Emigration forced or chosen across national frontiers or from village to metropolis is the quintessential experience of our time.

Giving women education work the ability to control their own income inherit and own property benefits the society. If a woman is empowered her children and her family will be better off. If families prosper the village prospers and eventually so does the whole country.

I belong to the generation of workers who born in the villages and hamlets of rural Poland had the opportunity to acquire education and find employment in industry becoming in the course conscious of their rights and importance in society.

I grew up in Greenwich Village. Dad was friends with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.

Many of our own people here in this country do not ask about computers telephones and television sets. They ask - when will we get a road to our village.

When I'm in town on Sundays I sometimes go down to the Central Bar in the East Village to watch English football. But my natural inclination now is to get in the car with my wife and kids and get out of town.

Remote villages and communities have lost their identity and their peace and charm have been sacrificed to that worst of abominations the automobile.

We need to become good citizens in the global village instead of competing. What are we competing for - to drive more cars eat more steaks? That will destroy the world.

It used to happen in villages and towns in China that they would have - I guess you'd call them beauty contests - where all of the women of a particular village or town would be seated behind these screens or curtains with only their feet showing.