If you find yourself overwhelmed by all the problems around you, it might be hard to believe that one person can make a difference in the lives of others. In her book How to Make an African Quilt: The Story of the Patchwork Project of Segou, Mali (Nighthawk Press), Bonnie Lee Black shows us that the desire to help other women, combined with vision and taking action can change lives.

Bonnie went to Gabon, Central Africa, through the Peace Corps, in 1996, at the age of 51, to teach health and nutrition to women. After her two years of service, she realized she loved Africa so much that she wanted to stay longer.  So she traveled to Segou, Mali, and continued to look for ways of being of service. When a group of Malian seamstresses visiting Bonnie’s house saw a wall quilt that she made and one of the women asked her what it was,  Bonnie replied, “Patchwork.” The seamstress said, “We must learn how to do that,” and Bonnie’s next project, The Patchwork Project of Segou, Mali, was born. For her remaining nearly three years in Mali, she taught Malian seamstresses how to do patchwork quilting, in the hopes that one day their work could be sold over the Internet.

In the book, Bonnie describes her feeling of being at home in Africa. She says, “For reasons even I didn’t fully understand, I felt I must stay.” As she taught groups of women how to quilt, she was accepted and embraced as a sister by the women of the Patchwork Project. The women who learned to quilt saw the way that the project could make a difference in their lives. One of Bonnie’s students, Fatou Sogoba, said:

“The Patchwork Project is a good project of development. It is a project that can succeed here because Malian textiles are very rich. It will also permit women to have money, which will make them economically independent.”

At a recent book release event in Taos, New Mexico, Bonnie shared more about the reasons that quilting was a natural craft for the women of Mali. The area has a long history of growing cotton and using it for textiles. Bonnie said, “The people of Mali are proud of their traditions, and their love of cotton runs deep.” She said that all the steps in producing cotton goods are performed in Mali, from growing cotton to weaving fabric to celebrating the creation of beautiful clothing and wall hangings. Because it is so hot in Mali year-round, the idea of using a quilt to keep warm at night was a foreign one. But the women of Segou immediately saw how scraps of fabric could be used, rather than wasted, to produce a beautiful cloth blanket for people in colder climates. The women attended Bonnie’s classes to learn how to quilt with the intent that they would continue to teach other women. The classes also undertook commissions, such as a large quilt to be given as a wedding present to Bonnie’s nephew and his new bride.

When Bonnie said that she felt at home in Africa, some of the women commented that Bonnie had surely been African in a former life. In contemplating this possibility, Bonnie began to envision herself as a young girl born in Mali, but stolen by slave traders. Bonnie’s vision of herself in a former life, as a woman named Jeneba, becomes yet another square stitched into the many stories in her new book that create a patchwork pattern.

The fictional character of Jeneba was a slave on a plantation in South Carolina. She eventually bears children, fathered by the plantation owner. Jeneba is also a quilt maker who uses her designs to help show the way to escaping slaves on the Underground Railroad. By the end of the book, Jeneba’s story comes together with the quilters of Mali, showing how lives that have been unraveled can be made whole again.

For more on Bonnie and her work with the Peace Corps and in Mali, read our profile here or visit Bonnie’s website.

guest post by Lucinda Cross, Author of The Road to Redemption

People talk so much about fear these days that is has become a convenient excuse just to sit in the corner and not take action. Giving your power away to fear is like a lioness giving up her position in the animal kingdom.  It’s normal and human to be afraid of the unknown, but don’t let it dominate you.

Life doesn’t reward quitters, towel throwers, or forfeiters.  If a lioness doesn’t conquer her fear, she would not be able to hunt wild game; she would die from hunger because she was afraid. So how does the lioness conquer her fear? She goes after the big game.  That thing that is bigger and sometimes faster than herself.

We must be like the lioness and roar, stop rattling like a snake and roar like a lion or lioness. Lions are very social and live in families called prides, notice the word pride.  They are amongst other fearless lions.  When you observe the lion in nature, you will notice that it is best described by its strength, natural dignity and demand for respect. The lion is born as a powerful creature and power naturally comes to it. (Just like you attract what you are.)

Each of us was not born with fear in us. It is something we decided to adopt.  We told ourselves that fear can conquer us, shake, rattle and roll us around.  You are born powerful and wonderfully made, just like the lion.

Get your roar back by doing the following: Read more…

guest blog by Betsey Martens, Boulder, CO

The idea to take our kids around the world existed long before they did.  In 1986 my husband, Dave, and I quit jobs that we loved, rented our house and set off with a round-the-world ticket.  The ticket required only that our travel be continuously in one direction.  We chose west.  Other than a plan to stay with a good friend who lives in New Zealand as our first stop, we had no reservations anywhere.  Our most pressing obligation was to stay in front of the monsoon that moves through Australasia in the spring.

Of all the things we resolved to do as a result of that trip, two stayed etched in my willfulness.  I really wanted to have children and I wanted to do a trip like this with them. Two years later, Brian was born.  Two years following Brian came Emma.  And three years following Emma, Isabelle was born.  Two weeks later, Dave had a vasectomy.  There’s a limit to how many children you can drag around the world.  Three was it for us.

We spent years trying to knit together a realistic plan to get away, and saving as much money as we could. After much calculus we decided the year would be 2003, when the kids would be 15, 12 and 10. At that point it was three years away, a sufficient planning horizon for a huge trip. When 2003 rolled around the world was a much-changed place. The events of September 11, 2001 seemed to have imprinted on our national psyche a deeply embedded fear of leaving the country. Travel was down, worry was up, but for us there was no turning back. Read more…

Eve Ensler

I had the privilege of seeing Eve Ensler kick off her latest book tour for In The Body of the World on Friday, April 26 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her absolute honesty about her own suffering through abuse and cancer  and the experiences of the women of the Congo roared through the historic Lensic Theater in such a way that no one could leave there untouched, asleep, still pretending that there is not horrific violence against women and girls in the world. I was inspired to fight harder, more honestly, more radically for the rights of women through the work of The Girl’s Guide to Swagger.

Ensler was sexually abused and beaten as a child.  As a result, she learned to emotionally leave her body so that she wouldn’t feel the pain. While she was writing The Vagina Monologues, she heard stories from women about their sexual experiences. “I wish I could say that the stories that I heard were about pleasure and satisfaction and desire and orgasm, but 99 percent of those stories were about women being abused, incested, raped, being forced to leave their vaginas disconnected, never knowing their vaginas,” said Ensler.  “That was the beginning of whole consciousness radicalization for me…I had no idea of the epidemic proportions of violence on this planet. It is like a hidden story.”

Ensler also said that women are fractured and cut off from ourselves by the trauma that they have experienced; that we are asleep. But rather than staying in this “semi-sleep,” Ensler woke up and came out fighting. She broke the taboo regarding talking about vaginas with her play The Vagina Monologues.

After she had been performing the play for awhile by herself, Ensler became restless. She wanted to do something more.

Read more…

Post by Gina Pujols, for The Girl’s Guide to Swagger

Elizabeth Gilbert Speaking at the WRC Leadership Luncheon

I recently attended a women’s leadership luncheon hosted by The Women’s Resource Center in Philadelphia. The organization provides free or low-cost legal outreach, career advice and other various important programs to help benefit women and young girls in the area. If you live in the Philadelphia area, click here to learn more about the center and see if you would like to join them in their volunteer efforts. The luncheon featured awards and highlighted the accomplishments of many significant women who have worked to improve the great city of Philadelphia. It was heartwarming to see so many people working to benefit women’s livelihood in the city.

But the best part was hearing the great author, Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and Commitment speak. She came to support the center’s mission and spoke about how women helping each other is one of our greatest talents and an invaluable resource. She also spoke about some of the trials and tribulations she experienced living in New York City in her younger years and also reminisced about some of her more solemn moments traveling around the world.

Read more…

Guest blog by Gretchen Cawthon, of Girls Can’t WHAT?

When I was 14 years old, my family was hit head on by a drunk driver while traveling 55mph on a dark, snow-covered highway.  We all suffered injuries, with mine being the worst. One of my vertebrae was shattered and I was unable to move or walk. The first hospital I arrived at took one look at my x-rays and promptly shipped me off to another trauma center nearby. At hospital #2, they also shook their heads and said they couldn’t help and sent me off to an even bigger hospital in Indianapolis.

For three days, I laid in intensive care while doctors discussed the options with my parents, who despite broken ribs and other various injuries, had continued to travel with me from one medical facility to the next. The doctors taking on my case had seen similar injuries before. They worked closely with the race car drivers at the Indy 500 track and handled a lot of “high impact” injuries before. However, in most of the cases, the injured persons were left paralyzed from the waist down. Things weren’t looking so good for me.

Although most of the events from that time (20+ years ago) are fuzzy, there is one thing I remember fairly clearly. No one ever told me that the odds were impossible. I was simply told they were improbable. I remember thinking that impossible and improbable are two different things. I figured I at least had a chance, even if it was a slim one.

On the fourth day, I was taken in for surgery and the doctors fused together what they could from the bone fragments scattered around my spinal chord. They grafted some bone from my hip and then screwed in two metal plates from the vertebra above and below the fractured one, leaving me with a scar on my right hip and an 11″ incision down my back. That was the best they could do.  Whether I could walk or not was still unknown.

A few days later, I was scheduled to start physical therapy. Read more…

If you are looking for some inspiration and a bit of advice on how to kick start your business and sharpen your message, you may want to talk to Lucinda Cross. She left her corporate job, which was working behind the scenes to make other people look good, in order to step out in front and start her own business.

In addition to advising entrepreneurs and speaking on panels, Lucinda has written two books. Corporate Mom Drop Outs contains the stories of women who left corporate jobs and made their own success working from home. Her second book The Road to Redemption: Overcoming Life’s Detours, Obstacles, and Challenges, advises us on how to grow and embrace the opportunities that life brings to us. It was published in 2012 and has been an Amazon best seller ever since.

What Lucinda loves to do is work with women to help hone their message. She helps them set a vision and be clear on it, along with identifying ways to make money with their business. She says “It is important to have a vision. Women can use their words as powerful vessels to heal. They can use the power of the tongue and pen to make a difference.” Read more…