Click link below for Radio Interview http://wamc.org/post/two-readings-seven-documentary-play-berkshires?_utm_source=1-2-2

SEVEN is off to the Berkshires in August! The Bard College at Simon’s Rock Council for Equity and Inclusion and CeCe Sloan Productions Present a reading of SEVEN, A Documentary Play Saturday, August 26th at 7pm @ The Daniel Arts Center, Great Barrington, MA FREE WITH RESERVATION – $10 Suggested Donation. All donations benefit the Elizabeth Freeman Center, providing services and leadership to address domestic and sexual violence in Berkshire County. Introduction and post show discussion with director, activist and long-time member of the United States National Committee of UN Women, CeCe Sloan. Cast: Barbara Greenbaum, Carla Lewis, Nancy Vale, Sheila Dabney, Tyler Malik. A riveting piece of documentary theatre, SEVEN tells the true stories of seven women who bravely fought for the well-being of women, families, and children around the globe: in Russia, protecting women from domestic violence; in Cambodia, rescuing girls from human trafficking; in Guatemala, giving voice to the poor; in Afghanistan, empowering rural women; in Nigeria and Pakistan, fighting for women’s education and rights; and in Northern Ireland, promoting peace and equality. DATE AND TIME Sat, August 26, 2017 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM EDT LOCATION The Daniel Arts Center Bard College at Simon’s Rock 84 Alford Road Great Barrington, MA 01230 #SEVEN #acting #documentary #play Original Article Here

To the editor: Let us walk Thursday with megaphones funnelling the invisible cries and muffles of the silenced — women who remain in precariously difficult to identify psychologically violent relations. And the invisible victims — children who witness the abuse. ["Walk a Mile in Her Shoes," benefiting the Elizabeth Freeman Center, will be held during Third Thursday tomorrow in Pittsfield.] Studies confirm that a disproportionate number of children witnessing abuse are also directly maltreated. Research finally focuses on child maltreatment (neglect, emotional, physical) in conjunction with spousal violence. Childhood exposure to maltreatment perpetuates itself, predicting adult revictimization. The terror, the self-blame, the unpredictability, and the betrayal of childhood trauma are key for clinicians deconstructing adult reenactment and revictimization. Those who seek shelter, or come forward, represent a small subset of domestic violence survivors, predominantly leaving their batterers because of severe physical abuse. Early research targeted physical violence alone in an effort to help women through legal channels. Recent research shows the devastating impact of more insidious, escalating, chronic psychological abuse, a multi-factored type of violence that can be classified along a continuum of behaviors (dominance, restriction, isolation, intimidation, and denigration). Psychological abuse is known to escalate into, and coincide with, physical assault. Psychological abuse emerged as critical to self-esteem deficits, depression and tendency to internalize blame, a dynamic associated with repeated victimization and trauma in our research. In our study of women and children in shelters, enduring and trenchant psychological forms of violence took precedence beyond physical abuse on PTSD symptoms. Yes we are out there walking and debunking stereotypes, a far cry from early focus on the individual traits of battered women. We are using social-learning paradigms and talking about educating our kids to break inter-generational cycles of violence. We are advocating for structural interventions to break cultural and gender constraints on leave-taking with child witnesses towards safety. But where are these survivors and their young? Isolated on the ledge of a continuum of dominance, of mind control? Bring their stories forth on the 15th. Hear the perilous sounds of self-silencing. Carla Lewis-Ruig, Lenox A recent member of the Berkshire community, the writer was previously vice president of Research for Women In Need Inc. and chief of research for the Urban Resource Institute in NYC. #activism #revictimization #gender #culture Original Article Here

Taking a Stand: A Short Play Festival (The Esterhazy Draft) Featured as the role of Marie Bastian

From left, "Seven" cast members Carla Lewis, Sheila Dabney, Anne Undeland, Tyler Gabriellle. Nancy Vale, Gale Ryan and Barbara Goldman. Drawn from the stories of seven women who have led national change in their home countries, "Seven" will be performed Saturday evening at Bard College of Simon's Rock. GREAT BARRINGTON — She stood up to men who swung clubs with nails in them. She came back from protests bloody. She ran a welfare office with gunshots outside the windows, and she organized lunch servers in schools and laundry women in hospitals. Inez McCormack became a human rights and trade union activist in Northern Ireland and the first woman President of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. And in 2010 she came to New York to see Meryl Streep perform her life on stage. McCormack tells her story in a monologue by playwright Carol K. Mack. It became part of "Seven," a play drawn from the stories of seven women who have led national change in their home countries. Since it opened in 2008, "Seven" has traveled the world in more than 30 languages. On Saturday evening, CeCe Sloan, a long-time member of the United States National Committee of UN Women, will bring the play to Bard College at Simon's Rock with a cast of regional actors, to benefit the Elizabeth Freeman Center. She has loved the play for years. "I knew I had to do it," she said in an interview. In 2006, she met Farida Azizi, who had crossed the desert in Afghanistan to bring simple medical care to women in small villages. "Under the Taliban, male doctors are forbidden to treat women," she explains in the play. So, with her small sons hidden under her burqa, she walked through border country and land mines to help women who were dying and alone. "We make a basic midwife tool kit," Azizi said, "with nailcutters, soap to clean the hands, gloves, plastic sheet for giving birth, scissors to cut the umbilical cord, things for measuring fever." She and Mack met through Vital Voices Global Partnership, an international network that has helped and taught more than 5,000 women in 150 countries to become leaders in their communities. And Mack wanted to tell stories like hers. She gathered six more playwrights, women with national awards and international names, to work with her — Paula Cizmar, Catherine Filloux, Gail Kriegel, Ruth Margraff, Anna Deavere Smith, and Susan Yankowitz. Each would talk with a woman who has become a leader and write a monologue in her voice. They spent months talking, Mack said. The playwrights and the women they interviewed came to know each other well. Mack and McCormack became close friends. Mack admired her courage and humor, even in the last stages of terminal cancer. "She connected to people beautifully," Mack said. And she sees that kind of connection and determination in all the women in "Seven" — they see people around them in need and will not sit still when they can help. In Russia in 1993, Marina Pisklakova-Parker founded her country's first hotline for victims of domestic violence. No one talked about this kind of abuse then, she says in the play — she did not even have a word for it — but 14,000 women a year were killed by their husbands. She began with an office and a phone and has built a coalition of hundreds of crisis centers. In Nigeria in 1993, Hafsat Abiola's father, Moshood Abiola, was democratically elected president and imprisoned by the military, and her mother, Kudirat Abiola, led his political movement while he was imprisoned. They were both assassinated. In their memory, Hafsat founded the Kudirat Initiative for Democracy to teach and support young women, and she became the youngest member of the Ogun State cabinet. In Cambodia, Mu Sochua lost her parents and her family to the Khmer Rouge. She was sent away as a girl and survived, and she returned home to fight against sex trafficking. She has served as Minister of Women's Affairs and as a Member of Parliament for the opposition party. She goes out into the rice fields, said Carla Lewis, who will play Mu in Great Barrington. She goes out to meet the people who work there and to talk with them in the heat and the mud. They live in huge and crowded high rises, working for minimal amounts, and often without medical care, and they may be desperate enough to let their children be taken by men who offer jobs — and so children are forced into the sex trade, thinking they are helping their families. In Guatemala, Anabella De Leon came from a poor family, earned a law degree and became a congresswoman in 1995. She is known for fighting against corruption and for the rights. And in Pakistan, Muktar Mai survived a gang rape. She was 28, and the men who raped her were high-ranking land owners. When she went to the police and denounced the men who raped her, the police asked her to sign her statement — and she could not read it or write her name. She resolved then that she would do both. She won in court, though the case has been re-opened more than once since, Sloane said. And with settlement funds Mai opened a school — and became one of its first students. Then she built more schools, and she has become a defender of women and education in her country. "She has this tenacity," said Tyler Gabrielle, who will play Mai in Great Barrington. "She just won't give up. She still gets death threats. She lives within eye-shot of where she was raped." And now young women come to her for help. "It's what keeps her alive and keeps her going," Gabrielle said. Many people have suggested Mai move to a city. Like her home village, people in rural areas need to learn and to know what rights they have. More than 600 children have already come through school because of her. But after the rape, she came near to killing herself. Many women do, she says in the play, when they have been assaulted. They are seen as stained, soiled, ruined. But her family stood with her, and she went on. "I wish more women could know their own inner strength that way," Gabrielle said. Mack and her fellow playwrights wanted to share that strength. These seven women have faced death threats, exile, guns against their skin, stalking phone calls aimed at their children. And they have kept going, even when they were alone and had nothing to guide them. "They didn't have a place they knew they could travel," Mack said. "And they went anyway." By Katherine Abbott, Special to The Eagle

Featured at Soka Performing Arts Center

Soka University of America Office of Student Affairs and CeCe Sloan invite you to a reading of SEVEN: Saturday  November 4, 2017  @ 7:00 pm Blackbox Theater SOKA 1 University Drive Aliso Viejo, California This ticketed event is $3.00. All proceeds from ticket sales and donations will benefit HUMAN OPTIONS- Breaking the Cycle of Domestic Violence. Performers: Victoria Burnett, Odette Derryberry, Debra Ehrhardt, Carla Lewis, Carrie Pohlhammer, Carol Shallin, Gila Zalon. For further info, call 949 683 1278.

A public health delegation, including an emergency room physician, several graduate students, mental health professionals and global health advocates, traveled to Cuba in December to learn about the country’s public health infrastructure. “It was a remarkable five days,” said Carla Lewis, an APHA member who works as senior director for program development and evaluation at the Children’s Health Fund in New York. Her main interest was to meet medical teams serving communities in Havana. “They’re basically situated in neighborhoods where they go into homes, and they scan the entire environment. So it’s a real comprehensive approach to health care,” Lewis said. “It’s really looking at the whole package, whether it’s nutrition or sanitation or mental health, everything from A to Z is in the mix.” Patients are referred to polyclinics — or community-based clinics — equipped with medical specialists. The health care model is “a trilogy, so to speak, across service, education and research.” And unlike in the U.S., Cuba’s system does not seem to draw a line between medicine and public health but integrates the two. An APHA-led delegation traveled to Cuba in December to learn about that country's health system. The trip included visits to community-based clinics, the National School of Public Health and the Ministry of Public Health, above. Photo courtesy Vina HuLamm Delegation members on the APHA trip learned that each family medical provider is assigned a set number of families with “everyone accounted for,” Lewis said. Research seems to be very needs- and community-based. The government pays for the medical education of students who agree to work in an underserved community upon graduation. “The social responsibility, the human rights perspective, the inalienable right to health and education is so powerful,” Lewis said. “What we saw was a seamless relationship between the people and the public health system.” According to the Pan American Health Organization, Cuba boasts a longer life expectancy and lower rates of infant and child mortality than the U.S. All obviously is not rosy, though, considering Cuban patients have no privacy rights, many facilities are old, and a decades-long trade embargo means essential drugs and medical technologies can be scarce on the island. Tight government control of the information that flows in and out of Cuba also meant delegation members likely saw only the positive aspects of the health system. Yet the health system seems to offer many lessons in being community-driven and cross-disciplinary, such as bridging the links between such areas as transportation and health. “We have much to learn, and I feel like on some level the embargo has undercut access to this wisdom,” said Lewis, who took from the trip a desire to “go global and expand our public health perspective. “We should be looking at building models, public health models that work, and to look for openings where care starts to be a little more community driven and a little more environmentally savvy in terms of breaking some of the silos. I think a lot of our stuff is in silos here.” #globalhealth #infectiousdisease #PAHO Original Article Here