Speaker 1: Your dreams will have greater meaning when they are tied
Speaker 1: to the bitterment of your community. Welcome to the one
Speaker 1: you feed Throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance
Speaker 1: of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
Speaker 1: or you are what you think ring true. And yet
Speaker 1: for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf. Hey, I've got some really exciting news. You
Speaker 1: can now listen to our entire back catalog completely add free,
Speaker 1: exclusively on Stitcher Premium. You can listen to literally every
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Speaker 1: com slash wondering and use the promo code Wondering. Thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr
Speaker 1: terror I Trent, one of the most internationally acclaimed voices
Speaker 1: for women's empowerment and quality education, held by Oprah Winfrey
Speaker 1: as her all time favorite guest. Dr Trent is an
Speaker 1: inspiring and dynamic scholar, educator, humanitarian, motivational speaker, author, and
Speaker 1: the founder of terror I International. Her book is The
Speaker 1: Awakened Woman, Remembering and Reigniting Our Sacred Dreams. Hi, terror Hi,
Speaker 1: welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Eric,
Speaker 1: Thank you. I'm really excited to talk with you. Your
Speaker 1: book is called The Awakened woman remembering and reigniting our
Speaker 1: sacred dreams. And it's a wonderful book. I've heard you
Speaker 1: speak so many times, and so this is going to
Speaker 1: be a great episode. Let's start like we normally do
Speaker 1: with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her
Speaker 1: granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two wolves
Speaker 1: inside of us that are always at battle. One is
Speaker 1: a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
Speaker 1: and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
Speaker 1: granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second,
Speaker 1: and she looks up at her grandmother. She says, well, grandma,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. It though it's a different partable,
Speaker 1: but it is the same meaning, because you know, when
Speaker 1: I was growing up, I would find myself sitting with
Speaker 1: my grandmother, my mother, and the elders of the village
Speaker 1: around and open fire and listen to these great stories.
Speaker 1: And there was one story that struck so deep within
Speaker 1: me the story of the hunger, and my grandmother would
Speaker 1: always talk about the two hungers in our life. There
Speaker 1: is the little hunger and there is the great hunger,
Speaker 1: and should always say which hunger are you feeding? The
Speaker 1: little hunger is all about immediate gratification. The little hunger
Speaker 1: as they leave us craving for instant gratification, constant praise,
Speaker 1: material position, and other things that create that falls sense
Speaker 1: of self and leave us always feeling anxious, competitive, and ungrateful.
Speaker 1: But then there is the greatest of all hungers, which
Speaker 1: is hunger for a meaningful life. My grandmother would always say,
Speaker 1: ultimately we become bitta when we lead a life without meaning,
Speaker 1: because the great hunger drives us towards meaning in life,
Speaker 1: finding peoples in life, knowing that it's not the little
Speaker 1: hunger that's going to lead our life, but we find
Speaker 1: meaning when we tap into that great energy that comes
Speaker 1: deep within us. That's the great hunger. So when I
Speaker 1: listen to your parable, I see the great hunger being
Speaker 1: the one we need to feed more than the little hunger. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a beautiful interpretation, and I love that story. The
Speaker 1: thing that I think is so interesting sometimes at least
Speaker 1: this is for me is that sometimes the great hunger
Speaker 1: and the little hunger are very close together. Listeners of
Speaker 1: the show have heard me talk about this before. There
Speaker 1: are times that I approach what I'm doing here from
Speaker 1: a deep sense of love and service and all of that.
Speaker 1: And then there are times that I start worrying about downloads,
Speaker 1: you know, I start working, and so I find that
Speaker 1: like I have to watch because it's like I can
Speaker 1: look at almost the same thing either from the great
Speaker 1: hunger or the little hunger point of view, and the
Speaker 1: little hunger, for me, if not manage well, sucks the
Speaker 1: joy out of the great hunger. Stuff. Oh yeah, because
Speaker 1: what the little hunger does is it creates that tape
Speaker 1: recording ourselves that says we are not good enough, that
Speaker 1: says I want that, I want this. But when we
Speaker 1: dig deep within ourselves and find that great hunger, we
Speaker 1: begin to ask ourselves what is it that our soul ends?
Speaker 1: What is it that we truly need? And I always
Speaker 1: say to the audience and to the women that I coach,
Speaker 1: ask yourself what breaks my heart? Because it is in
Speaker 1: those moments of our brokenness. It is in those moments
Speaker 1: when we feel overwhelmed. Those are the moments when we
Speaker 1: listen very carefully, those are the moments we begin to
Speaker 1: understand who we are, to understand what is its stake,
Speaker 1: to understand what needs to be done. We begin to
Speaker 1: find solutions within us, which is equally as prestigious. I
Speaker 1: think as Oprah, No, that's very true, because if I
Speaker 1: had not gone through the challenges that I had gone
Speaker 1: through in my life, and if I had not hold
Speaker 1: on to the belief that my dreams are achievable, I
Speaker 1: doubt very much I'll be here with you, in your platform,
Speaker 1: in your presence. So I started way back. I was
Speaker 1: born in Rhodesia. My country is known as Zimbabwe, but
Speaker 1: I was gone during a colonial regime that never respected
Speaker 1: the black people and never respected women. So I always
Speaker 1: say I come from a long line of generations of
Speaker 1: women who were married when they were very young, before
Speaker 1: they could define their own trips. My great grandmother was
Speaker 1: married off when she was very young. My grandmother would
Speaker 1: follow the same pathway as my mother, and it's myself.
Speaker 1: And so by the time I was eighteen, I was
Speaker 1: already a mother of four children. Unfortunately, one of the
Speaker 1: babies died as an infant because I failed to produce
Speaker 1: enough milk to feed the child. I was a child myself,
Speaker 1: but all I wanted was in education. And when I
Speaker 1: look at all these generations of women before me, there
Speaker 1: were smart women, intelligent women, but because of the agenda,
Speaker 1: they were denied the right to education. I always talk
Speaker 1: about my grandmother. My grandmother was this wise woman, the
Speaker 1: psychologist of the community. I grew up in a poor
Speaker 1: rural community with no running water, no electricity, nothing, nothing
Speaker 1: at all. I lived in these hearts that were built
Speaker 1: out of poles and dagger in the flaws were made
Speaker 1: out of cowdown. That's where I grew up, and we
Speaker 1: were very poor. But my grandmother what was interesting was
Speaker 1: every evening they would come, the community members and people
Speaker 1: from foul would come not get her door, to ask
Speaker 1: you to go and deliver babies. And should we end
Speaker 1: up delivering so many babies in the community and far
Speaker 1: and an interesting story that I I always share, but
Speaker 1: I don't have shared it on podcasting. My grandmother, as
Speaker 1: she was getting old, she would always um shake her
Speaker 1: hands and she would shake in it in a way
Speaker 1: that she could not control her hands, and she would
Speaker 1: lose and her eyes were failing as well, and so
Speaker 1: my grandmother would always say, baby Gail, baby Guil, do
Speaker 1: you know why my hands shake? And I would say no.
Speaker 1: She said, look at the ends, look at this in
Speaker 1: the wisdom Visians bring thecans. They've delivered so many babies,
Speaker 1: and these eyes they are failing me. But look at
Speaker 1: these eyes. These eyes they're failing me. They're getting blind
Speaker 1: because these eyes they have seen so many vaginas. No longer,
Speaker 1: no wonder why I am blind. And I would laugh.
Speaker 1: And Auntie, in that moment of your vulnerability, in trying
Speaker 1: to tell you a story, she was telling me that
Speaker 1: she was not defined by her poverty, she was not
Speaker 1: defined by illiteracy, but she was defined by her wisdom.
Speaker 1: And she wanted me to have that wisdom. So I
Speaker 1: never had an opportunity to go to kindergarten. I started
Speaker 1: my school when I was already late and got married. Uh,
Speaker 1: I guess when I was about fourteen years of age.
Speaker 1: And as I said, I was. I had four babies
Speaker 1: when I was eighteen, and I realized I was following
Speaker 1: the same pathway that generations of women before me had followed.
Speaker 1: And then we gained independence. All of a sudden, they
Speaker 1: ware these Americans Australians coming into the community, and there
Speaker 1: was this particular woman. She came and found me sitting
Speaker 1: in a circle with other women and asked me one
Speaker 1: fundamental question, what I your dreams. I had never heard
Speaker 1: anyone asked me that question. And I am looking at
Speaker 1: this foreign woman and thinking, me, black woman, marginalized, I'm
Speaker 1: supposed to dream. You must be kidding me. And I'm
Speaker 1: thinking to myself, and I kept quiet. The other women
Speaker 1: talked about their dreams of educating their children, of making
Speaker 1: sure that there was food within their household. I kept quiet.
Speaker 1: I I knew I had dreams, but somehow I couldn't
Speaker 1: bring my voice to articulate those dreams to this tepe
Speaker 1: recorder that was sending me from sharing my dreams. So
Speaker 1: I kept quiet. The woman looked at me and she said,
Speaker 1: young woman, you've been quiet, Tell me what are your dreams?
Speaker 1: Maybe it was the way she looked at me, Maybe
Speaker 1: it was the way she kept on nudging at me.
Speaker 1: When I opened my mouth, I became a charter box
Speaker 1: and I said, I want to go to America. I
Speaker 1: want driven undergraduate a master's in the PhD. There was silence.
Speaker 1: The other women looked at me. And I could feel
Speaker 1: their eyes on me, saying, how dare you say that
Speaker 1: you don't even have a high school education? You even
Speaker 1: talk of America? What about the abusive husband that you have?
Speaker 1: How are you going to go to America? How are
Speaker 1: you going to leave your children behind? And the stranger
Speaker 1: I didn't know her name, but she introduced her name,
Speaker 1: but by then I didn't even record what a name was.
Speaker 1: But she looked at me and right into my eyes.
Speaker 1: I remember that moment, and she said, terrorized. If you
Speaker 1: believe in your dreams and you work hard, they are achievable.
Speaker 1: I couldn't believe it. I've never heard anyone. I've never
Speaker 1: heard anyone say to me my dreams are achievable. Here
Speaker 1: I was an abused to women, marginalized and silence. How
Speaker 1: can somebody, a stranger from some other place say that
Speaker 1: I can achieve my dreams? Can say I can go
Speaker 1: to America? And she said to me, I I think
Speaker 1: she's so doubt in my eyes, and she began to
Speaker 1: tell me about her organization and how she has seen
Speaker 1: women like me achieving their own dreams. I believed it.
Speaker 1: That's all I wanted as a poor mother is an
Speaker 1: African poor mother. I wanted to hear that. I She
Speaker 1: used the word tino bona, which means it is achievable.
Speaker 1: I ran to my mother and I said to my mother,
Speaker 1: I met someone who really believed that I can achieve
Speaker 1: my dreams. And my mother said, something, Terry, if you
Speaker 1: believe in what this stranger is safe to you. And remember,
Speaker 1: we're just getting our independence. And we had never seen
Speaker 1: so many white people, and especially white women coming into
Speaker 1: our neighbors because we lived in an apatheid regime where
Speaker 1: there was a separation between white and black. So I've
Speaker 1: never been in contact with white people. And to give
Speaker 1: this woman sitting right there next to me and touch
Speaker 1: me and look right into my eyes and say yes,
Speaker 1: that's all I needed. So my mother said, if you
Speaker 1: believe in what this stranger has said, and you work
Speaker 1: hard and you achieve your dreams, not only are you
Speaker 1: going to define who you are as a woman, you're
Speaker 1: also going to define every line that comes out of
Speaker 1: your womb and generations to come. And I realized in
Speaker 1: that moment that my mother was handing me an inheritance.
Speaker 1: She realized I wanted to break this cycle of povert,
Speaker 1: this vicious cycle of poverty that runs so deep in
Speaker 1: my community. So I told my mother, here are my
Speaker 1: dreams that I just shared with this stranger to go
Speaker 1: to America undergraduate masters and PhD. And my mother said,
Speaker 1: right down your dreams and bury them the same way
Speaker 1: we bury the humbilical court, the bath court. In my culture,
Speaker 1: I come from a place where when a child is born,
Speaker 1: the elders of the village, the ones that I call
Speaker 1: the wisdom whisperers, my grandmother's they would take that infant
Speaker 1: umbilical code, cut it off, and take the mother's dress,
Speaker 1: a piece of the mother's dress which they cut and
Speaker 1: tie the umbilical cord, and bury that umbilical code deep
Speaker 1: down under the ground, with the belief that when this
Speaker 1: child grows, wherever they go, whatever happens in their life,
Speaker 1: the umbilical code will always remind them of the importance
Speaker 1: of their birthplace. So my mother said, bury your dreams.
Speaker 1: Your dreams will always remind you of their importance, that
Speaker 1: you need to break this cycle of poverty. And my
Speaker 1: grandmother would always remind me of this rest that I
Speaker 1: always talk about, the rest of the baton. I would
Speaker 1: always visualize my great grandmother because that's the last woman
Speaker 1: that I know of in my and when she was
Speaker 1: born out always think she was born in this rest,
Speaker 1: the really rass holding this baton, and she's running so
Speaker 1: fast with this baton. She runs to hand over this
Speaker 1: paton to my grandmother. And this baton I call it
Speaker 1: the baton of poverty, the baton of ir literacy, the
Speaker 1: baton of early marriage, the baton of abuse. But also
Speaker 1: my grandmother would always tell me that it wasn't only
Speaker 1: the ugly baton that is being passed as she runs
Speaker 1: this rest, there's also the baton of wisdom. So she
Speaker 1: runs so fast with this baton of early marriage, literary,
Speaker 1: she passed it on to my grandmother. My grandmother grapes
Speaker 1: that baton. She runs so fast, she passed it on
Speaker 1: to my mother. My mother grapped that baton of poverty,
Speaker 1: the paton of i literancy. She ran so fast with
Speaker 1: that baton. She runs so fast, and she hands it
Speaker 1: over to me. Something happened. I never wanted that baton.
Speaker 1: I never wanted that rest. It wasn't part of my rest.
Speaker 1: I wanted to receive only the wisdom that was part
Speaker 1: of that baton. And fortunate enough, that's when Joela came in,
Speaker 1: and so my mother said to me, terror, I, even
Speaker 1: though you have received and taken on this paton, but
Speaker 1: you can change this paton, redefine this paton, and never
Speaker 1: pass it on to your own girls. So when I
Speaker 1: grapped that baton, I knew I needed to change that baton.
Speaker 1: So when my mother said, right down your dreams, I
Speaker 1: wrote four dreams at first to go to America undergraduate,
Speaker 1: master's and PhD. And when my mother asked me to
Speaker 1: read back those dreams, she said, I only see you
Speaker 1: having four dreams, your personal dreams. But let me remind
Speaker 1: you this. Your goals in life will be more achievable
Speaker 1: when they are connected to the greater good. I had
Speaker 1: no idea what my mother was talking about, and I
Speaker 1: looked at my mother. My mother saw the confusion in
Speaker 1: my face because I was an overwhelmed woman. I was poor,
Speaker 1: I lived in an abusive marriage. I wanted to change
Speaker 1: my life, and my mother said, your dreams will have
Speaker 1: greater meaning when they are tied to the betterment of
Speaker 1: your community. I would end up writing my fifty dream.
Speaker 1: When I'm done, I want to come back and improve
Speaker 1: the lives of women and girls. So the girls. They
Speaker 1: don't have to go through what I had gone through.
Speaker 1: These women that I talk about, my great grandmother, my grandmother,
Speaker 1: my mother, and myself, we were all exchanged for a
Speaker 1: cow is part of marriage, and I didn't want my
Speaker 1: own girls to be exchanged for a freaking cow. I
Speaker 1: know they say it's part of culture, but I am refusing.
Speaker 1: Culture is beautiful, Culture brings value, Culture build us. But
Speaker 1: I think it's just customs. You know, when we build
Speaker 1: our own homes in America, we do a custom built house.
Speaker 1: So somehow, some where men decided we need to pay
Speaker 1: a cow to get a woman. So it's a custom.
Speaker 1: It's not culture. That I got that very clearly, so
Speaker 1: I didn't want my girls to go through that. So
Speaker 1: it took me eight years after I buried my dreams
Speaker 1: to get my high school education. Eight years of failing,
Speaker 1: but eight years of never giving up. When you say
Speaker 1: that you buried your dreams, sometimes in America, if we
Speaker 1: hear that bury your dreams means like bury them and
Speaker 1: give up on them. You're talking about burying them like
Speaker 1: a seed in the soil. In my language, the word
Speaker 1: to bury in plant and the same and my grandma
Speaker 1: that when you when she says very She says, you
Speaker 1: bury from the weather so the termites won't get to
Speaker 1: your dreams. You are planting your dreams so you could
Speaker 1: see them grow and grow. And my mother would always
Speaker 1: say that and should say, go to that place where
Speaker 1: you buried your dreams so that you can invoke them.
Speaker 1: You can manifest them, so you could see them grow
Speaker 1: and grow. So I'll spend hours and hours sitting in
Speaker 1: that place where I had buried my dreams and make
Speaker 1: those mental images what my life would be if I
Speaker 1: achieve those dreams. And she would further ask me to say,
Speaker 1: feel as though you're already living in those dreams. So
Speaker 1: I'll visualize myself getting into that aeroplane. And remember, I've
Speaker 1: never seen an aeroplane in my life. The only aeroplane
Speaker 1: that I knew were the helicopters, the war helicopters. I
Speaker 1: was born and bred during the war the world that
Speaker 1: liberated my country, so there would be these helicopters that
Speaker 1: would come and drop bombs into my community. So I
Speaker 1: would always visualize those helicopters is a roplanes taking me
Speaker 1: to this place called America, and I would visualize myself
Speaker 1: seeing these to buildings beautiful buildings, and I would see
Speaker 1: myself on campus when a university, carrying books, walking into
Speaker 1: a classroom, and that helped me because it was fantasy,
Speaker 1: but it really helped me to believe and to ground
Speaker 1: myself in these dreams. And so after eight years, I
Speaker 1: gained my high school diploma. You know, it was a
Speaker 1: long process because maybe I wasn't smart, but we we
Speaker 1: didn't have enough money to pay for all my correspondence
Speaker 1: because I couldn't go to a classroom. I wasn't I
Speaker 1: was an adult and I couldn't fit into a classroom.
Speaker 1: So I would do correspondence and we were still under
Speaker 1: the British system of education, where I would do my
Speaker 1: paperwork and send and go to this Row post office
Speaker 1: and send these papers to this place somewhere in Britain
Speaker 1: called Cambridge, and I would wait three six months for
Speaker 1: the results to come, and they will always come in
Speaker 1: a brown envelope. And open that brown envelope. I remember
Speaker 1: the first of the the time I opened that brown envelope
Speaker 1: and I see I have a you, and then F
Speaker 1: you and graded F failure. And how I relied on
Speaker 1: My mother was a subsistence farmer. She would collect every penny.
Speaker 1: She would sell members and any produce. I needed twenty
Speaker 1: two about thirty five dollars by subject, and I needed
Speaker 1: five subjects and I would only take two or three,
Speaker 1: depending on my mother's income from whatever she sells. And
Speaker 1: and I'll go back to my mother and I would
Speaker 1: say I failed. My mother would say, okay, let me
Speaker 1: sell these ground mats, let me sell the peannuts and
Speaker 1: the members, and see she would be held me and
Speaker 1: at the forty dollars, I would go and and roll
Speaker 1: and write and wait another six months and that paper
Speaker 1: comes again, that brown name develope comes and I opened
Speaker 1: it and there's a you, and there's a and f
Speaker 1: U graded failure. And I'll go back to my mother.
Speaker 1: And I was so emotional about it. Even when I
Speaker 1: talk about it, I am. I become so emotional because
Speaker 1: my mother was My mother was very poor, but she
Speaker 1: wanted me to change my life and should sell the
Speaker 1: last grain and give me the forty dollars that I
Speaker 1: needed and out going right. And after eight years, and
Speaker 1: I'll find myself opening that brown envelope and realized, after
Speaker 1: eight years, I have a B and I have an
Speaker 1: eight And I applied at Oklahoma State university and got
Speaker 1: accepted and I and I remember getting into that aeroplane
Speaker 1: and oh gosh, there was this feeling that I've been
Speaker 1: there before, just sitting in that aeroplane, that aero plane
Speaker 1: taking me to this place called America. I arrived in America,
Speaker 1: it was wintertime, and I began to take my classes,
Speaker 1: and there was this joy in me. Finally I am here.
Speaker 1: Finally I have achieved in the first dream of going
Speaker 1: to America. It was the hardest of all because I
Speaker 1: didn't have much money to find that trip. And I
Speaker 1: remember I used to do community development work and I
Speaker 1: was shot six hundred forty dollars for my air fair.
Speaker 1: I didn't have any scholarship, nothing, And I went to
Speaker 1: my mother and I said, I don't think I can go.
Speaker 1: I can't pay I can't pay my air fair. I
Speaker 1: am short six hundred forty dollars. My mother looked at me,
Speaker 1: and I could see tears in her eyes because she
Speaker 1: knew I had gone through eight years of trying to
Speaker 1: get my g e D and failing, and then finally
Speaker 1: I passed. And then I can't get six hundred forty
Speaker 1: dollars to come to America. My mother without me knowing
Speaker 1: she would go to the headman, the village, head of
Speaker 1: the village, and she tells the story that you're not
Speaker 1: here at Ibery, dear dreams, and she has worked so hard.
Speaker 1: I she just don't know how to console her. She
Speaker 1: won't work up, she won't eat, and he had men say,
Speaker 1: don't you worry, I'll do something about it. My mother
Speaker 1: comes back. She never told me what had happened. And
Speaker 1: one morning my mother woke me up. She said come, come,
Speaker 1: and I said, no, I'm well. I I didn't want
Speaker 1: to even to go to to the kitchen. He said, no, no, come,
Speaker 1: and I went and I saw the d man sitting
Speaker 1: in my mother's kitchen and he had pennies and dollars
Speaker 1: and and discounting, and my mother is validating every penny
Speaker 1: and say yes, yes, yes. And the headman looked at
Speaker 1: me and they said the whole village came together and
Speaker 1: sold everything that they had. Some they sold the goats,
Speaker 1: some old members and is six dollars for you, you
Speaker 1: can go to America. And that's how he came to America. Wow,
Speaker 1: that is so amazing. What is so staggering to me
Speaker 1: is that, you know, we talk about achieving our dreams.
Speaker 1: And it's so easy to get frustrated so quickly, and
Speaker 1: it took you eight years for the first one. I
Speaker 1: think because my grandmother would always ask, which hunger are
Speaker 1: you feeding right now? Is it that voice that says
Speaker 1: you're worthless, that voice that says you can't go, that
Speaker 1: voice that says you live in an abusive relationship you
Speaker 1: can't do. Or you listen and feed that voice that
Speaker 1: is deep within you, the great hunger that is within you,
Speaker 1: that is saying I am seeking for meaning in my life.
Speaker 1: That's the voice that you feed. That's the hunger that
Speaker 1: you feel. And so I kept on feed him on
Speaker 1: that hanger and I and I truly believe that when
Speaker 1: we feed that hanger, that great hanger, we tapped deep
Speaker 1: into it. The universe is a way to honor us
Speaker 1: because we have remained loyal to our dreams. And I
Speaker 1: guess that's what happened in my life because when I
Speaker 1: came to the US, I came with my children. It
Speaker 1: was tough time. But despite the toughness the challenges, I
Speaker 1: managed to go through all my classes and graduated my
Speaker 1: my my undergraduate in agriculture, in my master's in plant pathology.
Speaker 1: And I went on to work and I worked for
Speaker 1: Here for International. And I remember applying for this job
Speaker 1: and I had no idea um what I was going for.
Speaker 1: And when I got that job, one day, I am
Speaker 1: working in this room and this white woman looked at
Speaker 1: me and she says, I know you. I think I
Speaker 1: know you. And I am thinking to myself, no, I don't.
Speaker 1: I've met so many American women I don't. And she said, seriously,
Speaker 1: I think I know. I think you're from Zimbabwe. And
Speaker 1: then I looked at it and I realized, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: that was the very movement, the woman that I had
Speaker 1: met some forteen years in my village, the woman who
Speaker 1: had inspired me to believe in my dreams, the woman
Speaker 1: who never saw the marginalized, the woman in me. Maybe
Speaker 1: she's saw a champion. Maybe she saw something that I
Speaker 1: wasn't seeing in myself. And now and then is Joel
Speaker 1: and she is the CEO and president of her for International,
Speaker 1: and they just employed me as deputy director for Monitoring
Speaker 1: and Evaluation. And sure enough, my first trip back home
Speaker 1: with my job, I went back to the place where
Speaker 1: I had buried my dreams, the place where I had
Speaker 1: spent hours and hours meditating and visualizing the life I wanted,
Speaker 1: and now I am living that life. And I dug
Speaker 1: my dreams and check going to America, check undergraduate, check
Speaker 1: my master's, and reburied those dreams. And I came back
Speaker 1: and I enrolled myself at Western Michigan University, where I
Speaker 1: achieved my PhD in Monitoring and Evaluation, which is a
Speaker 1: lot of statistics and measurement for an old woman like me.
Speaker 1: I have always been the oldest student in every class
Speaker 1: that I took, and sometimes older than the professor herself
Speaker 1: in the professor himself, But I didn't care because I hunger,
Speaker 1: great hunger that I needed to feed. That I knew
Speaker 1: Ah who was going to be my passport to achieve
Speaker 1: in my dreams. So I remember the day that I
Speaker 1: walked that podium where they were now giving me that
Speaker 1: paper that now says I'm a PhD holder. I truly
Speaker 1: felt like a lawyer. We addressed a cast to yourself
Speaker 1: as well as to the world, to say that if
Speaker 1: we give opportunities two women and girls, and especially to
Speaker 1: those who are torn down and marginalized by the social
Speaker 1: ills of our times, they can also achieve their dreams.
Speaker 1: And I also realizing in that moment when I was
Speaker 1: working that podium that to be where I am today,
Speaker 1: to be able to say now I am a PhD holder,
Speaker 1: it is because I stand, or I stood on the
Speaker 1: shoulders of others, of many who gave me that opportunity,
Speaker 1: of many who in their own lives decided to feed
Speaker 1: on their great hunger, and to be able to see
Speaker 1: the great hunger in others and inspire that great hunger.
Speaker 1: I've been inspired by many in my life. Before you
Speaker 1: got your PhD, though you are, most gave up. Tell
Speaker 1: us about that many times I wanted to give up.
Speaker 1: You know when when when when people see successful people,
Speaker 1: they always think that, oh my gosh, they never gave up.
Speaker 1: It was all easy for them, or they're so determined.
Speaker 1: But let me say that, oh gosh, there were so
Speaker 1: many moments that I gave up. I remember when my
Speaker 1: children came to the US three months down the road.
Speaker 1: They were brushing their teeth and I could see the
Speaker 1: guns were bleeding as they were brushing their teeth, and
Speaker 1: they would call me, Mom, Mom, we're bleeding. And at
Speaker 1: first I thought, well, maybe because you know, we never
Speaker 1: brushed our teeth we didn't. We grew up in the village.
Speaker 1: We never a tooth brush and took best. Maybe that
Speaker 1: could be it. But then I realized, oh no, when
Speaker 1: I came to America. Before coming to a Rica, infect
Speaker 1: my kids used to eat fruits, vegetables and cornmeal. It's
Speaker 1: all food that we grew in the village. And all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, I'm in America. You can't afford fruits
Speaker 1: and vegetables. They're very expensive. So what do I result
Speaker 1: to French fries and beggars Because I used to work
Speaker 1: at these places called McDonald's and whatever. You on campus
Speaker 1: and out oout bring leftovers, French fries and whatever and
Speaker 1: fed the kids because many nights we slept hungry and
Speaker 1: that was the source of food. And if they were
Speaker 1: pizzas or what about just gather everything. Even when people
Speaker 1: live their pizzas, I would say, put them in beg
Speaker 1: I will take them moment and feed my children, because
Speaker 1: I didn't want my kids to go und dream. And
Speaker 1: I guess in many ways it was new food to
Speaker 1: my kids and it was affecting them. And I I
Speaker 1: ended up going to the university and there was this
Speaker 1: guy Dr. Ronder, who was the vice president of student Affairs,
Speaker 1: and I said, you know, it's one thing to have
Speaker 1: a dream. I have a dream and I've worked so hard,
Speaker 1: but it's another to see my own children going hungry.
Speaker 1: And he said, well, don't worry about that, as long
Speaker 1: as you don't mind if we go to the local stores,
Speaker 1: because there are some stores that can give you left
Speaker 1: over fruits and vegetables that they would normally throw away
Speaker 1: because they are getting begged. And I said, no, I
Speaker 1: don't mind. How eat them? So we went to the
Speaker 1: shore and this guy he says, no, we can't do
Speaker 1: that in case you eat these and if anything happens
Speaker 1: to your kids, you might end up suing us. And
Speaker 1: I and I'm so emotional, and I said, no I won't,
Speaker 1: so you please just give me the fruits and vegetable
Speaker 1: so I can feed my kids. And he said, yes,
Speaker 1: what we're going to do instead of me, rather than
Speaker 1: me ending you these fruits and vegetables, why don't I
Speaker 1: put them in a cardboard box and make sure that
Speaker 1: four o'clock you come here, and I will make sure
Speaker 1: that the cardboard box is placed the outside near the
Speaker 1: trash can, and you can piece take your cardboard books
Speaker 1: and go home and feed the kids. So because I
Speaker 1: used to work three three jobs, because I didn't have
Speaker 1: any scholarship, and I used to take sixt into eighteen
Speaker 1: hours of course work because in my mind, I thought,
Speaker 1: if I take more cost work, I'll be able to
Speaker 1: get out of the university system and find some work.
Speaker 1: But that proved to be very difficult. Three jobs eighteen
Speaker 1: hours of coursework and I can care of five kids.
Speaker 1: That was tough, and I think the toughest time in
Speaker 1: my life. And I would always be that trash can late.
Speaker 1: I was late, and I would find the cardboard books
Speaker 1: is already drawn into the trash can, some of the
Speaker 1: fruits and vegetables are already have already is pelled into
Speaker 1: the trash can, and I would collect everything, wash and
Speaker 1: feed my children and ask myself, who am I to
Speaker 1: even complain that my own children I eating from trash
Speaker 1: can or from fruits and vegetables that are collected from
Speaker 1: trash can when I know there are millions of homeless
Speaker 1: children in Sub Saharan Africa who are eating from trashcans
Speaker 1: that I never washed, at least the American trash and
Speaker 1: someone is washing it. And who am I even to
Speaker 1: complain that I live in a trailer house in Oklahoma
Speaker 1: with no air condition, with nothing is delabridated. When it rains,
Speaker 1: I find myself in a corner with my children and
Speaker 1: praying that, oh gosh, I walked, the tornado is not
Speaker 1: going to come to Who am I to complain? When
Speaker 1: I know in America and in many Western countries, women
Speaker 1: and men, they are homeless. They live on the streets
Speaker 1: where they have no shelter. You know, when I began
Speaker 1: to think of that, I knew I had an advantage.
Speaker 1: I was privileged to be in this beautiful country, even
Speaker 1: to attend classes, even to have food to feed my children,
Speaker 1: because I could see homeless people, people who had fought
Speaker 1: in the world, displaying this plot as that they were womeless,
Speaker 1: they have no shelter. People. We have done great things
Speaker 1: for America, and we am I to complain? And those
Speaker 1: thoughts grounded me. And even though I wanted to give up,
Speaker 1: but I always think, Gee, if I give up, now,
Speaker 1: am I saying my little girl who was now ten
Speaker 1: years old? Am I saying she was going to get married?
Speaker 1: As I had been? There are the three little girls,
Speaker 1: though they were younger. If I go and give up.
Speaker 1: Am I saying they're going to follow the same pathway
Speaker 1: that my greatgrandmother, my grandmother, and my grandmother and my
Speaker 1: mother had followed. No, No, there's something beautiful about adversity.
Speaker 1: And I tell the stories not to say because you know,
Speaker 1: I was a victim, because many of your listener may
Speaker 1: probably think, oh, porter right, she must have been a
Speaker 1: victim to be married dealty have gone through all that.
Speaker 1: But let me just say, no, I am not a victim.
Speaker 1: I am part of the solution. This great handle within
Speaker 1: me gives me the solution as long as I can
Speaker 1: tap into it. I am the mistress and master of
Speaker 1: my own destiny. That's beautiful. And tell listeners about your kids. Now,
Speaker 1: my you know, I talk about this paton that had
Speaker 1: been passed on two from my grandmother to my great grandmother,
Speaker 1: to my grandmother to my mother. I wanted to redefine
Speaker 1: that paton. I have a girl that came here when
Speaker 1: she was hardly nine years old. She graduated with mechanical
Speaker 1: engineering degree from Oklahoma State University. She's now in Oklahoma.
Speaker 1: And I have another little girl she came to when
Speaker 1: she was hardly four years old. She's now graduating this
Speaker 1: summer with biomedical degree from Western Michigan University. And I
Speaker 1: have another little girl, my last born. She's uh at
Speaker 1: a college in Sacramento, and she has been accepted at
Speaker 1: one of the universities in in San Francisco. And I
Speaker 1: can tell you this, my grandkids, even my great grandkids,
Speaker 1: are now going to receive this redefined baton. I can
Speaker 1: visualize my girls running with a different baton, running in
Speaker 1: this race, and I call that the rest of engineers,
Speaker 1: the rest of artists, musician, the rest of whatever goodness
Speaker 1: you can think of. They're passing it on to my grandkids.
Speaker 1: And my grandkids are going to hold that atton, this
Speaker 1: paton that had been redefined in passing it on to
Speaker 1: their own kids. That's what opportunities does. When we are
Speaker 1: given that opportunity, we can redefine our lives. And that's
Speaker 1: the reason why I am doing the work that I
Speaker 1: am doing, because others have given me that opportunity, opportunities.
Speaker 1: Others have allowed me to stand on their shoulders. And
Speaker 1: I want the girls in my community and every way
Speaker 1: to redefine and run with a different baton. So when
Speaker 1: I finished my page, Dave, and I am thinking, dear mother,
Speaker 1: Why did you make me write down that fifth dream
Speaker 1: to give back? I have no money. How am I
Speaker 1: going to accomplish that dream? And that's when I decided
Speaker 1: to come up with my own titiutes because that strange
Speaker 1: that woman or like it's said Tina Goona, it is achievable.
Speaker 1: So I said, I'm going to redesign my T shirts
Speaker 1: have uh Tino Gona on my T shirts. It is achievable,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to sell my T shirts go back
Speaker 1: home like a champion, build schools. My goodness, I only
Speaker 1: sold the trend T shirts and mainly to my American friends,
Speaker 1: and I realized I didn't have a marketing degree, and
Speaker 1: I was devastated, overwhelmed, and I kept from thinking how
Speaker 1: an earth was I going to fulfill that fifty dream.
Speaker 1: I've done everything that I know if I've designed T shirts,
Speaker 1: have tried to sell them. And then I got a
Speaker 1: phone call from operah win Free and she donated one
Speaker 1: point five million dollars US dollars towards that fifth dream.
Speaker 1: And today we have build in schools and I just
Speaker 1: got new numbers from our schools. We have impacted eight
Speaker 1: thousand kids that have gone through our schools nineteen pouss
Speaker 1: and our Girls, which was ournhead of to see a
Speaker 1: large number of girls sitting in classrooms with boys and
Speaker 1: competing and doing very well. And I just came back
Speaker 1: from Zimbabwe and worked seven girls into universities and colleges
Speaker 1: ahead of the school that I'm talking about. All these
Speaker 1: schools that we have rebuilt. One of the schools is
Speaker 1: sixty years old because it was built during the colonial system,
Speaker 1: colonial era, and that school never had a child going
Speaker 1: to university. Never And now we have a child. We
Speaker 1: have a kid we're doing medical um medicine at University
Speaker 1: of Jury. Another child graduated from the University of Zimbabwe.
Speaker 1: And now we have seven girls. It was never heard
Speaker 1: of seven girls into colleges enrolled. That's amazing. It is
Speaker 1: truly wonderful. Yeah, well, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 1: We're at the end of our time here. Although I
Speaker 1: could listen to you talk about this for hours and hours,
Speaker 1: I know that you are offering listeners some free lessons
Speaker 1: and so I thought i'd give you a chance to
Speaker 1: talk about that. Yeah. So, um, you know, I wrote
Speaker 1: this book, The Awakened Women. Um it it helps women
Speaker 1: really to understand what silences them. It also helps them
Speaker 1: to gain the tools to their own awakening. And it's
Speaker 1: it is exercises and tools. So what I decided to
Speaker 1: do is to come up with an online over online
Speaker 1: classes where individual was who are interested to learn more
Speaker 1: about how they can also achieve their dreams. The rituals
Speaker 1: that I also used, uh, the science that I also
Speaker 1: used in achieving my dreams, it's all packaged in these lessons.
Speaker 1: So if you are interested to get a free meditational
Speaker 1: or audio or one of my lessons, you can go
Speaker 1: to You can text on your phone fall fall four
Speaker 1: nine nine nine, so three falls and three nine, and
Speaker 1: then you wait and then you input feed F E
Speaker 1: E D and then you get access to the lesson.
Speaker 1: That's our own special code there feed. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: It is a special code. Because I believe some of
Speaker 1: your of your listeners, if they're interested, they can you know,
Speaker 1: get some of my of my lessons. You know, I
Speaker 1: I teach about finding your great hanger by asking yourself
Speaker 1: what breaks my heart? And I think in those moments
Speaker 1: of our brokenness, that's when we really find a yearning
Speaker 1: to yield ourselves and also to find solutions to our
Speaker 1: own problems. I also talk about um dealing from our
Speaker 1: soul wounds. When I talk about the paton, we all
Speaker 1: are coming from a place where we have been hindered
Speaker 1: some kind of paton. It could be a baton of privilege,
Speaker 1: It could be a baton of poverty, it could be
Speaker 1: whatever baton, but that lesson would really help you to
Speaker 1: dig deep and find ways to get out of that
Speaker 1: paton in person, in different paton, and I will make
Speaker 1: sure we link to that in the show notes. I
Speaker 1: will also make sure there's a link to your foundation
Speaker 1: also in our show notes. That would be great. That
Speaker 1: would be great. Thank you, Thank you so much. This
Speaker 1: has been a wonderful conversation and I really appreciate you
Speaker 1: sticking around an extra day in the US to talk
Speaker 1: to me. That was very kind. Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 1: Now I can start packing myself time to go home. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you very much. Eric, I appreciate, thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 1: If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
Speaker 1: consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast.
Speaker 1: Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support.
Speaker 1: The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank
Speaker 1: our sponsors for supporting the show.