As part of a Country Director tour, Women for Women International held an event on February 12 at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Temple Ner Tamid is involved in a synagogue-wide effort to support women survivors of war. The event was a great success, over 200 people attended to show their support for Women for Women International and the women that we serve.

Country Directors Sweeta Noori from Afghanistan, Seida Saric from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hamide Latifi from Kosovo and Berra Kabarungi from Rwanda engaged and inspired the audience with stories of the courage, hope, and resilience of the women involved in Women for Women International’s programs.

Thank you to Temple Ner Tamid for organizing such a wonderful event. We’re so grateful for your widespread dedication and long-term commitment to support women survivors of war.

To learn more about how you can mobilize your community to raise awareness and support for women in post-conflict areas, contact events@Womenforwomen.org

The turn-out for the event was wonderful, and the exchange between the supporters and the Country Directors provided meaningful insight into the tremendous amount of work that Ngozi and Christine do in order to support Women for Women International’s mission. 

Thank you Ngozi, Christine, Andrea, and Lisa for helping Women for Women International put on an inspirational and educational event!

To learn more about Women for Women International’s Country Directors, please click here.

Today, we visited the Google campus in Mountain View, CA with Christine Karumba, Country Director for the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ngozi Eze, Country Director for Nigeria.  We couldn’t take pictures in the buildings but grabbed this quick one by the sign.

Google sponsors talks like this often and makes the recordings available on YouTube.  As soon as the recording is posted, we’ll make it available on our web site.  In the meantime, I wanted you all the know about the kinds of questions Googlers had for Christine and Ngozi and the cool work that we do together already.  Ngozi and Christine both talked about the Men’s Leadership training courses that we offer in Nigeria and now the DRC and they were asked how men are enrolled for that program and what level of interest communities had in it given the state of women’s issues in their locations.  Ngozi told us about how she worked with local government and community leaders and asked them who they wanted to attend their training.  In this way, she had support of local leadership and the men who were chosen had some distinction in being asked as well.

Josh Mendelsohn, our host at Google, asked about how well we do or don’t work with the governments local and national where we work.  This gave Christine an opportunity to talk about the work her offices are doing with the Women’s Affairs Council of the government in the DRC.  She has worked hard to establish Women for Women’s leadership role in the country so that the government may look to us as a resource.  Ngozi talked about working at a very local level in each of the communities we work in and how the local support is key to bringing us into a community.  We also talked about how important having local leadership of our programs is to Women for Women International’s credibility on the ground and with the governments.

Tanya Keen, a sponsor who works at Google Earth was there so we got a chance to thank her in person for the Google Earth layer she created for Women for Women International. Look for more later when the video is posted.