I’ve had the good fortune to have some incredible souls step into my life. This post is about two of these that I first met in 2017. I saw both of them again in May 2019.

ZAINAB SALIBI – At the age of 23, Zainab founded Women for Women International, a grassroots humanitarian and development organization dedicated to serving women survivors of wars by offering support, tools, and access to life-changing skills to move from crisis and poverty to stability and economic self-sufficiency. Under her leadership as the organization’s CEO the organization grew from helping 30 women upon its inception to more than 478,000 marginalized  women in 8 conflict areas. 

In her move to journalism and media, Zainab created and hosted several very impressive shows. Zainab is the author of several books including the national bestseller Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam, If You Knew Me You Would Care, and her latest, Freedom is an Inside Job.Zainab has been consistently identified as one of the women impacting the world

HER IMPACT ON ME – After meeting Zainab, I devoted 9 months to working with the leadership then for Women for Women International to help them explore a twist on their existing funding model of getting individuals to fund one women at a time in their programs. The model I worked on was to have a group of women in Maine fund an entire class of Kurdish women living in Syria. My fundraising project was not successful but I did donate some of my own money.

TOHNIA ALEXANDER – Tohnia and I will be friends for life I believe. To date, we have spent 2 /12 days with each other twice. I think maybe we met each other before in another lifetime. Our souls seem to relate so well.

Tohnia is a writer and from what I can see is also an incredible mom. She lives on Whidbey Island which is in the Pudget Sound north of Seattle Washington and it is about 37 miles long. Sounds a bit remote to me.

We are currently planning ways we can spend more time together in 2020.