World Citizen, Journeys of a Humanitarian author, Jane Olson, shares her motivation and advice for becoming a more active citizen of the world.
Bookfinity: Who inspires you most?
Jane: Eleanor Roosevelt has been my role model since I first saw black and white newsreels of her at a movie theater in Iowa. She was walking along railroad tracks and talking to “hobos” and other poor people, treating them like people who mattered, listening to their sad stories, showing them respect. I was quite young at the time, but that powerful image has stayed with me as a life lesson.
Bookfinity: What motivated you to write World Citizen?
Jane: I have traveled to war zones and places of extreme poverty with international humanitarian and human rights organizations for many decades, capturing in journals and photographs many details about the victims and survivors who both touched and inspired me. When I did public speaking on behalf of those organizations, I shared those stories. I learned that facts and statistics about war simply overwhelmed an audience, but the story of one survivor could inspire and cause people to care and ask what they could do to help. I was told many times that I should write a book, but I never found the time until I suffered a severely broken ankle that put me in a wheelchair for months.
When I was 16, growing up in small-town rural Iowa, where I worked at the bi-weekly newspaper, I covered such events as school board meetings, car accidents, and the Country Fair, but I dreamed of being a war correspondent like the men I saw on newsreels. I soon learned that no such jobs existed for women. Only [when] I began writing “World Citizen, Journeys of a Humanitarian,” I realized that I had fulfilled that dream---not as a professional journalist, but as a “professional volunteer.” My mother always told me to do everything I attempted to the best of my ability and not to give up until I had satisfied my own high standards and goals.
Bookfinity: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Jane: The best advice I ever got came from a professor of creative writing at the University of Nebraska. He said, “If you want to write something that matters, live a life that matters."
Bookfinity: When do you feel the strongest?
Jane: I feel strongest when I connect to a human being who is very different from me in every way, especially one who has suffered unimaginable abuse. When I connect with “the other” at the heart level, I move beyond compassion to empathy, the actual sharing of deep feelings. Real strength extends beyond the physical. I believe there is nothing so strong as kindness, gentleness, and love.
Bookfinity: How do you hope readers will feel/react after finishing World Citizen?
Jane: When readers of my book ask the question, “What can I do to become a world citizen,” I suggest that they [start] around their own neighborhoods and communities. It is not necessary to cross borders and oceans to find people in need, even refugees and immigrants. Every town has displaced and desperate people like those in my book. They are all around us.
As a young mother, I volunteered at Head Start schools, where all the kids were poor children of color, many of whom had never held a book or been pushed on a swing. I read to seniors at the library, drove them to doctor appointments and helped them go to the market. I always gained more than I gave.
I also suggest learning foreign languages, following international news, studying sociology and anthropology, and speaking to people they do not know. Simple steps with world citizen awareness. The essential truth, as I have learned, is that all human beings are connected, more alike than different. What hurts one hurts all, and what helps one benefits all.
World Citizen: Journeys of a Humanitarian by Jane Olson
During journeys to war zones and places of extreme poverty and disease over decades, the author meets survivors whose resilience inspire hope, despite unimaginable suffering. Intimate details and beautiful photos illustrate that all lives are valuable and equally deserving of protection and support.
About Jane Olson
Jane Olson has dedicated several decades of her life to advocating for peace and justice by volunteering for global human rights and humanitarian groups. She has held the position of chairperson for the International Board of Trustees of Human Rights Watch and also served as the co-chair for the Women's Refugee Commission. Additionally, she is the inaugural board chair of the Landmine Survivors Network/Survivor Corps.
Jane has traveled extensively with various humanitarian organizations from Nicaragua and El Salvador during the Contra Wards to the former Yugoslavia during the "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnia. She has participated in missions to many countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. These missions focused on human rights abuse and refugee conditions, HIV/AIDS, landmines, and other calamities caused by conflict and extreme poverty.
Jane grew up in rural western Iowa and graduated from the University of Nebraska. She lives with her husband, attorney Ronald L. Olson, in Pasadena, California. They have three children and eight grandsons.
Visit worldcitizenthebook.com to learn more about Jane and her humanitarian efforts.
What Others Are Saying About World Citizen
“Olson recalls her international social justice work in this inspirational debut memoir.
Born nine months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Olson grew up in a rural community in western Iowa. As a child, she was handed a prize pistol by her father only to accidentally drop it in the river. From that moment on, she “forever hated guns.” At 15, she gained experience penning articles and obituaries for her hometown newspaper, which compelled her to write with compassion, “hoping to ease the pain of those who grieved their loss.” Olson graduated from the University of Nebraska, where she majored in history and journalism, before taking on an editorial role with the Ypsilanti Press in Ann Arbor. Her husband, Ron, a law school graduate, worked in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, and as a young wife and mother, Olson volunteered at Los Angeles organizations serving underprivileged children. The author notes that injustice always made her angry. Her first of numerous overseas forays was to Nicaragua during the Contras wars as part of a delegation to assess the threat of spreading communism. Working with humanitarian organizations, she later visited Eastern Europe during the fall of the Soviet Union and worked extensively throughout Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East addressing issues such as refugee conditions in the Caucasus and the HIV/AIDS crisis in Malawi. Olson also catalogs her roles in key organizations, such as chairing the International Board of Human Rights Watch and the Landmine Survivors Network.
Olson’s descriptive prose transports the reader to the many locations she traveled. For example, here she talks about Yugoslavia: “A light snow started falling, dropping big flakes that melted instantly on the windshield of our car, a wet snow that reminded me of early winters where I grew up in Iowa.” She goes on to tie trauma to the scene before her: “Snow always made the landscape look so clean. That thought struck me as ironic, since this war in the former Yugoslavia was called the ‘ethnic cleansing of Bosnia,’ and slaughter was anything but clean.” Olson also documents the atrocities that result from conflict. The author shares the story of Happy, a Rwandan genocide survivor and speaker at a conference focusing on war crimes against women, who describes the grisly discovery of a “seven-month-old baby drinking blood from his mother’s wounds” following a militia attack on a Catholic mission. In addition to writing about human pain, the author writes movingly about the power of human connection, describing a “deeply human kinship” she shared with Alma, a mother and former prostitute in Nicaragua who was “trying so hard to improve her life.” Driven to help others and bring about positive change, Olson recounts an extraordinary journey that describes the reality of conflict and injustices across the globe and across decades. This well-considered, affecting book may move others to follow a similar path.
A stirring account of humanitarianism.” - KIRKUS STAR REVIEW