My Inspiring Trip to Kenya As an Advocate for Childhood Vaccines

December 8, 2014

We started in Nairobi, traveling alongside health care workers administering polio vaccines to children. While in villages near Migori I met a young boy whose mother and two siblings are blind. He had walked three miles with his little sister to the community center to get immunized.

I heard similar stories in the villages outside Kisumu, where I met mothers who had walked for miles, and…

Amanda Peet is Momtastic’s December celebrity guest editor. Peet is an actor, mother, and advocate for childhood vaccines. She began serving as a volunteer ambassador to Every Child By Two in 2008 after giving birth to her first child. Through her ongoing presence, the campaign has reached more than 500 million people with messaging about the safety and necessity of timely vaccinations. Peet has continued her commitment to childhood vaccines as a Global Advocate for the United Nations Foundation’s Shot@Life Campaign to highlight the critical importance of increasing access to vaccines for children in developing nations.As an actress, Peet’s biggest break came when she starred in The Whole Nine Yards in 2000. (That same year she was voted one of the "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" by People.) Since then she’s starred in movies such as Melinda and Melinda, A Lot Like Love, Syriana, Please Give, and Gulliver's Travels. Additionally, she appeared on Broadway in Neil Lane’s “Barefoot in the Park” and made her playwriting debut with “The Commons of Pensacola” this year. On January 11, 2015, her new TV show "Togetherness" will debut on HBO.Peet and her screenwriter husband David Benioff, live in New York City and Los Angeles with their daughters, Frances Pen and Molly June. The actress is expecting her third child, a boy, any day now.