Another woman I have admired since childhood. EROS showed us a picture of her earlier in the thread:
Audrey Hepburn
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Audrey Hepburn is best known as an actress, loved by all in her starring roles in movies such as Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and My Fair Lady. However, her greatest role of all was as a humanitarian.
By the late 1980's Audrey's film career was coming to a close, her two sons were grown, and she was living in Switzerland with her companion Robert Wolders. Instead of settling down to a comfortable retirement, she began the job that would occupy the last five years of her life: Special Ambassador for the United Nations Children's Fund. As a starving child in Holland after Word War II, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, forerunner of UNICEF, brought her much-needed food, medicine, and clothing. "There is a moral obligation," she would say, "that those who have should give to those who don't."
Audrey Hepburn's love for children made her decision to become the Special Ambassador for the United Nations Children's Fund an easy one. "When I was little, I used to embarrass my mother by trying to pick babies out of prams at the market," she said. "The one thing I dreamed of in my life was to have children of my own. It always boils down to the same thing - of not only receiving love but wanting desperately to give it."
In the fall of 1987, Audrey was invited to dedicate an international music festival "to the world's children" in Macao, while on a tour of the Far East with Wolders. The money raised by that night's concert was to go to UNICEF. After the concert, Audrey wondered aloud: Wasn't there something more she could be doing for UNICEF?
"We didn't go to her," said Christa Roth, a UNICEF employee who became a close friend of Audrey's, "She came to us." She recalls, "At that time the World Philharmonic Orchestra was embarking on an enormous global tour." One was planned for Tokyo in March 1988.
We knew Audrey had an enormous following among the Japanese. We all decided she should appear there on our behalf, introducing the orchestra and speaking about our work. The numbers who attended exceeded our wildest expectations. It was like a national event. I think that experience decided Audrey: if she could lend her name and fame to UNICEF in such a way that it would help our work with children, she would. That was the beginning; that was how it all started. No one could have foreseen what it led to.
The announcement of Audrey's appointment as the Special Ambassador for UNICEF was made on March 8, 1988. Although UNICEF officials would have been content if Audrey had functioned merely as a figurehead, that was never the case. "From the moment she signed on, she went into the field, meeting with the starving children whose message of despair she hoped to carry to the rest of the world. Completely hands on in her approach, she raised the consciousness of millions of people about countries they never knew existed." However, hardship would be inevitable on some of the tours she would take to the impoverished Third World. Physical peril and medical risks in war-torn counties where disease was endemic were always a danger.
It had been less than a week since Audrey had enlisted with UNICEF when she and Wolders took off for Ethiopia, her first field-trip assignment. Ethiopia was among the poorest countries in the world. The trip was designed to bring attention to the dire conditions. She went to places with no sanitation, no heating, and no water. She visited hospitals, food distribution centers, and dam construction sites. "I'm glad I've got a name, because I'm using it for what it's worth. It's like a bonus that my career has given me," Audrey said later. "My first big mission for UNICEF in Ethiopia was just to attract attention, before it was too late, to conditions which threatened the whole country. My role was to inform the world, to make sure that the people of Ethiopia were not forgotten."
Audrey had always kept her distance from the press, and, despite her acting career, speaking in public "scare[d] the wits out of [her]." However, her new job required numerous speeches, press conferences, and interviews to effectively raise public awareness. As she had done for each film, Audrey put her all into doing the best job she possibly could. "Audrey did so much hard work - before as well as after," says Roth.
She called for all the information we could supply her with about a particular crisis spot. She not only went on her mission well briefed, but she could speak of particular problems - not just UNICEF ones - with a detail that convinced her listeners she had used her time well, and wasn't simply bringing back a sincere but rather superficial view of a country. She wanted, above all else, to be credible.
Roth says, "Her professionalism was terrific. She knew how a sentiment had to be boiled down into a phrase, a 'soundbite'. She was able to deliver it with all the force of her art." She got more coverage than any other UNICEF ambassador before or since.
The next trip planned was to Turkey, in August 1988. The priority in Turkey was immunization against the six main child-killing diseases: measles, tuberculosis, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio. After they had notified the government that their infant mortality was very high, a total immunization program was planned. Audrey said, "The army gave us their trucks, the fishmongers gave us their wagons for the vaccines, and once the date was set, it took ten days to vaccinate the whole country. Not bad."
A few months later Audrey made a trip to South America, followed by a trip to Central America in February 1989. She studied projects designed to aid children living on the street. "Do you know how many street children there are in South America?" she later asked in New York. "All over the world?
But especially in South America and India? It's something like a hundred million who live and die in the streets."
On her tour of Central America she pleaded the case for children in a series of meetings with the chief executives of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The most cheerful of all her trips, she was welcomed with signs that read "¡Bienvenida Audrey Hepburn!" wherever she went. She gave a lovely message on breast-feeding to the television cameras, in flawless Spanish. "Soy Audrey Hepburn. Soy Madre. La leche maternal es el major regalo que una madre puede dar a su hijo. Es para toda la vida." (I'm Audrey Hepburn. I'm a mother. Mother's milk is the best gift that a mother can give to her child. It's for his whole life.)
In April 1989, Audrey and Wolders arrived in Sudan to watch the start of a miraculous UNICEF-sponsored relief effort called "Operation Lifeline." Its goal was to ferry food to southern Sudan, which was cut off from all aid because of the civil war. At a remote Sudanese refugee camp, Audrey saw a 14-year old boy lying on a dirt floor with acute anemia, respiratory problems and edema, due to malnutrition. Audrey later said, "That was exactly the same way I finished the war - at that age, with those three things. I thought, how strange to hear those same three things. But it was also a moment of glory for me, because just then a big UNICEF truck came by full of food and medicine."
Audrey's sixth journey was to Bangladesh in October. "Everyone was calling Bangladesh a basket case," says John Isaac, a veteran photographer for UNICEF who became close to Audrey and Wolders, "because of the constant mishaps they had with floods, famine - you name it. But when everybody else was throwing up their hands, Audrey said, 'I want to go there and be with them and promote their cause.' I thought that was amazing." Isaac recalls, "She traveled to every little corner. Often the kids would have flies all over them, but she would just go hug them. I had never seen that. Other people had a certain amount of hesitation, but she would just grab them. Children would just come up to hold her hand, touch her - she was like the Pied Piper."
As in Bangladesh, the main purpose of Audrey's next trip, to Vietnam in October 1990, was to get the government behind the UNICEF-supported immunization and water programs.
UNICEF's Jack Glattbach briefed her on Vietnam's unique 'structural adjustment' policies and asked if she would emphasize that in the documentary they were shooting. 'Oh, that's too complicated for me,' she replied. 'Really, if I don't understand it, I can't speak it.' Glattbach said fine, never mind. But soon after, he recalls, 'watched by a few hundred Vietnamese villagers and with absolutely no 'fluffs,' she spoke four minutes to camera and covered every point from the discussion she 'didn't understand.' It was one of the best summaries I ever heard. It got seven minutes on ABC prime-time news and incredible TV pickup around the world.
While there, she also met with General Vo Nguyan Giap, Vietnam's deputy prime minister and great war hero.
In addition to over fifty trips to Third World countries, every year between 1988 and 1992 Audrey hosted, with Roger Moore, the Danny Kaye International Children's Special, in Holland, which was broadcast worldwide and drew enormous donations. In 1990, she performed in a series of benefit concerts for UNICEF, reading selections from The Diary of Anne Frank, integrated with an original orchestral work by Michael Tilson Thomas. It toured five United States cities as well as London. Also in 1990, she co hosted Concert for Peace with Jimmy Carter, Francois Mitterand, and Nelson Mandela among the participants. She even drew a simple but beautiful sketch of an Ethiopian woman and baby that she donated to an auction to benefit UNICEF, which sold for $16,500 and was put on a UNICEF Christmas card.
On April 6, 1989, Audrey made the first of two congressional appearances, testifying before the House Select Subcommittee on Hunger. She told the congressmen, "Less than one-half of one percent of today's world economy would be the total required to alleviate the worst aspects of poverty and would meet basic human needs over the next ten years." In her second appearance, in June 1991, she urged a boost in aid for Africa.
Audrey's last journey was to war-torn Somalia, in September 1992. "I walked into a nightmare," she said. "I have seen famine in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, but I have seen nothing like this - so much worse than I could possibly have imagined. I wasn't prepared for this. It's so hard to talk about because it's unspeakable." Between the worst drought in history and a horrifying civil war that had destroyed the country; most of the population was starving to death. "There's nothing left," Audrey said. "The cattle are dead, the crops are gone, whatever there was has been looted. Anarchy. It's a country without a government." It was the first time in history that a country had been held together purely by relief workers, from organizations such as UNICEF, Save the Children, and Care. But there were too few of them.
At the feeding camp in Baidoa, "One of the first sights I saw" Audrey said, "was that they were loading the bodies of that night onto a truck, and most of them were very small. Just one night's dead. Around a hundred. Children were sitting around waiting to be fed, but they were beyond wanting food. Some of them had to be more or less force-fed with tiny spoonfuls. They are just totally spent." Her son Sean says:
She came back and said 'I've been to hell.' And every time she spoke about it, she had to relive it. Nothing ever prepared her for going to a camp and meeting a little kid and coming back the next day and he wasn't there anymore. You're supposed to go back to your hotel room and drink bottled water? Get on a plane and go back to your regular life? It throws your whole world out of balance.
The mission was followed by press conferences in London, Geneva, and Paris and numerous television appearances in the United States.
Not least of her skills was that she could speak with reporters in a variety of languages. More than any other, this round of interviews generated an unprecedented amount of international coverage and captivated the world. In all of them, she looks a bit tired but otherwise healthy, betraying no hint of the fact that she had just fifteen weeks to live.
When Audrey returned from Somalia, she descovered she had developed cancer in her appendix, which spread to her colon and then to her stomach. Speaking in New York after her trip, she said, "I'm filled with a rage at ourselves. I don't believe in collective guilt, but I do believe in collective responsibility."
"The work Audrey Hepburn did for UNICEF was imperative for us" said Lawrence E. Bruce, Jr., the president and CEO of the US Committee for UNICEF. In 1991, President George Bush gave Audrey the highest honor any individual can receive in the United States - the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She said, "I have been given the privilege of speaking for children who cannot speak for themselves, and my task is an easy one, because children have no political enemies. To save a child is a blessing: to save a million is a God-given opportunity."
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Thanks for starting this thread, Betz, the intent was a good one. 
You can have them deleted though if you'd like. I'd understand. 
