An Oprah Winfrey show entitled “Mom’s Around the World” caught my attention as I was flipping through the channels searching for a “not too heavy” / “not too light” program to watch. The segment that I saw featured a mother from Uganda who had 10 children and no husband. She worked as a porter, carrying loads for anyone who needed something moved from one place to another. The show conveyed a number of powerful messages, particularly about how mothers around the world have a similar desire to protect their children, regardless of their cultural, economic, and social differences. The piece about negotiation that struck me was to see the Ugandan mother negotiating with one of her fellow porters and convincing her to split a load that was too heavy for her to carry alone. They each earned 75 cents for carrying the loads across a beaten uphill path for the better part of the morning. I found the importance of this negotiation to this mother coupled with the amount of compensation that she received worthy of reflection, to say the least.

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