oprah contest o magazineOprah Winfrey & Seabrook's- Erin Kennedy have much in common. But that's not why both women met at an exclusive Arizona spa recently. Ms Kennedy was among fifty-nine other winners of the five-day vacation with Oprah and the celebrity's best friend Gayle King, in "O" Magazine's "Live Your Best Life" spa week contest.

"We all met Oprah, this was her getaway with Gayle," said Kennedy. "She was eating meals with us, at the lectures, on the treadmill next to me. I'm really a fan of her attitude on life. Her goal is, women have to help each other. She's just average, everyday ... she knows where she comes from. I think that's why she likes to help people in Africa."

Kennedy is similar to Oprah in that, for the past four years, the thirty-nine-year-old mother of two has devoted herself to helping other women living in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya. She and four other Seacoast women founded HopeCraft, a non-profit company that sells beaded jewelry, leather goods and cornhusk pocketbooks made by the African women. The crafts are sold in the United States with the money being reinvested into the cooperative set up for their businesses.

Ms. Kennedy says that wasn't chosen because of HopeCraft but because her nomination statement revealed she was "due" for a break. But her own story of being stressed paled in comparison to what the other women told her of their experiences, she said.

"For her," said Kennedy of Oprah, "it's all about women who give to everybody else first. She's trying to teach women they first have to take care of themselves. The point is it hit home with me."

Ms. Kennedy takes no salary and would like to make HopeCraft her full-time job. "That's my goal, so I don't have to do anything else," she said. "That's my passion. I just love it. When I go back over there, they're so grateful. They think it's all me, I think it's all them. To me it's just women helping women." It was her mother, said Kennedy, who sent in the contest nomination.

"My mother's a big Oprah freak," said Kennedy. "In January she sent in the nomination, she didn't tell me."

"I really learned a lot, the (spa) is about life balance," she said. "Their theme is living in the moment, when you're here, really be here, how to eat right, exercise, nutrition, different things designed to help us help ourselves."
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