by Elizabeth Atalay | Apr 5, 2013 | Africa, Cultural Differences, Death and Dying, Motherhood, Older Children, Teenagers, Travel, World Motherhood
Once upon a time I may have been an adventuress, but that was a very long time ago.
- The Okavango Delta
It was a time when I was young, carefree,and as far as I ever thought of it, immortal. As a mother now, the stakes are extremely high. My teenage desire for risk taking has been satiated, and now comes the payback. I have to guide my own children through that sense of indestructibility. Although they are still a ways off….we are creeping closer. My husband and I call the teenage and young adult years The Gauntlet. We realize all parents need to get through the gauntlet, to reach the holy grail of happy, healthy adult children. I remember the moment that switch flipped for me as a young adult, and hope that realization comes to my own children in a much less dramatic way. (more…)
Elizabeth Atalay is a Digital Media Producer, Managing Editor at World Moms Network, and a Social Media Manager. She was a 2015 United Nations Foundation Social Good Fellow, and traveled to Ethiopia as an International Reporting Project New Media Fellow to report on newborn health in 2014. On her personal blog, Documama.org, she uses digital media as a new medium for her background as a documentarian. After having worked on Feature Films and Television series for FOX, NBC, MGM, Columbia Pictures, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, and Castle Rock Pictures, she studied documentary filmmaking and anthropology earning a Masters degree in Media Studies from The New School in New York. Since becoming a Digital Media Producer she has worked on social media campaigns for non-profits such as Save The Children, WaterAid, ONE.org, UNICEF, United Nations Foundation, Edesia, World Pulse, American Heart Association, and The Gates Foundation. Her writing has also been featured on ONE.org, Johnson & Johnson’s BabyCenter.com, EnoughProject.org, GaviAlliance.org, and Worldmomsnetwork.com. Elizabeth has traveled to 70 countries around the world, most recently to Haiti with Artisan Business Network to visit artisans in partnership with Macy’s Heart of Haiti line, which provides sustainable income to Haitian artisans. Elizabeth lives in New England with her husband and four children.
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by Jennifer Burden | Feb 24, 2013 | Shot@Life, Social Good, Uganda, Uncategorized, World Voice
It takes a lot for me to leave my family behind for a week like I did to go to Uganda. Actually, it was the only time I’ve ever done it, sparked by an URGENT matter. Did you know that every 20 seconds a child dies from a vaccine-preventable disease?
Doesn’t sound pressing enough?
Well how about some math…:
In the time it takes for the Shot@Life 28 Days of Impact campaign to run through the blogosphere, statistically,120,960 children will succumb to vaccine-preventable deaths in the developing world.
And February is the shortest month.
That is 1.5 MILLION children in a year will die a death that we could have helped prevent for a few bucks. Yes, a few bucks, even just one buck, in some cases. It’s so simple.
Last October I left my family for a week and flew to Uganda with a delegation from the UN Foundation’s
Shot@Life campaign.
(more…)
Jennifer Burden is the Founder and CEO of World Moms Network, an award winning website on global motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. World Moms Network writes from over 30 countries, has over 70 contributors and was listed by Forbes as one of the “Best 100 Websites for Women”, named a “must read” by The New York Times, and was recommended by The Times of India.
She was also invited to Uganda to view UNICEF’s family health programs with Shot@Life and was previously named a “Global Influencer Fellow” and “Social Media Fellow” by the UN Foundation. Jennifer was invited to the White House twice, including as a nominated "Changemaker" for the State of the World Women Summit. She also participated in the One Campaign’s first AYA Summit on the topic of women and girl empowerment and organized and spoke on an international panel at the World Bank in Washington, DC on the importance of a universal education for all girls. Her writing has been featured by Baby Center, Huffington Post, ONE.org, the UN Foundation’s Shot@Life, and The Gates Foundation’s “Impatient Optimists.” She is currently a candidate in Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in the Executive Masters of Public Affairs program, where she hopes to further her study of global policies affecting women and girls.
Jennifer can be found on Twitter @JenniferBurden.
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by Natalia Rankine-Galloway (Morocco) | Feb 19, 2013 | Motherhood, Religion, Safety, Tunisia, USA, World Motherhood
Natalia and her son in Tunis.
As I sat in the Embassy listening to the rocks and chants hitting the wall outside, I couldn’t help but feel as though my maternal instincts had failed me. Why didn’t I know to leave? Why did I stand on the second floor, flippantly observing the gathering crowds, and assume it would just be your standard protest? Shouldn’t I have had some sixth sense, some feeling in my gut that things were going to go from bad to worse?
I knew that the baby was far from danger, picked up by family friends from his daycare miles from the Embassy. The staff had in fact been quite at a loss to understand why I couldn’t pick him up at 2pm. “Protests you say?”
The events of September 14th at the U.S Embassy in Tunis took many people by surprise. Not least of which the Tunisians who were even more taken aback when the order was given to evacuate all non-essential Embassy personnel and all families. (more…)
Natalia was born a stone's throw from the Queen's racetrack in Ascot, UK and has been trying to get a ticket to the races and a fabulous hat to go with it ever since. She was born to a Peruvian mother and an Irish father who kept her on her toes, moving her to Spain, Ireland and back to the UK before settling her in New York for the length of middle and high school. She is still uncertain of what she did to deserve that.
She fled to Boston for college and then Washington, D.C. to marry her wonderful husband, who she met in her freshman year at college. As a military man, he was able to keep her in the migratory lifestyle to which she had become accustomed. Within 5 months of marriage, they were off to Japan where they stayed for a wonderful 2 and one half years before coming home to roost. Baby Xavier was born in New York in 2011 and has not slept since.
A joy and an inspiration, it was Xavier who moved Natalia to entrepreneurship and the launch of CultureBaby. She has loved forging her own path and is excited for the next step for her family and CultureBaby.
Natalia believes in the potential for peace that all children carry within them and the importance of raising them as global citizens. She loves language, history, art and culture as well as Vietnamese Pho, Argentinian Malbec, English winters, Spanish summers and Japanese department stores...and she still hopes one day to catch the number 9 race with Queen Liz.
You can find her personal blog, The Culture Mum Chronicles.
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by World Moms Blog | Feb 12, 2013 | Kenya, Social Good, World Voice
We meet interesting people on all platforms! Twitter led us to Evans Wadango, the founder of Sustainable Development For All, an organization in Kenya. At only 19 years old he came up with a revolutionary idea, the “Use Solar, Save Lives” program to enable families to receive a regular source of income after getting solar lamps. Interested in the type of self-starter that he is from his home country of Kenya, we invited him to write us a guest post:
On my recent visit to Western Kenya, I met so many people living in dynamic villages, with different economic conditions. Some of the villages have electricity cables passing along the main road, but the families living just fifty meters from the electricity cable cannot afford the cost of tapping to it. Although I saw the worrying trend of a rapid decrease in the size of land owned by each family, some families grew sugarcane while others grew maize.
My friend and I visited one of the villages Sustainable Development For All-Kenya has been working in for several years where we met women of Mumashi group holding their usual meeting. I saw children going to school, healthy women and children, and more importantly, happy faces. The women were learning how to bake cakes. My friend asked the women how the baking of cakes was going to change their lives. The women were so eager to answer- but the group leader, mama Ruth explained: (more…)
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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by Mama Mzungu (Kenya) | Feb 7, 2013 | Casting a Wider Net, Culture, Kenya, Uncategorized, World Motherhood
Our “Casting a Wider Net” series features mothers around the world who’s voices have typically been excluded from the blogosphere, due to lack of access to computers or the internet, low literacy or poverty. This feature aims to include their important and distinct perspectives with interviews and occasional video clips.
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Meet Wilkister. She’s a mother of seven children, including a remarkable two sets of twins, ranging from 7 to 18 years old. She lives in Western Kenya and tends a shamba (farm) of maize, cassava, millet and vegetables. She met her husband, a primary school teacher, when she traveled to his village to visit her sister who had married a relative of his. The marriage was sealed with a pride price, she moved in to his homestead and has become an important member of his extended family. Her relatives describe her as responsible, strong and hardworking.
Unlike many other women in her village, she graduated secondary school. She speaks four languages fluently and worked as a translator for me on a recent trip to her village. The following are some of Wilkister’s thoughts on marriage, family and life… (more…)
Originally from Chicago, Kim has dabbled in world travel through her 20s and is finally realizing her dream of living and working in Western Kenya with her husband and two small boys, Caleb and Emmet. She writes about tension of looking at what the family left in the US and feeling like they live a relatively simple life, and then looking at their neighbors and feeling embarrassed by their riches. She writes about clumsily navigating the inevitable cultural differences and learning every day that we share more than we don’t. Come visit her at Mama Mzungu.
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by Jennifer Burden | Dec 22, 2012 | 2012, Uganda, World Moms Blog, World Motherhood
At World Moms Blog we’ve been so “Go! Go! Go!” that I haven’t had time to reflect on our year, and now that I have, it was really “WOW!!” Here are some amazing and memorable highlights!
World Moms Blog contributors and editors met up for the first time in Washington, DC in January, around the UN Foundation’s Volunteer Summit for Shot@Life. I was also invited to speak at the event on grass-roots fundraising and party planning for social good during the summit.
In March, our Indonesian contributors, Maureen and Shaula Bellour, also met for the first time ever in Jakarta for coffee. (more…)
Jennifer Burden is the Founder and CEO of World Moms Network, an award winning website on global motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. World Moms Network writes from over 30 countries, has over 70 contributors and was listed by Forbes as one of the “Best 100 Websites for Women”, named a “must read” by The New York Times, and was recommended by The Times of India.
She was also invited to Uganda to view UNICEF’s family health programs with Shot@Life and was previously named a “Global Influencer Fellow” and “Social Media Fellow” by the UN Foundation. Jennifer was invited to the White House twice, including as a nominated "Changemaker" for the State of the World Women Summit. She also participated in the One Campaign’s first AYA Summit on the topic of women and girl empowerment and organized and spoke on an international panel at the World Bank in Washington, DC on the importance of a universal education for all girls. Her writing has been featured by Baby Center, Huffington Post, ONE.org, the UN Foundation’s Shot@Life, and The Gates Foundation’s “Impatient Optimists.” She is currently a candidate in Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in the Executive Masters of Public Affairs program, where she hopes to further her study of global policies affecting women and girls.
Jennifer can be found on Twitter @JenniferBurden.
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