Us, please feel free to grab a calendar over by a register which shows the Event Schedule for the rest of august and those at this location and other two locations in town. You can also go to our website politics pros. Com dizzy with coming for the upcoming month. We ask that everyone silence your cell phones so theres no unwanted distractions during the talk. During the q a portion of the handheld microphone to pass around. Plus we recorded tonights event and its important we hear your questions on the audio. After the talk there will be assigning in this room and if you have not purchased the book with many copies behind th for e im pleased to introduce zahra hankir who writes about the intersection of politics, culture and society in the middle east. She is also the editor of the essay collection she is here to present tonight, all women on the ground, arab wome reportingm the arab world. It provides a platform for arab female journalist to share in their own words, their experiences reporting in the middle east. The 19 essays in this collection are chilling, harrowing and darkly humorous. Enlightening providing insight into the unique challenges these women face while reporting a unique advantages. Cnn chief International Anchor rights in the collection forward, womens voices are crucial to gaining a full understanding of the story. Without the fema perspective this picture cannot be painted and often particularly in the middle east and the arab world, female protagonist can be given a voice only by other women, with all women on the ground, we are given the opportunity to hear what these women have experience and we all benefit from a fuller picture. Tonight were doing a conversation with contributor haner, she is a National Security reporter covering extremism or mpr, please welcome me to joining them to politics and prose. [applause] thank you so much for the introduction and thank you everyone for coming out. Its such a great turnout and 70 good to see some new friends and familiar faces. With her today, its the first time ive ever met her even though weve worked closely for month. So her essay is actually the opening essay in this collection and for specific reason, the way she framed her essay was really quite beautiful because essentially what she does, this is me analyzing your work right in front of your eyes, she shares her own experiences of covering iraq and remembering her time there about speaking about the french of that she formed in the importance of the closeness to the women women se developed the friendships and professional relationships with. I wanted to speak a little bit about how you felt when he first approached you to contribution in this collection and why you decided to go the single and how you decided to do that . Share, thank you everyone for coming out. We are here in the bookstore surrounded by books in the passing today of her who had a heahuge influence on my worldviw and the possibility of the language. In reading her work in doing this kind of reporting, when i was first approached she said already have three stories and working on, what am i going to do, reporters anxiety. But really its a project that i believe in wholeheartedly, i would see my colleagues in the middle east and there is a sisterhood that forms when youre doing this kind of work and i would hear their stories and see their lives and see how passionate they were and i know that only a fraction of that makes it into print or on air. So i thought this was a valuable way to contribute all of the stuff that does not make it out of our notebooks sometimes. You open by saying what it is like to implement over there and you say in a very clever way, ive never been there, im not sure i can compare. And i felt that was a great way to open your chapter because also throws into question the entire book and im divided to go with women and specifically why not local journalist or just journalist and general covering the arab world. I want to take the conversation further and ask you, did you feel that you had advantages as a woman in iraq and were there disadvantages and if you could count one or two of those. The problem with a question, to be a woman over there, i was weighted down with so much assumption and presumption. When youre so repressed how did you ever do your job . Honestly, it was the flipside was true, in most places, there is very few exceptions was nothing but a benefit, i generally do everything my male colleagues were doing but then i had access to conservative society and half of the population in some cases had no access or very little access and had to work harder, i could get my nails done at the salon and herewith on the mind of a rocky women and i can be in their kitchens and in their funerals and sit with the men and share with the Tribal Council was saying. I felt that there was nothing but a benefit. Even when their work those encounters where i could help someone because i was a woman or the time when i was in iraq. One of my first days at work at bureau chief i came back and found something taped to my door that said fisherprice, my first bureau. Hazing me about my age. There is age and gender and wrapped up into it. But i did find that it was generally i still twist it to my advantage because it came from underestimating what we can do, my very first translator was a woman, she is still in my life, very close to me but she was eight months pregnant and can you imagine the pair of us bumping around and talking about the uncertainty and also we need to chair. In 108degree weather. Look at these little ladies want to talk about this, come on well talk about it. So as a result the nine month pregnant iraqi woman we broke one of the first stories in the first interviews. In terms of disadvantages, i was wondering if you feel that youve experienced similar disadvantages to local woman because obviously id like to get into that in a moment, and you have a dual identity so youre both arab and western as well and i also have a foot in the western world and the arab world. I was wondering if you think the dual identity protected you from disadvantages the other women absolutely. I could choose which one to use that day and i could choose and when to present myself, i knew that no matter how bad things got in iraq, i had a magical passport that i could in a way. They were there. And i was confident when i was leading. And to make sure people were working nonstop and this is their life in many reported as a hardship post. And you could respond and 24 7, 365 job for our rockies. And i was incontinent of that and in terms of being a woman, in some ways there were similarities because of my background they see my name they know a muslim and they expected me to have a certain standard of behavior they did not expect her mother americans who are not at the background there was an element and i did not have to face all that stuff. And that my family about that. In just a little bit more on the identity issue i intentionally and this collection included women like haner who are dual nationalities and identities because i feel strongly that is part of the story of our world where you have them living outside the arab world and many were forced out of the world and live in exile and others have families who fled conflicts who are younger and so on. And i wonder to what extent your arab identity you feel a strong in the north african, theres many different ways to frame it. Too much extent do you feel it is informed your career in any way and obviously you chose to go there and work in the middle east but did it to feel it affected your approach, do you feel it continues to affect your career today for those of you who dont know haner as a superstar she works there and covers america. Im just wondering do you feel it informs your approach anyway. Anytime growing up in a society, youre attuned to that kind of thing. And when i went to that at the bureau chief, i did not i am just noticing how correspondence would snap their fingers to bring me this, bring me that and it felt colonial and achy and i knew i did not want that kind of bureau. I was probably the first bureau chief to institute working hours, paid days off, vacation after car bombings, and bring in a masseuse, i would really try to be attuned to the fact that the local staff were the ones keeping us alive, the ones who know the story better than we ever hope to know it. If you dont appreciate that, is not only a decent thing to do, in terms of trying to build a working newsroom that can accurately cover the big moving dangerous stories like iraq. And i think it played into that because i was attuned to the second tier. Everybody in here ha had a flat vest, if my byline is on the story and you have done just as much supporting and translating you will have a cobyline with me. That is something im very glad to see changing in the industry and i think that took people of color, working their way and in building up that kind of culture, changing the culture to more distribution of credit and good stories. I want to take many steps backwards in your memoir which we are hoping for one day. Can you tell us why you chose to become a journalist and how you feel your career has developed in the inventions of ingenuity. I wanted to be a novelist or something but. [laughter] i think i spent my childhood going back and forth between oklahoma and were made out as from africa, he worked in saudi arabia and abu dhabi. But i just remember my dad picking up newspapers from the region and saying in a sarcastic voice, a kingdom and another hospital, he clearly did not see this as anything other than what it was which was a multitude for the government. I worked at the paper there, they did not have to be that way. And actually coming into contact started to read writers like him in the late anthony had a beautiful and heartbreaking essay in here. So getting to see that and is not excluded, there is a place for me, i need for me, a need for this kind of thing and going back try rocky women and going over there as a young bureau chief, it becomes quickly apparent and out of place that things are not going well, we probably were not going to leave behind really great working institutions and so what can i do. I could try to build up in his room that was going to have full coverage of iraq because thats what we do. We come, assert and go but i felt a responsibility to leave something behind. Looking at how your career has progressed, it is fascinating, im just curious how you feel about the transition how you transition from that coverage to what you cover today. In preparation for publication, i went back and was flipping through the essay and read it closely and i was thinking at this moment of conflict and division, here in the United States that this is a cautionary tale. Because you see women telling the story of what happened women in society reach their natural end, conflict. It was actually terrifying to read it again after a week like we had in the country. I do hope that people see that that this will lead to civil work, i hear things like that and i spent time researching american malicious and just last summer i was in a Militia Initiative and tha my editor cad me and said im going to call you at a certain time and ask how your cold is and if you say yes youre fine, if you say im still kind of sick that means well get you out. And i thought to myself, this is a security protocol are used for interviewing and iraq. And here i am in michigan, how bizarre is that. So i do see there are important lessons to learn from conflict. I would like to talk a little bit about your experience writing the chapter itself and with that difficult for you, it feels so vivid like those memories happen to you yesterday, its hard to read and im wondering what the writing process was like, i remember you met your deadline and you were one of the very few [laughter] im just curious did it come out naturally for you, was it emotional . It was, my goal today is get through without crying. It was very hard to write this stuff up, these are people i worked with, lived with, and curfew with often times. You are stuck with each other and you are stuck with your colleagues all night and youre working in really close quarters, its become natural to be in a war zone. And if you remember that and remember what it felt, and i completely forgot that i included a game that i mentioned and basically this is something that my iraqi friends and i made up, there were loads of car bombings all the time and we were in traffic and made a game called is that the one that one looks heavy, that looks explosive, thats the one, know that one has unmarked on the back, thats the one. And thats the one thats going to blow us up, thats how we amused ourselves in traffic. Now we can laugh about it because it emerges in a place like that and so we were living that was painful but it was al also, of course a lot of my friends did not make it through, and other friends are in syria, libya and other places. There were definitely tears writing this. Many of the chapters in this book entitled crossfire which couldve been in is a double entendre for people who are stuck between two identities or experienced work, the women in that section and im not sure if you relate at all, they feel very guilty about having access to the region and you mention passports which is a huge thing in there able to work for major needy outlets the other locals dont have, and they were not born into conflict in the way their friends might have been. I think that guilt really was quite evident for some of the essay. I wonder if you experienced similar experiences of guilt throughout your career. You do touch on it a little bit and you are so acute of the privileges that you had in a way that people that did not have that awareness would not have. I wondered if you experience that in various ways over the years . Guilt . Asked. Absolutely. Six weeks on two weeks off, and i couldnt wait to go to jordan and swim and read and then a wave goodbye and see my iraqi colleagues lined up and wave and i got to go and they didnt and that was shattering. So much in fact that i would never say that because of the stigma, and the stereotype. You dont have the support networks that they have, and you go to hotel room that are carrying guns and they go home to their families and their kids and their loved ones so there is a built in support that you do not have as an outsider so that mitigated it somewhat but of course the best you can do in the best way to mitigate the guilt is take your platform the best you can to make sure youre not a void for the voiceless. Absolutely i think were coming close to the end just a few minutes. I was wondering if you had a particular story that you covered that moved you so much that you still think of the characters, and was really difficult. At different stages, i remembered in 2004 when i was in a shrine, they had people and reporters embedded on the other side in the American Forces. And we were having thousand pound bombs dropped on that night and i remember, there was no electricity into the place is before prayer and i would go in there and iraqi women taught me to take off and soak it in water and put it on soaking wet and that was the antidote to the heat, when i was in there i saw an older woman in her ears had been arraigned from these bombings and she was cleaning her ear with a match stick and crank when i said dont cry, itll be okay we will make it until the morning and she said no, im crying because im thinking of those american boys, dont they have mothers that want them home. Anytime i can capture that humanity and people trying to keep that humanity and check on the margins to follow you up, those are the moments i look for and that stick with me. Thank you. How much did you cry. Is one of many in her chapter. I have one final question, its something that you also mentioned in the chapter that you faced maybe you can categorize it, one your editors derided you for covering the stories what was that for iraqi people . There were men that think that covering the war means covering the bang bang, wheres the frontline, how many yards didnt move, i was much more interested in the sea changes that the battles leave behind in the civilian lives in society and culture, thousands of years there disrupting. And so i focused a colleague and antidote in the book told me what are you working on and i told them and he said haner and her pips and unlike whats up hip, a port iraqi people story, and i hope they are not pips, i hope there are iraqi people story, i really tried to push through the stereotypes to make hierarchies, especially iraqi women come alive another dimension with the humor and sometimes annoying in all the things that make us human i wanted to capture the and people who are seen in one dimension. And you also capture that beautifully in the chapter. I just want to say thanks and if anyone has any questions just raise your hand and please read your hand so i can see you. Hello, thank you so much for coming i have known both of these guys for more than a decade. I had a question for both of you, something that weve seen a lot lately, speaking of my own experiences, you have a real difficult time or correspondence to tell story with the trump of ministration. Its a lot that they struggle with now. And what your advice to some of them as far as stories that were lacking, what is the hunger, appetite and you touch upon breaking stereotypes, one of the stories he felt broke through that was dominating the headlines. I will not answer the question, i think all give a huge shout out to vivian, she is in the section of this book in one of its patients behind the book, many of you probably know her work and she wrote a gorgeous essay when i was a blogger and it was a beautiful insight and so im pleased to see you here today. [laughter] i actually have no envy for people on the ford and corresponding right now especially the middle east, it does its very hard, i heard the same frustration, what does it take to break there and when it does break through something tragic like and even that feels clean. I dont know i have to believe that a good story is a good story. And i remember when 400 war fatigue sudden as it did and i covered that for a decade and at some point a powerful car bomb ripped through and it becomes a formula. I was just trying to not let my cell fall into upper move. Harder and harder to find what breaks through right now. I have a question about the process of putting together the book but im wondering if you can tell us about it a lot of authors knew each other but if you can talk a little bit about the camaraderie that was built between the journalists and if you have plans after the book to continue the sisterhood that developed and where do you focus . I love this question. The sisterhood is expanding. We are quite a tightknit group. We all follow each other on twitter and we support each other. Its fantastic and i personally didnt know some of the women either. Or i knew them because of their work because ive been following their work for years and ive admired their work for years. The purpose of putting it together for me was the most challenging part because there are so many credible arab women doing such incredible work. It was so hard for me to go from i could have easily had 90 people in this book, more. So i literally had to think of the backgrounds of the women come the ages come the type of journalism they were doing, the countries they come from. There were so many things to take into consideration. It was painful at certain points to say there were many things to take into consideration. That was going to be my next point. There is more work that needs to be done in this space. I dont think im going to do another anthology. It took two years but the format is up for debate. Im hoping to do Something Else i will continue to celebrate our women journalists and arab journalists in north africa. Were you surprised by anything that came out . C this is the first time we are meeting and i feel like i have poured out my heart to you but i was wondering you have seen all of them in all of their forms and how did it evolve for you . Some of us never met before but i feel like i knew her very well. I was surprised by the extent to which the authors were honest and intimate in these essays. Its not that id didnt expect them to be honest. Its more that they shared their struggles in such a way that i found myself frequently in tears when i was editing the book and also there were a couple of authors who were experiencing trauma themselves. They were on the field but they were also not quite ready to articulate the trauma or to decide what story they want to tell. I have to then help them through that process without coaching them to tell me one thing or another so its a very delicate balance. I found it surprising that all of the authors were able to push through whatever barriers they had any right openly and honestly about their deepest struggles. One of the essays that comes to mind, its such a raw and honest account of grief and loss and its the state of the arab world today. This is not a beach read that there are moments of hope in there. I was surprised by certain details that just shipped me. Theres another detail the palestinian journalist who says at some point she had been covering more and she had to help a mother who had lost her child create her the way she described it i dont want to do it myself. I hope that youll read the chapter in and the way she described it was just so harrowing. Theres another piece by a syrian journalist and shes talking about how in the daytoday life of syrians sent to a certain extent many people feel disenfranchised by the tragedy. She has seen blood on her car. She parked her car next to a school where there had been a bombing and there was blood on her car and she just started wiping blood off the car and called her friend and said what are we having for lunch today . I was surprised the extent to which women were sharing those details and how i reacted to them myself which is i got incredibly emotional when i was editing and then reading and rereading. I hope that answers your question. Thank you so much for this honest and wonderful talk to jasny further into the book and reading other journalists experiences. I want to draw on the experience of the editor. Was there something you how hard time adding to the book that you wanted in the book but you couldnt find it . Was the difficulty, were there some subject you thought were redundant and became a theme acrosstheboard and other things that were just really not mentioned at all . I dont know if this is a really weird question is something about your book. Its not a weird question adam and its something that weighed on me a while because i thought i was excluding something. In editing the book what i wanted to do was allow all the women to tell their own stories without directing them one way or another. I didnt project anything to them. I never came to the womens said hey how about you write about this or how about we go to this angle because that would portrayal the book which was to give them the right to share their stories but i think the stories are so unique and the style and the writing and delivery of the style are so unique. Even though there are very clear themes. Where member insists and exiles of being transitions. All of these things are within a different context so there are certain things that pop up that womens journalists or women in general had started to rely to communicate with sources specifically in syria. That came up a lot. Women who had to fight their families to become journalists. That came up but it never seemed redundant because the stories themselves were so unique. Its funny actually when we first pitched the book to publishers one of the publishers that rejected the book said Something Like the stories will start to feel redundant at a certain point. That was the one rejection that from a stone because i felt that completely betray what we are trying to do because every single story is unique. The arab world is so rich and so diversity than if you have some similarities every story is unique. So i really appreciate that question. I feel in retrospect maybe there is something missing like the fact that it could include more women and that could include everybodys stories. I have two questions. One is having grown up in a maledominated environment i saw women having to behave like men to succeed. Im hoping you dont have to do that so you can continue your stories. Do you feel like you have to do that now . Thats one question and a totally unrelated question. I was struck later comment about the civil war. When trump got elected i remember saying i feel a war in my bones coming and this was three years ago. Having left lebanon and because of the civil war it struck me here. I would like you to elaborate more and where you see it and what can you do we do and what can we do to alert the people . As a journalist i cant give prescriptions on that kind of thing except to say my reporting and what that shows is i just think people shouldnt dismiss it as impossible here or in europe or anywhere. We have had levy were here and we are still finding echoes of it. So i think on the civil war just dont rule it out. Its not impossible because it just takes a certain set of fact years and fault lines and a trigger. It might not be and i hope im wrong. I hope its never worn out but to think its impossible i think is a mistake and even if its not a big prolonged fit tenure war like in lebanon we could see and we are starting to see more violence. I cover extremeism. I try to really put it in check. I see it in a very myopic way. Oh my gosh we are on the brink but when you pan out its not quite there and there are a lot of people who are working very hard to heal the country. God speed to them. As far as acting like a man i think there was i dont know if i would use that term but there was a pressure when for example if i were embedded with American Forces i made sure i could carry my own tags. I can hop up on the Armored Vehicle even though im sure. I dont need your assistance. There were certain things im going to hold my own and im not going to be the damsel in distress that i cant do my own stuff. That was really the only kind. Otherwise i was in iraq and i was five months pregnant when my doctor in cairo said come back or i am dropping the location. So to see the difference there, that was the time i really felt a restriction. That was on the american side a cause i tried to go on a blackhawk or whatever it was that i showed up the airstrip with a bellyup to hear they said no man you are not getting on. If anything happened you would put our medics in a bad situation and the women in the prep course really rallied around me and supported me. We took it all the way up senior officers. I was not allowed to make those trips but it was nice to see there were supporters there. I remember specifically one colleague told me, thanks so much for your activism. I want to be able to be pregnant in a war zone and do my book. [inaudible] everyone has an element of that but i would take the philosophy of the late anthony shahid. Whenever he was asked are you a war correspondent he would wrestle at that title. War happens to be the backdrop but i look for human stories. That was with me. Im not someone who goes around saying im a war correspondent. Also just a small way to look at how it had so many farreaching effects. Im. A member of the sisterhood. I wanted to ask about rejection actually since im sure youve had this project for a while now but how did it feel to try to advocate for womens stories but also im sure you got rejections and he mentioned one and trying to navigate that route too. No i took rejection pretty hard. I take every rejection hard. Im not a grateful graceful person when it comes to rejection could you have to have. Thick skin and if you have a idea that youre passionate about and i dont want to sound really lofty, its something you need to be committed to do you need take take the feedback really well, listen to it and think about how you might be able to reframe whatever you are proposing and a way that still consistent with their own vision i had a couple of people suggest completely different visions for this book whom i chose to not work with because i feel it wasnt compatible with what i wanted to do and i would have been compromising too much in terms of my own vision. I believe there was appetite for these voices. I knew there was appetite for these voices because i traveled the western world and the arab world and the people who i was pitching did not fully understand the book in the way that i do from where im sitting i thought okay i will find someone who shares this vision or believes these voices need to be amplified and i found an agent who worked with me. She is amazing and i just went and started taking whatever rejection came from publishers very seriously. I took it hard that i took at the back very seriously. You might get 100 rejections but all you need is that one yes. Ive heard that before its not my own. You just need to be patient and find people who will help you. I think thats important to reach out to people when ever you can to understand the industry or the genre or whatever you are going to put together. I am pleasantly surprised by the reception and yeah i see there was a hunger for those kinds of voices. I thought it was interesting to see that because my overarching i guess point of my essays were a reason. I wanted to contribute to reframe how we think of womens issues and how we cover women especially in that region. Its the end of moral thing to say yes there is a moral argument. They deserve to have their voices heard so there is that argument but if you take that away and look at it strictly from the craft of journalism is bad and lazy journalism to leaf out half the population do not have interlocutors who can do an interview and to not have people with the language the culture in the history. Thats journalistic malpractice to leave out a huge chunk of the population. Just to reframe it here we are liberating the voices of these women but we are just doing our job. I completely agree with you and i have to say i get annoyed when people say oh we are giving voices of people. The voices are there and we want to amplify those voices. I actually think people are frustrated now with the idea that correspondence who are not from the regions which they write about command of the narrative on the region and what i try to advocate is inclusivity. We need to have nuances to have that detail to have the intimacy not necessarily in the way that will mean that their work is bias, no but to provide that understanding of the story in a way that perhaps someone who is not familiar with the culture in the same why cant. I think its important to recognize that people are frustrated with the fact that this narrative has dominated for so long. I think there have been changes. This year as we know the Pulitzer Prize for International Writer was awarded to incredible women. Women are starting to gain recognition but more still needs to be done. There are so many things that still need to be done. I think perhaps that is the narrative people are so frustrated i bet the moment they thought finally at least theres something, theres a book that says hey lets do something different. Lets hear these voices. I also think its a timing thing the Trump Administration has helped a little bit with the idea that we need to hear more minority voices i think. Theres the International Womens media. I was not on the board many moons ago when do i wmf gave six iraqi women from our newsroom mccloskey, they gave them collectively the courage in journalism award. For me when people say what story are you the most proud is that when he looked back, its not actually a story. As watching six women who had very little journalistic experience come into their own, and the brilliant writers, reporters and come from our newsrooms and when this incredible honor. Angelina jolie and meg ryan gave it to them in the speech upon accepting it, theres a bit of it in the essay. Thats what its all about. Thank you so much. Does anything give you hope . I know you said you were crying during the book. Actually i do really want to give many of the women in this book credit for their resilience and their strength. They say that they find hope in the women they cover but i personally am inspired by them. I became very attached to so many of the women, women ive ever met because of their resilience but i was inspired by them. I feel that even though many of these women were writing from the field are writing in countries that there was war surrounding them more in the aftermath of the war they still felt hopeful for their own futures and they felt that they were obliged to continue with their professions because thats what they have to do. Thats their job and a photojournalist in this book, she said i would actually love to read the last sentence in her essay. She had been committed really to try to take photographs, pockets of hope in yemen as to oppose two pictures of destruction and famine and malnutrition. She said whenever i think of giving up i have a deep thought of giving up their member i cannot guess many girls are relying on me to show the world what fighting spirits they are. That such a moving sentence for me. We need to continue having that hope because we need to pass it on to the next generation. Its very lofty again that when you are dealing with common tragedy on a massscale you must have people who are committed to continue to tell the stories and work towards good and rebuilding. That really comes through. I actually think it throughout the book and not just on the section of resilience. Thank you for asking that. I actually am hopeful on a number of fronts. One is guess i keep the twitter leaf or sources that partly because i get students and inspired journalists writing me and saying i cant wait to hear how did you get in to that . What advice do you have for me . Would you read my clip and all the things that i did with people that i admired. Its really cool to see that there are so many more. Even looking in this room i know so many people who are doing this kind of work. That is very helpful and one small one of the women that i mentioned in passing in the story but one good iraqi friend of mine and i want to mention her. I know shes comfortable with that but we are in baghdad together and we were single and we didnt have kids. We used to love the beautiful latticework, this would work on some of the old houses and pleased to say you know when iraq is stable we are going to buy twin houses on the tigris and returned to raise her kids and go fishing in the backyard. This is going to be our life. We will be besties forever and of course then i get sent to cairo. She goes into exile because she is forcibly removed from her home. After eight years of trying to get resettled somewhere safe she landed in virginia right down the street. Now we joke that we have the grilled dinners and i said we just got the river rock. [laughter] on that note why do we give another round of applause for hannah. [applause] if we could just ask for everybody to sit tight or moment and we are going to prepare the signing area for the signing. This would be a good chance if you havent got your book to grab a copy of the register. If you are ready to get your book signed to stay put while we move some stuff around and thank you for attending. Thank you. With health care the fact that so many of our people just because they need Certain Services like help getting in and out of bed, and getting washed. In order to get that kind of help unless you are rich enough to pay out a pocket you have no other choice but to be poor in order to qualify for medicaid. Medicaid is the only problem that pays for what is called longterm care or what we call Longterm Services and support. And what that means is that when you are disabled enough that you need those kinds of services you are condemned to a life of poverty even though there are so many ways that activists have tried to find ways to get around the system. So you can have some money and still receive your services if you are willing to give up control of the money. You can put it into a truck. There are all these financial acrobatics that you are forced into doing in order to receive services and supports with health care. This should be our right. It should be our right. [applause] good afternoon everyone. I am for Services Manager for the National Archives museum and producer for the new series. After half a beer can with the United States that like to welcome mail to the theater located in the National Archives building in washington