Jane holds up two books. The one on the left is the book she wrote: 34 Million Friends and the other, Motherhood in Childhood, was one she contributed to.
“I’m in this all the way, forever.”
Those are the words of One Book, One Community guest speaker Jane Roberts on Sunday, December 8th at the Fremont Main Library.
She is talking about her non-profit 34 Million Friends of the United Nations Population Fund.
The non-profit campaign was created by Jane Roberts, AAUW member from Redlands, California and a New Mexican woman Lois Abraham in the year 2002 when both women learned that the Bush administration decided to withdraw our country’s $34 million donation to the UN agency that helps women with family planning and bettering their health and human rights situations around the world.
This state of affairs didn’t sit well with Jane. “I went to bed that night and lying there thought: ‘If only 34 million Americans gave $1 each then we could make up the shortfall”.
Most people would leave the idea right there. But not Jane. She woke up the next morning ready to tell the world that they needed to donate the paltry $1 to help this important UN agency.
Well, eleven years later Jane, Lois and their charity have raised over $4 million and still counting. Jane told her story so feelingly with words and pictures. “Gender inequality,” she said with a sad shake of her head, “is the challenge of our age. We talk about apartheid and Nelson Mandela, well, gender apartheid is so vast and it’s also almost invisible.”
The audience in the library is spellbound as Jane tells of the unequal plight of girls in many third world countries.
This determined woman is making it visible with talks like ours and visits to developing countries to see women’s unequal status first hand.
She cited the appalling statistics of women who die in childbirth — one out of 22 women — and how this can be avoided with proper care. She told the story of Nujood, age 10, who was married to an adult man. After she was raped by the man, who had promised not to have relations with her until she got older, she cried for weeks and in desperation boarded a bus on her own and went to the local courthouse in Senegal and said: “I want a divorce.” The bottom line: thousands of children are wed to what they think of as old men every day. The reason for it is poverty. Parents “sell” their children to feed their families.
Jane has written a book about her journey from recognizing the great need and initiating $34 Friends to today and her travels through third-world countries. It’s called $34 Million Friends of the Women of the World.
She makes the point that, although the Obama administration has reinstated their donation to the UNFPA, the need continues to be great.
One of the reasons One Book, One Community invited Jane to speak is because she is part of this sixth year’s book choice: Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Jane Roberts’s story is featured on page 146 of the book with her picture. ““PLEASE NOW” runs the quote from Jane’s email to Americans, “Put a dollar, wrapped in a plain sheet of paper, in an envelope marked ‘34 Million Friends.’ …Then mail it today. EVEN MORE IMPORTANT: Send this letter on to at least ten friends — more would be better!” If you would like to donate a dollar, go to the 34 Million Friends of UNFPA website: http://www.unfpa.org. Jane would be ever so grateful!