Women Hold Up Half the Sky

I've been shadowing Nicholas Kristof for about 5 years now. I find his courage and his ability to serve as a moral compass for the public and our elected leaders in the West profound. But it is his commitment to the most vulnerable that I find most inspiring. I came to know Nick when I was working on the Darfur crisis and he helped publish my brother's photographs from Darfur in the New York Times. I corresponded with him by email for a while, at one point asking him how hard it must be to stay neutral as a journalist: "After all, you see some of the worst of humanity, and yet your role is simply to report on what you observe. Don't you feel like you want to act to end the suffering you bear witness to?" I shared in an email to him that I was deeply impressed by a story I had heard on the radio about a journalist covering human sex trafficking who had elected to buy the freedom of the girls he was writing about - I think it cost the person somewhere around $150. "Funny you should mention that," he replied. "That was me." I was astonished and amazed. Nick later went on to write about the success of his rescue a year later in the New York Times - one of the young girls from Southeast Asia, whose freedom he had bought, had started her own hair salon, where he was able to get his hair cut. A few years later, he profiled her again in his book, co-authored with his wife Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky. I see Nick as an example of what we should all aim to achieve. Not only do the right thing when faced with a moral dilemma, but as a human being, proactively uphold what we believe to be our intrinsic human rights. When my mother asked Nick to sign a copy of his book to me, he wrote one of the most deeply touching inscriptions I could imagine: "Gretchen, you truly hold up 2/3 of the sky. Keep up your wonderful work."