Posted on 01/25/2004 2:26:29 PM PST by Hon
Teresa Simoes-Ferreira was born and raised in Mozambique in east Africa. Fluent in five languages, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in romance languages and literature from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. After graduating from the Interpreters School of the University of Geneva, she worked for the United Nations in New York. In 1966 she married John Heinz, who subsequently became a congressman and U.S. senator from Pennsylvania; he died in a plane crash in 1991. In 1995, she married Senator John Kerry. She has three sons, two stepdaughters, and one grand child, of whom she is inordinately (but understandably) proud.
After the tragic death of Senator Heinz, she was urged to run for his Senate seat but chose instead to assume direction of the family's extensive philanthropic activities. She immediately undertook a major reorganization designed to sharpen the foundations' strategic focus. Only two years later The Chronicle of Philanthropy noted that under her leadership The Heinz Endowments were already “poised to become a much more influential force in the philanthropic world”.
Today, the foundations she oversees are widely known for developing innovative strategies to protect the environment, improve education, enhance the lives of young children, broaden economic opportunity and promote the arts.
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a little more on her at a school visit
Earlier, in an address to about 50 students at Merrimack Valley High School, Heinz Kerry had espoused her husband's plan to provide free tuition to anyone who pledges two years of service to the country, be it military or community-based. But mostly, the noted philanthropist, environmentalist, women's advocate and ketchup heiress discussed personal philosophy and geopolitics, not the primary.
Sen. John Kerry's name didn't even surface until after she had woven a mix of life lessons and biography for the students. Then, in a brief stump speech, she focused on her husband's integrity and global appreciation. (If he didn't understand "what it means to be an American and a world citizen . . . I don't think I could've married him," she said.)
Associate Principal Jim Gorman had introduced Heinz Kerry as the senator's "better half." It would be "worth having him as president if we could have you as first lady," he said, before giving way to the school's first political speaker of the season.
Talking about her upbringing in Mozambique, Heinz Kerry said she learned several early lessons. "If you swam at dawn or dusk, you got eaten by crocodiles or sharks. If you went into still water you got malaria," she said. Though she was free to frolic in the wild, she remained healthy, citing an early appreciation for the relationships between cause and effect and between man and nature. Her father was a doctor, and observing his visits to the East African bush was a formative experience. Heinz Kerry spoke of global compassion as well as the importance of preventative medicine. "If you don't prevent, most of the world can't afford the cure even if it exists, and so you die," she said.
Growing up in a dictatorship - Mozambique was then under Portuguese colonial rule - she saw America from afar through the eyes of the disenfranchised. To her, it was less a country than a concept, an "organic system with a can-do attitude, with an optimistic eye, with an idea of the possible." Now look at America, she said. "Where are we today?"
In college in South Africa, Heinz Kerry (born Teresa Simoes-Ferreira) marched against segregation in Johannesburg. After graduate school in Geneva, Switzerland, she went to work for the United Nations as an interpreter, albeit with an ulterior motive. "I wanted to help my country become independent," she said. Though she "wasn't doing anything wrong or bad or loud," just gathering information, the secret police warned the undersecretary who hired her that she was being watched.
Having lived where "people (would) die to be able to have the right to vote, literally," low voter turnouts in the United States make her angry. She told students that apathy is unacceptable. "Your inaction is an invitation to trouble. Your action is an invitation to hope," she said.
Her 25-year marriage to Sen. John Heinz of Pennsylvania ended when the senator was killed in a plane crash in 1991. The following year, she served as a delegate to the U.N. conference in Brazil that established the Kyoto Protocol, an international accord addressing emissions and global warming. Kerry was also a delegate; they married in 1995.
She brought up Kyoto not to talk about her life but to share her disgust for the Bush administration. The president, even before his inauguration, called the 166-nation agreement "dead on arrival."
"Now, a president should never say an international accord is dead anywhere, especially before he has really studied it," she said. In turn, she said, when Bush was stonewalled as he sought global support for a war in Iraq, "The world community basically said, 'You're dead on arrival. Treat us this way, and we'll treat you the same way.' "
Heinz Kerry told students to see "global problems" as "global opportunities," to remember that environmentalism and commerce need not be mutually exclusive and to eschew cynicism, "the greatest threat to democracy."
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