Room to Read Blog

Guest Blog from Sri Lanka: Nelka's "Need to Read"

Recently, on a trip to visit our programs in Sri Lanka, our team had a chance encounter with Nelka, a young waitress who, as it turns out, knows a thing or two about Room to Read. Reena Luke, our communications manager for Asia, shares her impressions of the team’s meeting with Nelka in a guest post from the field.

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The A-9 highway is a busy truck route in Sri Lanka connecting Mannar in the northwest to the capital, Colombo. On most days, traffic is heavy and a sense of urgency abounds. Police stop vehicles at frequent intervals—checking papers and asking questions—reminding travelers that they are close to the “war zone” where scars are still fresh from dark days past.

Standing in stark contrast to the somber police checkpoints are lush green fields dotted with children on bicycles headed off to school.

Just past the 100 mile marker, our team spots a small hotel that seems the perfect place to stop for a cup of tea and a bite to eat.

Once inside, we are greeted by a young woman named Nelka, who rattles off the breakfast menu with impressive speed.

After serving our food, Nelka approaches our group and asks in perfect English whether we are tourists or on business.

“We’re here for work," shares one member of our group. “We help set up libraries in some of the schools here.”

“Well, you are not the first to do that here,” she counters without skipping a beat. “My school had a library built by an organization called Room to Read.”

At that, we point towards to the parking lot, where our van sits adorned with a Room to Read logo. Nelka squeals with delight, and immediately launches into the story of how she spent hours reading in the library at her school, and as a result, had become proficient in Sri Lanka’s three most prominent languages—Sinhala, Tamil and English. She spoke of the “tri-lingual” books she had enjoyed and the “need to read” they had helped to cultivate within her.

“I passed my A-levels a year ago with good marks,” she shares, adding that her voracious appetite for reading has only grown since graduation, thanks to weekly trips to her community's public library.

When the time comes to rejoin the traffic on the A-9 highway once again, we say goodbye to Nelka, but I can still see her in my rearview mirror as we pull away, waving vigorously. In that moment it occurrs to me that the traffic, the checkpoints and the long journey are all worth it, so long as more children like Nelka in this part of Sri Lanka that have seen such hard times, have a place to go where they can learn and play safely.

Learn more about our work establishing libraries, and about our programs in Sri Lanka.

 

Don't forget to help us spread the word this month about our campaigns for literacy!

Join our tweet campaign! Each RT will donate $1 to our literacy programs in Asia and Africa (up to $30,000) thanks to Random House, Inc. Click to Tweet!

 

Throughout September, all donations to our library programs will be matched up to $40,000 thanks to our partner, Better World Books. Click to donate.

Library in Nepal Turns Primary School Children into Public Health Activists

Saroj Lama and Anita Bista are 5^th grade students at the Shree Pratibha Primary School in the Kavre region of Nepal. Plagued by high illiteracy rates, the Kavre region also suffers from a widespread lack of awareness regarding proper health and sanitation. The streets are often littered with trash, putting the community, and children in particular, at risk for injury or disease.

Anita and Saroj had never given much thought to the negative implications of their community’s sanitation issues until one day they came upon a book on the subject at their school’s Room to Read library. That day, the two students turned into budding community health activists.

Inspired by their new-found knowledge, Anita and Saroj started a grassroots program at their school to improve their community’s health and sanitation record. “We looked around our littered village and decided it was high time we did something to clean the mess up,” says Saroj, who immediately began rallying support from parents and teachers at his school.

Together he and Anita initiated a door-to-door awareness campaign that had them performing songs with their fellow students throughout the community about the importance of proper hygiene and waste disposal practices.

“The library encouraged them to think outside their comfort zone,” says one teacher, who helped Anita and Saroj with their project.

“The books about the environment helped us visualize what we wanted to achieve,” echoes Anita. “With our vision clear, it was easy to share it and to convince the community to help us conserve our shared environment.”

Thanks to Anita and Saroj, the streets of their small community in the Kavre region are cleaner than ever, and perhaps more importantly, they have witnessed first-hand the power a few dedicated individuals have to create positive change in their community.

Read more about our work establishing libraries or about our programs in Nepal.

Don't forget to help us spread the word this month about our campaigns for literacy!

Join our tweet campaign! Each RT will donate $1 to our literacy programs in Asia and Africa (up to $30,000) thanks to Random House, Inc. Click to Tweet!

 

Throughout September, all donations to our library programs will be matched up to $40,000 thanks to our partner, Better World Books. Click to donate.

Guest Blog from John Wood: Kicking off the 2011 Clinton Global Initiative

The excitement is palpable as the world descends upon New York for today’s opening of the 2011 Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). I’ve been lucky enough to attend CGI on behalf of Room to Read for the past five years, and now sit on CGI’s Advisory Board. Every year I’m in awe of how the forum has turned into a catalyst for game-changing partnership and collaboration in the field of international development. Each year, I leave with new connections and new ideas that we have been able to implement to make a difference for millions of children across the developing world.

This year’s CGI will be no different. Room to Read will unveil an innovative report, the inspiration for which was born at a meeting convened by CGI last spring. At the meeting, Cory Heyman, our chief program officer, met with representatives from FHI 360 and Amenons Nos Filles á l’Ecole (ANFE), two other nonprofits working in the field of girls’ education. Despite the multitude of organizations around the world dedicated to girls’ education, they noted, there has been very little research dedicated to identifying the factors that contribute to girls’ success in reaching higher education.

Together they questioned: If we know that gender bias, safety concerns, early marriage, pregnancy and financial disadvantage are major roadblocks to tertiary education, then what are the success factors that can help girls in the developing world overcome them? In other words—let’s not focus on the barriers, let’s learn about the real-world solutions that actually work.

As the idea for a study identifying such factors began to take shape, The MasterCard Foundation, with whom we first connected at CGI 2010, stepped in to provide guidance and financial support—kicking off six months of rigorous research.

The fact is, even under the most challenging conditions, there are young women across the developing world charting new territory and taking the bold step of seeking higher education. We wanted to hear from them—in their own words—about the factors that were positively contributing to their success.

Our team conducted in-person interviews with 160 of these trailblazing young women in Cambodia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India and Mauritania, and found that despite political, cultural, and economic differences between their communities, the girls identified very similar success factors as being instrumental in their ability to reach university.

The young women we met shared personal stories that illuminated their common attributes of determination and courage. Many cited the encouragement of their families, teachers and communities as being paramount to their success, coupled with the material and emotional support they'd received from nonprofit organizations.

For Room to Read, these findings will help shape our Girls’ Education program curriculum, which we’ve built out over the years to go beyond financial support and to include extensive life skills training and mentoring as well as family and community engagement.

By releasing the final report at this year’s CGI Annual Meeting, we hope that these girls’ voices can reach across borders and help shape best practices in the field of girls’ education for years to come.

Read the complete report, Through Their Eyes, In Their Voices: Young women in five countries share their experiences navigating tertiary education, on our website.

Tune in tomorrow at 3:20pm EST to watch John Wood answer your questions live from CGI in an interview with Randi Zuckerberg broadcast on Facebook.

Fun with Phonics at Nakatete Basic School in Zambia

As Ms. Sharon Chanda sings instructions to her class, her first grade students run to the mat at the front of the room to join her, one by one.  

It starts as a few students from the table underneath the mtondo (mango) sign scramble to the front of the room. They are soon joined by their classmates who sit below the dangling nanazi (pineapple). As they settle, they don’t miss a beat in the call and response routine.

As Ms. Chanda calls out in Chinyanja, the language of instruction for these first graders in Zambia, the students sing back a melodic reply. The exercise is one of many teaching methods Ms. Chanda learned through the in-service training she received as part of Room to Read's Literacy Instruction program. “The students have always been eager to learn,” she shares, “but the Literacy Instruction program has inspired them to be more curious in their studies.” 

While the first graders wait patiently on the mat, their fingers dance in anticipation of the phonics game they’ve gathered to play.  She hands out letter cards and has students match the letters to the sounds on the wall.  Ms. Chanda believes this interactive approach is working. “I have never seen my students have so much fun while in class", she shares. "Reading and learning are no longer droning activity for them—it’s fun.”

As the phonics game comes to an end, select students report to Ms. Chanda to deliver the next exercise back to their respective tables.  

What could result in chaos is pure energetic order, as the students dutifully file back to their assigned tables, all led by Ms. Chanda’s signing.  

Once reunitied, the teams work together to match the phonics in pairs with their corresponding vowel sounds—speaking each pair aloud to check their answers.  “Ba, be, bi, bo, bu,” they chant together, grinning from ear-to-ear.

“The crux of teaching with the new methods is that we ensure that the students are having fun while learning," says Ms. Chanda. "It emphasizes creativity and encourages both the teachers and the students to learn in a different, yet fun-filled, way.” Maureen Simunchembu—Room to Read’s Literacy expert in Zambia—agrees, adding that the program, “offers a great opportunity for children to learn to read and write, and inspires them to strive for more.” 

At Nakatete Basic School, the Literacy Instruction program “has definitely inspired the students, since it complements the prescribed course content perfectly," says Ms. Chanda.  A quick observation of her classroom shows that this is clearly the case.

Learn more about our work in Zambia and about our Literacy Intruction program.

 

Don't forget to help us spread the word this month about our campaigns for literacy!

Join our tweet campaign! Each RT will donate $1 to our literacy programs in Asia and Africa (up to $30,000) thanks to Random House, Inc. Click to Tweet!

 

Throughout September, all donations to our library programs will be matched up to $40,000 thanks to our partner, Better World Books. Click to donate.

 

Show and Tell: Accepting the UNESCO Confucius Prize for Literacy in New Delhi

This post is part of the ongoing series, Show and Tell, where we bring you photos and stories collected by Room to Read team members on the road. 

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Today's show and tell is hot off the presses. Taken earlier today in New Delhi at the UNESCO Literacy Day 2011 celebration, it shows Wilfredo Pascual, global program officer for our Local Language Publishing program, accepting the 2011 Confucius Prize for Literacy on behalf of the entire Room to Read team. The award was presented by President of India Smt. Pratibha Devisingh Patil and Dr. Qian Tang, Assistant Director-General for Education for UNESCO.

Three Ways to Celebrate International Literacy Day

Many of us don’t spend much time thinking about how literacy affects our life, but maybe we should…

Imagine being one of the nearly 796 million people worldwide who lacks the ability to read or write. It would make deciphering the contents of an employment ad, taking the proper dosage of medication and filling out a ballot form all nearly impossible.

The bad news is that most of those 796 million people live in developing countries, where access to a quality education can be extremely limited, so their children and grandchildren are likely to continue in the same path. The good news is that doesn’t have to be the case.

International Literacy Day is September 8, and Room to Read will be celebrating all month long by spreading awareness and raising funds to fight illiteracy in the developing world. Here are three things you can do to help:

1. Make a donation. Thanks to our partner, Better World Books, all gifts to our library program in September will be matched up to $40,000. That means that your gift and all others like it will have twice the impact!
2. Spare 140 characters. In today’s world, information travels fast…if you can read it, that is. Help give the twittersphere a taste of what a world without literacy would look like by tweeting an “illiterate” message to your followers with the hashtag #RTforLiteracy. For each tweet, Random House, Inc. will donate $1 to our programs (up to $30,000).
3. Educate yourself. Watch an interactive video about global illiteracy (produced in partnership with Credit Suisse's Global Education Initiative), or read about our work in Asia and Africa in our most recent newsletter. Then go out and spread the word!

And don’t forget to celebrate your own right to read this month.  Take the time to curl up with a good book, and remember what it is that made you love reading so much in the first place.

Read more about International Literacy Day on our website or refer to UNESCO.

Inspired to do more? Learn how to start your own fundraising campaign for Room to Read.