#WorldMoms 2015 in Pictures

#WorldMoms 2015 in Pictures

Happy New Year #WorldMoms! If 2016 is anything like 2015 for us it is going to be a fantastic year! Here are some highlights, impact, and accomplishments of World Moms in 2015.

Founder and CEO, Jennifer Burden, accepted the UN Correspondents Association award on behalf of World Mom, Purnima Ramakrishnan of India:

https://www.facebook.com/worldmomsblog/videos/1290132341031041/

 

Purnima was unable to attend the event in New York as she was busy reporting on the flooding in Chennai, India where she lives with her family.

purnima

Managing Editor Elizabeth Atalay joined Jen at Cipriani in New York City for the UNCA Award Gala where they also caught up with Dan Thomas, a Communications Director at the UN. Dan was formerly our World Moms contact at the GAVI Alliance when he was in Switzerland!

Elizabeth Dan and Jen UNCA 2015

Jennifer and Steve Burden were in NYC to commemorate World AIDS Day and 10 years of ONE and (RED) with special guests Bono and The Edge, Hozier, Danai Gurira, Trevor Noah, Bill and Melinda Gates and more! #WAD2015 #WorldMoms

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Kirsten Doyle of Canada, visited her home country of South Africa in 2015. No international journey is complete without meeting up with a local World Mom!  Here she is with Mama Simona in Cape Town!

2015 WMB Meetup Kirsten and Simona

We celebrated #DayoftheGirl with our daughters from around the world. World Mom, Aisha Yesufu in Nigeria, wrote our post for #DayoftheGirl and her daughter is pictured below.

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World Mom Nicole Melancon climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania with Solar Sisters to raise funds to launch new solar entrepreneurs.

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Our editors stay connected with global Skype calls throughout the year.Screen Shot 2016-01-03 at 9.23.22 PM

World Mom, Kristyn Zalota, continued to help to provide nurse training and Clean Birth Kits to mothers in Laos through the non-profit she founded Cleanbirth.org.

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World Mom, Susie in Israel, took her daughter in to the hospital where she works hard saving lives in Israel for “Take Your Daughter to Work Day!”Screen Shot 2016-01-04 at 6.27.36 AM

World Moms Blog attended the first ever Media Tour of Heifer Farms in Massachusetts.

heifer Collage

There were lots of speaking engagements around the world including:

World Moms Blog’s panel at the World Bank in April 2015 in Washington, DC on the importance of universal education for girls!

World Moms Blog Panel at World Bank 2015 600

World Mom, Cynthia Changyit Levin, also spoke at a RESULTS conference in Washington, DC on ending poverty.

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World Mom, To-wen Tseng, spoke at a Breastfeeding Conference in LA.

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And World Mom Sophia Neghesti Johnson spoke at a storytelling event for children, including a village story from Kenya, and one from Austria.

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In September while in New York for UN General Assembly week World Moms met up at a ONE Campaign “Poverty is Sexist” party and hung out with activist and Reggae legend, Rocky Dawani. We were also in NYC at that time for the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the Social Good Summit.:

World Moms With Rocky Dawani

 

We also started our collaboration with BabyCenter in October 2015, where our moms can also be found writing!

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In Kenya World Mom Tara Wambugu toured an elephant orphanage in Nairobi.

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Managing Editor, Elizabeth Atalay, and Social Media Editor, Nicole Morgan, advocated for vaccinations for children who need them most in Washington, DC with the UN Foundation’s Shot@Life Campaign and were both 2015 United Nations Foundation #SocialGood Fellows:

Elizabeth and Nicole at UNF

 

This summer World Mom, Jennifer Burden, visited the woman who wrote the very first post on World Moms Blog on November 1st, 2010! Astrid Warren, formerly known as pen name Asta Burrows, helped Jen raise the Lady WMB colors in Sogndal, Norway! The two took their families camping together among the fjords this past summer!

Astrid and Jen in Norway

World Mom Alison Fraser, Founder of Mom2MomAfrica visited students benefitting from the program she started in Tanzania.

Alison in Tanzania

World Moms Blog Founder and CEO, Jennifer Burden, interviewed the CEO of Save the Children, Carolyn Miles, in April 2015 at the UN in New York City. They were there for the UNCA press conference for the State of the World Mothers Report.

Jennifer Burden and Carolyn Miles

 

Aisha proudly voted in the March Elections in Nigeria.

Aisha Votes in Nigeria March Elections

World Mom, Aisha Yesufu of Nigeria, proudly votes in her country’s elections this year.

World Moms Blog Founder and CEO, Jennifer Burden, met the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban ki moon, at the UNCA gala in New York City in December.

Jennifer Burden and Ban Ki Moon 2015UNCA 600

 

We are excited to head into 2016 with new partners and exciting plans, and to see what this new year holds! Happy New Year!

World Moms Blog

World Moms Blog is an award winning website which writes from over 30 countries on the topics of motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. Over 70 international contributors share their stories from around the globe, bonded by the common thread of motherhood and wanting a better world for their children. World Moms Blog was listed by Forbes Woman as one of the "Best 100 Websites for Women 2012 & 2013" and also called a "must read" by the NY Times Motherlode in 2013. Our Senior Editor in India, Purnima Ramakrishnan, was awarded the BlogHer International Activist Award in 2013.

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BELGIUM: Roots

BELGIUM: Roots

ethiopië 039This time next week, I’ll be in Ethiopia with my daughter. My Ethiopian daughter. She is six years old, and four of those have been with us. Four years which have been wonderful and rough all at the same time.

Before she was with us, we already spoke about returning to her birth country. Later. When she would be a teenager, in search of her identity. It would be a roots trip for her.

It turns out that six-year-old adoptees have glaring roots questions too. One day, she came up to us, plumped down on the couch and sighed dramatically.

I don’t know who I am!

I explained to her that she is the daughter of two mommies. One in Belgium, one in Ethiopia. She loves to hear that.

But not this time.

No, I mean…how do I know where I fit in the whole wide world?

I honestly told her that’s a difficult question. I don’t even know how to answer that one for myself.

She was devastated and sighed with even more drama. She’s good at that.

If it’s difficult for you, how am I supposed to find the answer then? You know where you come from. How am I supposed to know where I’m going if I don’t know where I come from?!

These kind of conversations led us to decide to take a roots trip with her now, instead of waiting for her to reach puberty. Moreover, we’ll keep on returning every few years, to keep her in touch with her roots. We know from fellow travelers that Ethiopia is addictive anyway.

Ever since we booked the trip, she has found a kind of peace. Returning to her country really means a lot to this little girl.

Of course, returning won’t all be magical, as she imagines it. No doubt, she will experience a culture shock, just like we did the first time we visited.

We try to prepare her for the poverty she will witness. The poverty she and her family were in, as she knows. It will be hard for her.

But Ethiopia is far more than poverty. To me, it’s the most beautiful and safe African country, with the kindest of people and of course, the best coffee. We’ll visit wild life centres, hike in the mountains and have injerra, the traditional dish, as our Christmas dinner.

I can’t wait to discover Ethiopia again through my daughter’s eyes.

How do you deal with identity questions from your little and big ones? Do they know struggles as well?

 

This is an original post to World Moms Blog by K10K @ The Penguin and The Panther.

The picture in this post is credited to the author.

Katinka

If you ask her about her daytime job, Katinka will tell you all about the challenge of studying the fate of radioactive substances in the deep subsurface. Her most demanding and rewarding job however is raising four kids together with five other parents, each with their own quirks, wishes and (dis)abilities. As parenting and especially co-parenting involves a lot of letting go, she finds herself singing the theme song to Frozen over and over again, even when the kids are not even there...

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