This trip is almost over. We’re about to pass through the final of the Three Gorges: Xiling. The other two are magnificent.
Yesterday we sailed through Wu Gorge in a small, thirty-seat tour boat. Despite the beauty, most interesting was our guide, who gave us the name “Janine” because “my Chinese name is too hard to say.” A lovely 26-year-old with a great sense of humor, she was the headline for me.
She is the first girl from her village – tucked into the side of the mountain, several hours walk away – to go to college. The first girl.
She was able to do this, although she’d never been away from home, because Chinese businessmen have begun “sponsoring” college educations for local girls, and she received one of the scholarships.
I asked her about her village, assuming, correctly, that there was a lot of push-back from the community about her choice. Did neighbors give her parents a hard time, ask them “What are you doing? How can you let her do that?” Yes, yes – especially challenging her dad. Her mother didn’t even want her to go, but her father stood firm and supported her, and off she went.
The view from our boat. It looks like that one in front of us.
It was tough – busy and noisy, especially for a girl from a little mountain village. “I cried and cried” she said. But she stuck it out – able to return home only once a year. She’s very proud of what she’s done and is working hard to enable her two younger sisters to follow.
I’ve been involved in issues regarding women for a long time, and admired groups like the UN Foundation‘s Girl Up, Vital Voices and The Elders‘ battle against child marriage. Janine, however, was the first person I’d met, in her home environment, who’d benefitted from such undertakings. It was quite an inspiration — delivered just down the mountain from where she started, sharing her education and her English major with us as she led us through the beauty that has surrounded her most of her life.
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Cynthia Samuels
Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families.
For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million.
She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings.
She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.
Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World.
A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.
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