“I knew they were suffering. I would not ask them what happened, because I knew they were very ashamed to say that they were raped. Not to be a virgin is a big crime in those places. So I would just ask them what they need,” says Mawahib Al Shaibani, a UAE banker who crossed over to turn savior of traumatized women and children in ISIS-ravaged Iraq after meeting Sri Sri Ravishankar.

Sitting across Mawahib in the guestroom of the Art of Living’s international centre in Bangalore, talking to her, thoughts of two women fleetingly cross the mind – Joan of Arc, and Florence Nightingale though it gets clear during the course of the conversation that neither of those historical figures fit Mawahib.

The battlefield is common to all three, filled with death and violence, rape and ravage, but both Joan and Florence were doing their bit for battling armies, Joan with the sword and Florence with her lamp.

Mawahib on the other hand is battling the devastation left behind by war on the innocent, on helpless women and children. And she wields neither the sword, nor holds up a lamp but, nevertheless, she’s a savior, bringing hope to thousands with the computer and skills-training that she imparts to the forgotten men and women, that will once set thousands of them up for life.

She talks of the plight of the Yazidi women and girls. She first saw them in the February of 2015 in refugee camps in Iraq. She speaks of the vacant eyes, the hopeless faces. And she recalls that she herself was displaced once, torn from the land of her birth, Yemen, and transported to the newly independent nation of the UAE.

Born in 1967, Mawahib wants to help refugees everywhere. May be because she herself went through the same ordeal.

“We had to start all over again in the UAE. We left Yemen with just the clothes we wore. We were not allowed to take anything else,” she says. “All I can remember is being in a ship and it was dark and there were rats.”

Mawahib comes from a family of traders. In the United Arab Emirates, she studied in a private international school, and after finishing high school, moved to the United States, where she studied finance, and got a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Indiana, Pennsylvania.

Thereafter, after training in a private bank, she moved to Geneva, and became a broker, and started trading with the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).