Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

I first stopped in Nicaragua, a country of over four million people ravaged by years of civil war and a massive earthquake that had almost flattened the capital, Managua, in 1972. Violeta Chamorro, Nicaragua’s first woman President, headed an ambitious but fragile government in a country that had known only dictatorship and war in past decades.

In 1990, in one of the first legitimately democratic elections in Nicaragua’s history, President Chamorro won a surprise victory as leader of an opposition movement. An elegant, striking woman, she welcomed me to her hacienda-like house in Managua. She had turned it into a shrine to her late husband, a crusading newspaper editor who was assassinated by the forces loyal to dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1978. Displayed in the yard was her husband’s bullet-riddled car―a memento mori of the dangerous environment in which she governed. Once again, I was struck by the courage of a woman whose personal tragedy led her to fight for democracy and against unaccountable power.

In one of Managua’s poorest barrios, I visited women who had formed a microcredit borrowing group called “Mothers United.” Supported by USAID and run by the Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA), these women were an excellent example of successful American foreign aid at work. They showed me the products they made or purchased to re-sell-mosquito netting, baked goods, automobile parts. One of the women surprised me when she said she had seen me on television, visiting the site of the SEWA project in Ahmadabad, India. “Are Indian women like us?” she asked. I told her that the Indian women I met also wanted to improve their lives by earning money that would enable them to send their children to school, fix up their homes and reinvest profits in their businesses. The encounter made me more determined in my efforts to increase the amount of money our government invested in microcredit projects around the world and to establish microcredit projects in our country. In 1994, I had advocated the creation of the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund (CDFI) to support communitybased banks across the United States dedicated to providing grants, loans and equity financing to people in distressed areas that had been deserted by traditional banks. I was convinced that microcredit could help individuals, but most countries needed good national economic policies like those that were working in Chile, where I went next.

Chile had suffered for years under the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who left office in 1989. Under its democratically elected President, Eduardo Frei, Chile was becoming a global model of economic and political success. Frei’s wife, Marta Larrachea de Frei, was a First Lady after my own heart. Assisted by a professional staff, she tackled issues ranging from microfinance to education reform. At a microcredit project in Chile’s capital, Santiago, Marta and I met a woman who used her loan to buy a new sewing machine for her dressmaking business. When she told us that she felt “like a caged bird who had been set free,” I hoped that all women would eventually be free and prepared to make their own choices in life―just like Marta’s four daughters and mine.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, President of Brazil since 1994, had also come to office determined to revitalize the economy after a period of instability His wife, Ruth Cardoso, a sociologist, assumed a formal position in her husband’s government working to improve the living conditions for poor Brazilians in crowded cities and vast rural areas. I met with the Cardosos at the presidential residence in Brasilia, a modernistic complex of glass, steel and marble. At the gathering Ruth had convened, we discussed the status of women in Brazil. It was a mixed assessment. For educated, affluent women, choices were wide open, in sharp contrast to the vast majority of Brazilian women, who lacked education and opportunities. The Cardosos told me they were focused on changing the education system, in which disparities were intensified because public primary education in many parts of the country was available only a few hours a day, limiting the opportunity for a good education to those who could afford private schools or tutors. Access to higher education was largely free to the students who qualified, but most of them were upper class.

This disparity between rich and poor was made vivid in a stop in Salvador de Bahia on Brazil’s coast. Well-known for its exciting mix of cultural influences, Salvador is a city pulsating with the influences of the Afro-Brazilians whose ancestors had been brought there as slaves. In a square overflowing with jubilant revelers, I watched a performance by the band Olodum, a local sensation that had become world renowned as Paul Simon’s backup band. Comprised of dozens of young men pounding drums of all shapes and sizes, Olodum made music that was electric and deafening, leaving the crowd dancing on the cobblestones.

If Olodum evoked the positive expression of people’s lives in Salvador, a maternity hospital I visited the next morning bespoke the hardships of everyday living. Half the patients were mothers with their newborns; the other half were gynecological patients, many admitted because of botched back-alley abortions. The Minister of Health, who served as my guide for the hospital visit, bluntly told me that despite laws against abortion, “Rich women have access to contraception if they choose; poor women do not.”

By the time I arrived in Asuncion, capital of landlocked Paraguay, for the meeting of the Western Hemisphere’s First Ladies, I had seen evidence of the myriad problems confronting Latin America, as well as grassroots solutions. At the conference, we worked together on a plan to immunize all children against measles and to expand opportunities for girls to attend school. On the way to a reception hosted by President Juan Carlos Wasmosy and his wife, Maria Teresa Carrasco de Wasmosy, at the presidential palace, I climbed aboard the bus and spotted an empty seat next to an amiable-looking lady with white hair. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t remember