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Brita Fernandez Schmidt
Interview & Words Phadria Prendergast
Executive Director of Women for Women International and author of Fears to Fierce Brita Fernandez Schmidt speaks with WOTC on her passion for women
Phadria: Tell us where it all started for you?
Brita: It's so interesting. When you get older, there's this benefit of hindsight and you look back and what might have been happening to you at the time, would not have been as significant as when you look back and you realise how it has shaped your life, isn't it? I've been looking back a lot and I'm able to tell that story now. I'm always aware that sometimes people think, ‘oh, well I don't have that’, but it's just because they haven't stopped to look back and really understand what moments in their lives have shaped them.
So my parents were teachers, and they decided that they wanted to teach in a German school abroad. My father was offered a job in Caracas, in Venezuela and so when I was 14, just turning 15, we moved there and, I think that is a crucial age, particularly for girls. I think it's when you really wake up to the reality of what it means to be a woman and in terms of the gender stereotypes and the norms that society expects you to live by and abide by. That, coupled with moving into a completely different culture and socioeconomic context, where there was extreme poverty right in front of your eyes, which I had not experienced directly before - it really was like a fierce eruption of passion. I remember, it was just like, ‘how is this possible? This is outrageous. It's absolutely unacceptable’, that that was the kind of feeling. It was not fair and both not fair in terms of seeing the extreme poverty and seeing how it disproportionately affected women. We now know that 70 percent of the poorest in the world are women. But at the time when I was 15, I didn't know that.
Phadria: Wow! And what changes have you enforced or made for women?
Brita: there are things that I've achieved as part of a team at Women for Women International, that are definitely highlights. For example, in 2015 after the Yazidi women and girls were held hostage, kept kept us as sex slaves, by ISIS, I was reading a story of a 12-year-old girl who had been a sex slave for six months and had been raped by different men throughout the period on a daily basis. I remember reading about it in The New York Times and my youngest daughter at the time was 12. I just felt sick and I could not stop thinking about it. It never changes for me, the outrage and the horror just never left. Right. And so I came back from holiday and I said to my team, because we were preparing for an art gala at the time, I said ‘we have to raise money to help Yazidi women, because they were coming back from this horrendous experience and their families and communities are not welcoming them back, because they're basically tainted goods now. So to go from one trauma, to the next trauma, we had to do something. So we raised an enormous amount of money and we were able to raise enough to start partnering with the Free Yazidi Foundation. It is a wonderful organisation that works with Yazidi women and girls in northern Iraq and through that, we were immediately able to help hundreds of women receive psycho-social counselling, a safe space and a community to fall back on.
Phadria: What’s your pledge for change for 2021?
Brita: I absolutely believe that sisterhood is a choice, and every single one of us can actively choose sisterhood over the fear of losing out, the fear of competition, the fear that there is not enough. This scarcity mindset just does not serve us. I feel that's been one of the challenges in the current covid crisis, that there's been a lot of fear, which comes with change and upheaval. That fear plays into the fact that there's not going to be enough, there's not going to be enough, now that there's going to be an economic crisis, it's not going to be enough, and you're like, wow, stop. That is never going to help us. We need to think the other way. There is enough for all of us to go around and the way that we can tap into that is by helping each other, supporting each other, looking out for each other and connecting. So that is why it's my ongoing pledge. It's not just for twenty one, I choose sisterhood.
Phadria: What advice would you give on the ability to take on different people, different environments and different forms?
Brita: For me, the most important thing when I travel is that let’s say, I've been to Nigeria a couple of times. I always try to come with a beginner's mindset. I don't want to make any assumptions, just because I've been there, I'm not going to just assume that I know. I will always be advised.