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Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam, a powerful memoir about her experience. In response to the fate of women in rape camps in Bosnia, they created one-on-one “sister-to-sister” connections between sponsors in the United States and survivors. This year, Women for Women will serve more than thirty thousand women in Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Nigeria, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan. Each woman has a sponsor, who provides direct financial assistance for one year and exchanges letters with her “sister.” The sponsors come from all fifty states and fifty-five other nations. They contribute just $27 per month, but in the affected countries that is enough for food, clean water, medicine, schoolbooks, and perhaps seed money for a small-business venture. Women for Women has helped its sisters make durable market baskets in Rwanda; raise and sell fish in Colombia; cultivate and sell flowers in Kosovo; and form a baking cooperative in Afghanistan.

Women for Women International’s one-on-one model could expand almost indefinitely, given the number of women who need its help. To do so, it needs more sponsors and volunteers.

Not all skills-givers are wealthy or part of large organizations. Diane Stevens owns a beauty salon in Greenbelt, Maryland. She felt compassion for the people of Sierra Leone, who suffered through a decade-long civil war in the 1990s in which rebel forces, in their bloodlust for victory and control of the vast store of “blood diamonds,” regularly cut off the arms and legs of noncombatant civilians, including children. When Diane learned that one of the victims was a hairdresser who worked all day standing on one leg, she decided she had to do something to help. She recruited three other stylists from her shop, along with three members of her church, to go on an eight-day trip to Sierra Leone, with expenses paid by her clients and their local government. Diane and her stylists will teach three hundred women in the capital city of Freetown about hair treatments, manicures, pedicures, and other techniques. She learned that Sierra Leoneans pride themselves on their appearance, especially their hair, and believes her cosmetology program can help alleviate the severe unemployment problem and raise morale. Think of all the good that could be done if other Americans with universally marketable skills followed her example in troubled countries half a world away, or troubled neighborhoods nearby.

Carlos Slim’s life is very different from that of Diane Stevens, but he too is a deeply committed skills-giver. One of the world’s wealthiest men, Slim owns Telmex, the Mexican telephone company, and a host of other business ventures. He is also an avid sports fan with an encyclopedic knowledge of sports history and current developments. The first time I met him, he was carrying a notebook in which he had written his list of the twentieth century’s greatest athletes, his ranking of the twenty greatest baseball pitchers of all time, and his graphs of improvements in performance in various sports over the past hundred years. Currently, he is overseeing a major reconstruction and restoration effort in his hometown, Mexico City. And he is obsessed with Mexico’s future and with giving more young Mexicans a chance to be a part of it.

His two foundations, Carso and Telmex, have combined assets in excess of $5 billion, and he plans to add another $5 billion by 2010. Over the last decade, they have paid for nearly 200,000 surgeries performed outside Mexico’s main cities, financed more than 3,600 organ transplants, provided specialized equipment for about 2,400 newborns, supported cultural programs in 1,300 public and private institutions, and posted bail for 52,000 poor people.

These are remarkable achievements, but Slim’s commitment to skills-giving will have an even larger impact on Mexico’s future. Every year, Telmex Foundation provides computers for two thousand schools, bicycles for ten thousand children in rural areas to ride to school, and university scholarships for fifteen