Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Teach a Girl to Read... at topic for our time.

One reason that I love teens and love to write for teens is that teens are brave. Teens are often the ones who are willing to stand up and say the "hard" things; the ones who are willing to stand up and take action. That's why they make such great heroes and heroines.

Here are a few videos of real life heroines living in the developing world today -- and some folks from an organization that's bringing them books, and libraries, and schools. These are some of the amazing young women being helped by one of the many great humanitarian organizations in the world, Room to Read.

Suma was sold by her family to be an indentured servant, while her brothers stayed at home and went to school.



This week, in celebration of International Women's Day, Suma has been invited to perform her song in New York City at the 2012 Women in the World Summit, hosted by Newsweek and The Daily Beast. She will open the summit on Thursday, March 8 and will be on stage again the afternoon of Saturday, March 10 to talk about her experience.

You can watch it live, here:

Watch live streaming video from womenintheworld at livestream.com





"Life without an education is like a book with blank pages."


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Janelle. I've downloaded this for school.

Anonymous said...

Wow! That's a great use of these videos! I can imagine a lot of interesting conversations could be started by these videos in a high school classroom - discussions of other cultures, poverty, teens taking leaderships roles in trying to solve the problems of the world, gender issues, reading and why it's important. That's a great idea. Go Anonymous!