October 12 - October 18, 1995

W-O-M-A-N: Copper-haired Tracy Carroll, pumped up beyond belief, is back from the United Nations' Women's Conference and sister act the Non-governmental Conference on Women. She comes back even more committed to making things better for the world than she started out, warmed by the hands and stories of the thousands of women who touched her in Beijing.

Carroll, who attended as one of 30 people representing RESULTS, an organization geared toward ending hunger and poverty by 2010, learned a lot, including some exceptional press relations. She noticed the international press spending an inordinate amount of time photographing immediate problems, like weather. "I was offended that press (members) were focusing on the rain, that people were taking pictures of women 'enduring.' "

What Carroll did was gently guide the oft-confused press to the Credit Corner, where Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, spoke about the success of microcredit, loaning money to the poorest of poor women to start their own businesses. She chatted up money-making Grameen and its two million borrowers, of whom 94 percent are women and whose average loan is $140. She told the international press about Yunus, whose lofty goals include loaning 100 million families money by 2005. To date she has loaned nearly one billion dollars.

CNN and National Public Radio covered microcredit, and during that week Peter Jennings named Yunus the person of the week on ABC News. And the world learned the snowballing success of Grameen borrowing, which has, through its loans, directly affected girls' educational levels and lowered birth and death rates. "I never thought about how important it is to talk to someone who could talk to the world," says Carroll.

Press work aside, this grandmother, physical therapist and community health activist also took time to absorb the emotions and understand the horrors women face the world over.

Daily during the 10-day NGO conference in Huairou, Carroll says she made a point to attend at least one human rights workshop "to stand in solidarity with these women and hear their stories."

She was particularly moved by the Wise Woman Council workshop, where a rotating panel of four to six women listened as women went to the podium and spoke about kidnapping, atrocities of war, rape, children being taken from them, husbands and brothers killed. "The wise women would say how very wrong it was and say that this needed to stop. It was a very powerful way to have women hear--and other people hear--that what was done to them was wrong."

Now Carroll says she will get back to working with our government to push issues like microcredit. "I'm a more powerful person when I speak from personal experience. Now if I call (Sen.) John Kyl, I can say I met borrowers from banks in Bangladesh and how they're going to change the world because they had access to credit."

With her impossibly bright, gray eyes flashing, Carroll says, "I'm hoping our legislators will listen to me now."

No doubt there, warriors.
--Hannah Glasston

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