieve that mission. She is considered one of the most influential executive women in Brazil and within Latin America and it did not take long to see why. Her presentation was an analysis of the positions women hold in the corporate world and questions as to why women have not yet achieved a higher percentage of positions in upper level positions. She emphasized the importance of those participating in this project being positive role models for future female leaders. She also discussed why it is critical that women be in these upper level positions. As an example, she spoke of the extent of women’s involvement in most of the family purchasing decisions and left us with the question of why corporations would not want women involved in the design and marketing of the items purchased. Her presentation led to a healthy discussion around the use of quotas to move a country closer to resolving long-standing issues of discrimination such as those that exist in hiring and pay decisions involving women.
During the coffee hour that followed, the American and Brazilian women were given the opportunity to gather more informally to talk about their lives, their work and issues that are faced by women worldwide at some level no matter the cultural context. Every woman in the room seized this opportunity with a visible thirst for more time together.
No comments:
Post a Comment