Today, October 15, 2008, is Blog Action Day all over the world and 9,373 sites are participating - hoping to catch the attention of over 10 million readers/viewers.
How can you help? You can go to the Blog Action Day site and check out what other blogs are participating. You can learn about ways you can help reduce poverty and, because I'm a nurse and a health writer, hopefully improve the health of people all over the world.
I've written many times about my passion for literacy. Often poverty and literacy (or lack of literacy) go hand in hand. When your stomach is empty, it's hard to concentrate in school. If you can't do your work, you can't learn - if you can't learn, you can't learn how to read. If you can't read, you're destined to continue living in poverty. People in poverty often are less healthy than those who are better off. And there is your circle.
In my mind, the best way to beat poverty is to teach people how to read - and most of those people should be women. It's been proven that a family and a community's health and welfare improves when women become more literate. As women are educated, they are more able to care for their children and help them learn how to read. This then enables the children to learn skills and trades to be employable.
Poverty can be beaten in many cases. If you can help someone learn how to read, you can be helping them be a healthier person, as well.
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3 comments:
Hi Marijke,
I completely agree with you about literacy being an important road out of poverty. You might like to know about Room to Read, a not-for-profit organisation building schools and libraries in developing countires to give children the lifelong gift of education. And they support girls education too, for the same reasons you wrote about. I wrote about them today in my blog Growing Up Global. Thanks for your thoughtful words today.
Hi mihiri, thanks for stopping by. I'll go over and have a look. It's a topic I'm very passionate about.
Hi Marijke:
Thanks for sharing your passion for health literacy. My boss in a former job held a similar passion, have you met her? She's a really neat woman. Her name is Linda Church, she works in the special projects department of ProLiteracy International in Syracuse, New York. The director of that department, Jane Hugo, is also a really neat woman who has a passion for women's literacy. You guys would have a lot in common! ProLiteracy does some really neat work in developing nations, as well. For example, they teach basic adult literacy in South Africa using simple texts related to preventing the spread of HIV. Their members also do great work teaching adult basic education in the US. I don't work there anymore, but you might want to check them out. They also hold an annual conference in different cities around the US.
Best wishes with your blog and your new career as a writer.
Don Harting, MA, ELS
Chester Springs, PA
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