Influential Woman · Charity
Meta (Meta) Paubert Kaurin
Founder, Nurse, Nofy i Androy
Tacoma, WA
Her Story
About Meta
I became a teen mom and had to drop out of high school for five years to take care of my baby while my boyfriend continued studying and then left me alone. I saw the injustice and endured bullying, but I promised myself that one day I would go back to school and tell my story to empower young women. Sex education and talking about men and women equality is taboo where I'm from because it's very male-dominated. I went back to school, finished college and university in my country, then worked there before moving to America. In 2012, I started a nonprofit organization called Nufi Andrui, which means the dream of Andrui, with my friends. We started with 17 girls, and now we have a little bit under 800 girls, managed by me and my daughter who I was pregnant with back then. I work as a full-time nurse, sometimes taking overtime, but every night my daughter and I meet to work on the organization. We provide free education and a free tutorial center for farmers' daughters and low-income families in my region, encouraging them to go to school, remain in school, and stay in school until they finish higher education. We fight against child marriage and forced marriage, which are very common in my region in the south of Madagascar, one of the poorest regions in one of the poorest countries in the world. I even go there myself to do interventions, interviewing men who married young girls, and then reporting them to police.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Meta
01What do you attribute your success to?
What makes me successful in my life and in this charity is the pain. I was in pain a lot when I was a teenager, and the injustice and the bully. People have told me, like, you are not gonna go anywhere, either both sides, even here in America or in my country. They said your English is not good enough to go to nursing school, that nursing school is about math and chemistry, which is all lies. I like it when people say that I cannot do it, and then I challenge myself that I want to do it and see if I really can't do it. That drives my success - the pain, the inner pain that people don't know about, that you are walking on the road and people think you don't have any pain, but you have pain in your heart. To me, doing what I do is like kind of therapy, like to put band-aids to that pain. Another thing that drives me is that Madagascar is one of the bottom list of the poorest country in the world, and the region where I'm from in the south is the poorest of the poor. Because of climate change we don't get rain, and when we don't get rain everybody goes hungry. I don't like that it's normal to them for girls to not go to school and to get married young. To me it's not normal. I think everybody should go to school, at least know how to read and write and apply it in your real life, and even better if you have a higher degree and go back to your community and serve your community and be a role model.
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