Posted to Web: Sunday, May 17, 2009
Opinion: Editorials & Letters: Story
Greg Mortenson, author of “Three Cups of Tea,” drew an audience of 7,000 people to McArthur Court on May 7. His message was inspiring: Education of girls can change the world.
The quote he emphasized was, “If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community.” Statistics show that when girls are educated: 1) infant mortality decreases, 2) population growth diminishes and 3) basic health and quality of life improve for everyone.
Friendship With Cambodia is a small-scale version of Mortenson’s work — only instead of educating girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan, we are educating girls in Cambodia,where half the girls and a quarter of the boys never go to school. Poverty is the main reason, but when girls are not valued their disadvantage is doubled.
Cambodia is still recovering from 30 years of violence. Nearly 2 million people were killed during the genocide (1975-79) that targeted educated people. Seventy-five percent of the country’s teachers died. Today, most people in Cambodia live in poverty.
Friendship With Cambodia sponsors 110 poor rural students in secondary school and college. Three out of four are girls. In Cambodia only 12 percent of the students graduate from high school. Poverty forces most of the students to drop out between 3rd and 6th grade. Their parents, who earn $1 a day, can’t afford fees, books and clothes.
Friendship With Cambodia’s students are motivated and work hard, getting up at 4 a.m. to do chores before going to school. Some walk for two hours to get to school.
What stops people in this country from supporting the education of girls in developing countries? Often people feel their money goes into an organizational quagmire and never reaches the student, which is sometimes true. Friendship With Cambodia gives at least two-thirds of every sponsor’s donation directly to the student, and the rest is used to make the program possible, including paying social workers in Cambodia who work with the families and students.
We keep our program personal and real — we facilitate an annual letter and photo exchange between the student and her or his U.S. sponsor. Some of our sponsors have traveled with us to Cambodia to meet their student. Friendship With Cambodia’s next trip is in January, and you are invited.
It takes time to see the impact of educating girls. However, we see almost immediate results through our micro-credit loans for women in Cambodia. We teach them to set small goals, borrow money for income generation projects such as raising pigs, and then we encourage them to save money until they reach their goal. Often their first goal is to send their children to school. Later they might build a house or a well.
Once they gain self-confidence, these women start improving their community. They educate other women about vaccinating their children and family planning. They address the problems of domestic violence. They organize the community to solve problems, such as illegal land grabbing.
Poverty in developing countries seems overwhelming. Morteson’s solution is simple and effective: Educate the girls. Mortenson has put enormous effort into education in this country, speaking at 220 schools last year with the message that you can make the world a better place. American schoolchildren responded and raised funds for Mortenson to build schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In Eugene, Karen Dukes’ literature class at Spencer Butte Middle School read “The Clay Marble,” a story about a Cambodian child, and then raised funds to sponsor a youth to go to school in Cambodia. It costs $30 a month to sponsor one student for a year through Friendship with Cambodia.
Mortenson is a remarkable humanitarian who is changing the world, one girl at a time. It wasn’t through training, skill or personal fortune that he succeeded, but through sheer determination and dedication to his mission to help others. He’s a great inspiration to all of us who want to make the world a better place.
Bhavia Wagner is executive director of Friendship With Cambodia (www.friendshipwithcambodia.org).
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