Coming Soon

Global Citizen Circle Presents:

Afghanistan: A Delicate Balance
Human Rights, Democracy and Nation Building
Fulfilling Our Promise to the Afghan People

Thursday, November 20th, 2003
Omni Parker House -- Press Room
8:00 am Breakfast and Discussion

With a special clip of the documentary
The Woman in Exile Returns: The Sima Wali Story*
By Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald

Sima Wali
President, Refugee Women in Development
Discussion Leader

Liz Walker
WBZ-4 TV Boston
Moderator

Sima Wali, President of Refugee Women in Development - (RefWID), Inc.

She is an Afghan activist living in exile in the United States. Ms. Wali has worked for over 20 years to empower uprooted women to assert their human rights and to participate in economic and social development. She is a pioneer in providing culturally specific institutional development programs and domestic violence prevention and intervention mechanisms for women around the world.

Ms. Wali is the recipient of numerous awards for her pioneering work in developing program models aimed at the empowerment of women caught conflict, democratic civil society_building of war_torn societies, gender, forced migration, and human rights. She has been honored by the Women Donors Network, the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, the National Conference for College Women Graduate Leaders. She was the recipient of the Gloria Steinem: Women of Vision Award for her pioneering work in addressing violence against refugee women in the United States. Ms. Wali was the recipient of Amnesty International's 1999 Ginetta Sagan human rights award for her work with Afghan women. She serves as advisor or board member on several national and international agencies. Visit her website at www.refwid.org

For more information about the Circle visit www.globalcitizenscircle.org
For more information about this event contact Margaret Connolly at Globalcitizenscircle@comcast.net

Past Events

1. Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald collaborated with Sima Wali most recently as contributors to the Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future book project to be published October, 2002 by Palgrave.

2. As the first Afghan refugee to come to the US in 1978, Sima Wali is going home, October 6-19, 2002

3. FORD HALL FORUM Free Public Lecture and Discussion
Afghanistan and Freedom of the Press in the United States
with Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould, journalists/authors and Bob Zelnick, Chairman of the Department of Journalism at Boston University.
Moderated by Christopher Lydon of www.christopherlydon.org
For online viewing of this lecture go to WGBH Forum Network

Thursday, November 7, 2002 at 6:30 p.m.
Raytheon Amphitheater, Egan Center
Northeastern University
120 Forsyth Street, Boston, MA

Since September 11, the press has been criticized for not challenging our government's conduct rigorously enough. In light of security concerns and the Bush administration's alleged attempts at censorship, doubts have been raised about the ability and commitment of reporters to tell all the news. As citizens, how can we participate in a democracy without a sense of the full picture? Christopher Lydon, former host of The Connection, probes these and other compelling questions with Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, the first American journalists to enter Afghanistan behind Soviet lines in 1981, and Bob Zelnick, former ABC News Pentagon correspondent.

Discussions Coming Soon to Grailwerk.com

Merging the intellectual quest of the mind and the wisdom quest of the heart. A discussion of a new reality based on our extensive dreams and visions.

1. Dreams and the Trickster: The function of Hermes in the creation of image, its manifestation on the modem stage, motion pictures and cyberspace.

Discussion: How we discovered dream realms of self-empowerment How those realms relate to prophecy and Hollywood’s hold on image.

2. Our Celebrity Dream Series: From Tom Cruise to ex-CIA director William Casey, surprising guests that began to arrive regularly.

Discussion: How we came to understand reality as a matrix interweaving past, present and future by analyzing hundreds of our dreams.

3. Dream Mapping: Opening the door to a new reality by hard work and persistence.

Discussion: Learning to focus on the background reality of daily life through our dreams. Developing the personal research tools to analyze the mythic content of our dreams and our place in it.

4. Our Breakthrough: Keeping an open mind finally pays off.

Discussion: The emergence of the BLACK KNIGHT as our own mythic guide and how learning his true role empowered us.

5. Looking back to go forward: How the past lets go of us, not the other way around.

Discussion: Overcoming the conflicts in our personal lives in order to appreciate the mythic role our family played. Overcoming the desire to forget the past by pushing through to a new understanding with new eyes. Then, by remembering the deeper purpose, freeing ourselves to move into the future.

6. The Final Challenge: Testing the Theory.

Conclusion: Our goal is to guide you through our experience, to reveal how the intelligence of the mind combined with the wisdom of the heart will create the new paradigm for thoughtful living.

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