One of the greatest mistakes the international community can make is to say, "Well, we will get other matters figured out and stabilized, and then we'll think about the women's rights, because that's really a grade-B kind of concern."

If we look at governments around the world, we see that the higher the women's percentage is in parliament, the more funding there is for education and for health care as compared to buying arms, for example.

Women know what kinds of laws can really be implemented. I loved in the film where the woman was talking to the other women about what it was going to be like when they were married. And she was saying, "Now, don't you think that just because the mother gave your husbands that cow that it's just his cow."

I'll tell you, when you have wounds that are as deep as were caused by the genocide, the first thing you do is try to create some way to pull the wound together. And it may be artificial until the skin grows back.

I would like to see many times more dollars going into the education for girls. The World Bank has some wonderful statistics in terms of the importance of educating girls as a way of lifting whole societies out of poverty.

Rwanda is an example in terms of the transformation of the rights of women. But if you talk to almost any Africanist at the State Department or the World Bank, when you say the word Africa, they think women.

Women tend to be more interested in reconciliation. A Kenyan woman leader said to me, "You know, in a war, men and women want different things. The men care a lot about territory. And they care where the borders are. And they want this whole state. The women," she said, "they want a safe place." And she put her fingers like this, "They want a safe place for their children to go to school without being shot, for their daughters to not be raped."