Krishanti Vignarajah

Krishanti VignarajahKrishanti Vignarajah - marched in D.C. this past week-end while pregnant and carrying her soon to be born daughter. Krishanti served as the Director of Policy for Michelle Obama and launched the Let Girl's Learn campaign.

"I was born in Sri Lanka and my family and I were planning to move to Nigeria. My parents had already bought the plane tickets. And then, fortunately their green cards came through and we moved to the United States. If we had moved to Nigeria, I would have lived in the region of Boko Haram. Here, I could become anything I wanted. This made the Let Girls Learn campaign very personal for me. It helped me have the empathy and determination to be a champion of women's education."

Judy Gabbie

peace-corps-advocacy-day0095-2"My mother, because she was lighter skinned, managed to buy a house in an all-white neighborhood in Indiana - she wanted me and my sisters to integrate into the white schools.  On the night of our house warming party our neighbors, who turned out to be Klan members and not the brightest people, burned a cross into their own yard and nearly lit both of our houses on fire. My teachers said that "Negro" students weren't smart.  My mother, like Michelle Obama, taught us, "When they go low, we go high". Then I won the 6th grade Math contest. Oh they hated that and hated that I went to Harvard. If we weren't an all female household I think they would have killed us." - Judy Gabbie just returned from serving in the Peace Corps in Mexico.