Forbidden from going to school as a child in Zimbabwe, Tererai Trent taught herself how to read and write by studying her brother’s books. Eventually she started doing his homework. After catching on, a teacher begged Trent’s father to allow her to attend classes. He did but only for two years. At age 11, she was sold into marriage in exchange for a cow. By age 18, she had three children.
In 1991, while Trent was in her early 20s, nonprofit organization Heifer International visited her village, and International Programs director Jo Luck asked a group of women about their dreams. Trent said she aspired to go to America to earn bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees.
“If you desire those things, it is achievable,” Luck told her.
Tererai proved her right despite having two more children with a man who beat her for wanting to better herself.
Two years after she earned her doctorate degree and returned to Zimbabwe to encourage girls to pursue their own dreams, her goal of opening a school was realized when Oprah Winfrey donated $1.5 million to help build a school in Trent’s village. Winfrey also concluded 25 years of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” by saying Trent had been her favorite guest out of 4,651 interviews.
“[S]he embodied everything I was trying to do and say to women and the world,” Winfrey said about Trent in a video posted on YouTube. “I was trying to say one needs a vision for your future. One needs passion. One needs compassion. One needs a commitment to that passion and to that compassion. One needs to never give up and to understand that whatever it is you want in life is achievable.”
Today, Trent, who remarried after her first husband was deported for abuse, keeps in touch with Luck via weekly emails and monthly phone calls. She was recently named one of the world’s 10 most inspiring women and promotes that message by sharing her story with audiences about 45 times per year. She will do so in Indianapolis once again when she returns to the Indiana Conference for Women on Nov. 7 at the Indiana Convention Center. Trent made her first conference appearance in 2017 .
Trent said the conference is “a great launch pad for women to begin their journey toward collective empowerment,” believing “women are waking up and finding their voices.”
Producer of the conference Deborah Roccaforte, who worked on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson,” believes the conference has grown 20% each year since it started in 2010 because the speakers are so transparent.
“They’re not just giving some pie-in-the-sky story that my life has always been wonderful and you can have it, too,” Roccaforte said. “It’s the story of this is where I failed or this is what helped me get through this. It’s about reality.”
