The Powerful Influence of a Mother

Fast forward, at one point in your career you were in East Africa building a program to support female entrepreneurs. I’ve heard you tell this fantastic story about how your mom’s experiences as an immigrant really influenced your work. She was an immigrant from Iran. Can you share that story with us?

Of course, happy to. So, I am a second-generation immigrant and I like to joke. About twelve years ago, I asked myself: what would be the best way I could possibly repay my parents for the sacrifices they made, you know show my gratitude? And then it dawned on me it would be by quitting my really shiny, fancy New York City corporate job and moving halfway around the world to Rwanda. I better hope my children never do this to me.
But I made that decision. There was my immigrant mother who came all the way to the US. And she was having her 24-year-old baby, saying that she was going to leave America to go move to a country that she couldn’t even find on a map. By the way, at that time, I couldn’t even find Rwanda on a map.
But my path to that flight to Rwanda started 32 years earlier with my mother. A very similar scene. In 1978-79, the Islamic Revolution was breaking out in Iran, so those who were not aligned to the new regime were forced to flee.
And so there was my mom, this woman so full of potential at the age of 17, fleeing the country, and she got on a one-way flight with her little brother in hand and landed in a foreign place in Boston, Massachusetts.
This woman, who didn’t get to start college because she didn’t even get to finish high school, had to find a way to make ends meet in a foreign country where she didn’t really speak the language. But she was an entrepreneur. She had this fighting spirit. And she turned one job opportunity into another, into another.
As you mentioned, she ended up becoming a real estate agent, actually. And it was this gift where this life that she fought to build in the US, gave me the opportunity to then give a gift back, right? So, I got to be the first woman in my family to attend college and to graduate from college. And so she always said, “It’s what you do with your gifts that matter.”
And she gave me that gift. And so I decided at an early age after college that I wanted to give back. And so I moved to Rwanda to work with these women. So if you know anything about the history of Rwanda right. What’s first word you think about when you hear Rwanda, you think of genocide. These women who didn’t have basic primary education were now the breadwinners of their families because the women survived.
The male population was in particular a really hard hit during the genocide. And so we built a women’s business training program for these women to teach them. How do you go to market? How do you take out a loan? How do you price goods? How do you manage a checkbook? And we graduated 200 women from that business training program who are now supporting their families and their communities.

What a great story. You’ve got to be so proud of that.

I would say, you know who’s actually surprisingly prouder than I am is my mom, who didn’t want me to go, but got to see my…The gift she gave me is the gift I got to give to these women.