Speeches Shim
Every day, all over the world, USAID brings peace to those who endure violence, health to those who struggle with sickness, and prosperity to those who live in poverty. It is these individuals — these uncounted thousands of lives — that are the true measure of USAID’s successes and the true face of USAID's programs.
Mariama Keita has been a midwife for more than 30 years now at the maternity center of the regional hospital in Mamou, a prefecture in central Guinea. As the head midwife, she and other service managers have received training to better accommodate patients and make them feel more comfortable.
Gulbahor Mirzosharifova has had many firsts in her life, but the most important one happened recently when doctors told her she was the first patient in Tajikistan to be cured of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) using a new shorter treatment regimen recommended by the World Health Organization.
Kubanychbek Alymbekov, a 54-year-old farmer and father of five, cultivated clover and cotton for decades. He had never planted soybeans until spring 2017, when he learned that Oasis Agro, the largest producer of commercial animal feed concentrates in southern Kyrgyzstan, used soybeans as their main ingredient. He saw an opportunity.
One could say that Aungkana Saejeng got her professional start in life at a tender age in the shade of the White Elephant Gate in Thailand’s city of Chiang Mai. Here, a few steps from the 700-year-old wall protecting the country’s second city, Saejeng’s family boiled and ladeled fishball noodle soup in their small but popular Ong Tipros shop.
Throughout Estela Tudio’s first pregnancy in 2013, she worried about medical expenses. Estela, a homemaker in Bayambang — a town in the Philippines’ northern region of Luzon — and her husband, Almar, who earned $6 (300 Philippine pesos) per day as a tricycle driver, could not afford birth at a hospital. So Estela gave birth at home.
Even as Syria’s civil war grinds into its seventh year, Fatima* is learning to grow vegetables and discovering that, like hope, vegetables spring eternal. “Besides fulfilling our [own] needs, sometimes I give vegetables to our neighbors,” said Fatima, a mother of five, a school teacher — and now a budding gardener — in Al Hasakah governorate in northeast Syria.
Parents in the Dongoni village of southern Mali had no contact with their community school and were not aware of the importance of following up on their children’s progress. Attendance and achievement were both low, particularly for girls, who were often occupied with household tasks.
Amid the ongoing conflict in the Donbas region of Ukraine, Nina K.* abandoned her home in Luhansk oblast in 2014, resettled in Sumy oblast, and registered as an internally displaced person (IDP). When recent legal troubles threatened her income, she needed help quick.
This is one of the first things one hears when speaking with Rabije Sinani, who has become an unofficial leader of the disadvantaged and marginalized women from the village of Kamenjane in the Polog region of Macedonia. She is well known locally for her sweets and wedding decorations.
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