Leymah Gbowee: At 17, I was fresh out of high school. I had the world ahead of me. I was going to college to be a pediatrician. I was going to marry my dream boyfriend and have two children, with a white picket fence, live my dream life. My dad was working with the government, the National Security Agency. Things like that were quite good for us, so we were now a middle-class family. My mom worked at the national hospital as one of the senior dispensers in the pharmacy. And Monrovia children, I would say, at my age, we weren’t really involved in the politics of our time. We were involved in our own politics. So life was booming for us. And then, like I said, we had moved from a community where we didn’t know poverty, we didn’t know hardship. Growing up, my dad had the only television in that neighborhood. Every child came to watch television in our house. But by the time we moved outside — in the more suburban area — and we came to that community, then we realized that we were living in a bubble. Not a rich bubble, but a comfortable, closely-knitted bubble.