Girl Rising Page #5

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dead volcano, 17000 feet up.

In the perpetual snow of the Andes.

They tell me my

town is harsh. Hazardous.

The highest human habitation in the world.

I don't know.

My father named me after

a famous warrior - Xena.

He had seen her on TV

but since he could neither read or write

he didn't know that her

name started with an X.

He said that like ker

I would grow up to be a

fearless defender of the poor.

A heroine prepared to go to

war against ruthless men,

if honor demanded it.

If a warrior's name

was my father's first gift to me,

a brave heart was his second.

There is nothing I can't overcome.

My father knew something

about brave hearts.

For he, like all the men

of La Rinconada, was a miner.

He comes looking for hope

and finds nothing but misery.

For every golden ring,

two thousand tons of

rock must be moved.

For 35 years my father

drilled and dug.

Hunted tirelessly for a glimpse

of glitter winking in the ground.

But this mountain, she

will tremble the fiercest spirit,

shatter the strongest back.

I still don't know what

happened that day.

But I imagine it.

The slam of ice,

the rock of grove,

the crash, the grind,

the sudden black.

He survived but he never

returned to the mines.

And each day after that

he died a little bit more.

I was barely 5, but the memory

of that day still haunts me.

As if a shadow had fallen over my father.

As weeks went by and we

grew desperate for money

my father became a cook,

and my mother took his place

on the mountain.

Every day she and my

sister joined the women

who scrambled their way up

steep inclines to pound that rock,

looking for gold that miners had missed.

Until night fell and cold

stiffened their fingers.

Still my father insisted

that I go to school.

Learn all the things he hadn't.

"There's no hope for me",

he would say.

"But there is for you."

"Make a better person of

yourself, Senna. Study!"

He made sure I saw what became of

many girls who did not go to school.

It was impossible not to.

Beside every gold buyer store

was a loud rocker's canteen.

Above every canteen was

a busy brothel.

Miners squandered their gold

as fast as they could find it.

Drunks staggered out of whore

houses in the full light of day.

I had heard about the thousands

of girls sold to men in those places.

Many of them infected with AIDS.

They seemed hard-faced,

veiled eyed,

with an infinite sadness about them.

Don't die.

I love you too much!

But the corpse...

Ay, he kept dying.

I went to the man who owned

La Rinconada's public toilets.

And begged him to give me work.

My job was to get to

the stalls by dawn,

flush down each cubicle,

scrub up the holes in the floor

and take 20 cents per person.

I could add the earnings in my head,

as fast as the owner with his calculator.

My father beamed when he heard of it.

"You see", he cried, "you have

all the makings of an engineer."

In La Rinconada the engineers

are the bosses, the owners.

And the ones with all the money.

In truth, I was having

a hard time at school.

I was too worried to do anything

but think about my father.

With every day his health

sank to new lows.

I told myself I was a warrior,

a defender of the weak.

He needed me to stay strong.

I sang to him...

Did all his sums.

One day my mother told us

that she would take my

father down the mountain

to find a shaman, a herb,

anything to slow his racing pulse.

Stop the cough that was

threatening to claim him.

I never saw my father again.

He collapsed and died

in my mother's arms,

shortly after they got out of the

bosk at the foot of the mountain.

When my mother told us this

it was as if I had been

punched in the chest,

as if the ground beneath us

had fallen away.

For all the years that my family

had climbed that frozen rock,

for all the gold that had been dug out,

burned clean, sent to

glitter around the world,

we had never owned a fleck of it.

We were poor.

The poorest family in the

mudhole of poor people.

I cursed the mountain,

cursed the mines,

cursed the gold bearing

beneath my feet.

And then I found this,

this poem

about the black heralds of death,

about the powerful blows

that fate can sometimes rain on us...

I don't know.

Those poems, those words

altered something in me.

It was as if I had chance

upon a cache of buried treasure.

Each page opened a world,

each line stopped my heart.

I memorized every word

on every page.

Then all the people of the Earth

surrounded him.

The sad corpse gazed at them,

touched.

Slowly he sat up,

embraced the first man

and began to walk...

And so I say.

In time I saw that my father

had been right all along.

I was a fighter. Brave.

And words made for mighty weapons.

I began writing poems.

I recited them for all

my schoolmates to hear.

I even won a poetry contest.

I will be the engineer my

father always wanted me to be.

I will be a poet.

I know now that the fortune my

father sought so helplessly

was always buried in me.

It was just a matter of finding it.

Fewer than half the girls

in the developing world

will ever reach secondary school.

By beating the odds, Senna is

writing a new chapter for girls in Peru.

Girls need good schools.

And they need to stay.

Because a girl with one

extra year of education

can earn 20% more as an adult.

Because women operate the majority of farms

and small businesses in the developing word.

If India alone enrolled 1% more of its girls

in secondary school,

their GDP would rise by billions.

Educated girls are a powerful

force for change.

And this kind of change

- it happens fast.

MARIAMA,

Sierra Leone

You're probably wondering -

is that an ad for some charity?

But I actually have a normal

life for a teenage girl.

I get up, I brush my teeth,

I listen to Rihanna,

I pick my outfits,

I text.

Welcome to my world.

This is Freetown, Sierra Leone.

This is my Mom.

And this was my Dad.

My Dad died when I was really little.

I like to think he still watches over me.

This is my Dad's younger brother.

He had to marry my Mom because

she was his brother's widow.

She could have said no.

Or she could have

become a praying wife,

which is sort of like being

a wife, without the fun.

But then my Uncle was

really quite handsome,

so he became my stepdad.

A few years later Papa married Hava.

Now that was a love match

from the start.

I guess you could call us

a perfect family.

And it's true.

Isn't my school cool?

I'm the first person in

my family to go to school.

Everyone says I'm the lucky one.

This is our physics teacher.

He told us about Isaac Newton,

the biggest problem solver all time.

Lots of people think science

is boring. But I don't.

Science is about asking questions

and solving problems.

Just like Isaac Newton.

The most exciting change in my life

was when I got my first real job.

I was so happy when I landed a

spot as a host at Eagle Africa 91.3

These days radio is the biggest

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