Egypt: One Village At A Time (Women's Literacy Project)

[onager]

Another thread has some of the (usual) bad news about Egypt right now. I went looking for more info on atheists in Egypt, and stumbled across this piece of happier news.

This is a story about 3 high-school girls, 10th-graders, who organized a women's literacy project in their rural village. Literacy is the first step to finding out what it REALLY says in your Holy Book, so I'm flagrantly cheating and calling this on-topic...

I found it in Egypt Today magazine. Which is a great source if you have any interest in Egyptian society, culture, politics, etc.

When I lived in Egypt, the magazine constantly pushed the boundaries. e.g., it ran a special issue on the subject of FGM, generally a taboo matter.

From the article:

Fatma Sayed, Hagar Sultan and Fatma Mahmoud, all 15 years old and in grade 10, live in El-Agamyeen, a village of about 12,000 families 20 kilomters west of Fayoum City. With their school teacher Rabab Mohamed, and some help from local education initiatives from the technology giant Intel, these three girls have overcome cultural barriers and community resistance to set up a literacy program for the women in El-Agamyeen...

The girls say that they live in a culture that does not fully approve of a girl’s education, so most girls are taught the basics and then forced to leave school to find a husband and start a family. “Which made it a terribly difficult task, since it consisted mostly of convincing the people of our village,” Sayed says...

At first, the people of El-Agamyeen were not welcoming at all and looked upon the girls “as the aliens who are breaking our social norms,” Mahmoud recalls. However, after explaining the benefits for the community as a whole, “they were persuaded and most of them became really helpful in the whole process,” adds Sultan. “Face-to-face interaction was the best way to do it,” Mohamed says.

The literacy program students range from young women in their early 20s, widows in their 40s to grandmothers in their 60s.

http://egypttoday.com/blog/2014/05/14/one-village-time/

[RussBLib]

1. literacy is SO fundamental to opening up the mind

When I think of literacy my mind goes to one-time illiterate slave Frederick Bailey who learned to read, escaped slavery, changed his name to Frederick Douglass and became a dazzling orator and writer, disproving slaveholder's beliefs that black people lacked the intellectual capacity to function as free American citizens.

I hold out hope that these wonderful young girls attempts at advancing literacy will produce similar statesmen (and women). Oh, to have someone who could demolish the Koran like Ingersoll could mince the Bible.

(ramble over)

[AlbertCat]

2. disproving slaveholder's beliefs

Not just slaveholders at that time.... but the general consensus!

[AtheistCrusader]

3. This is great, and literacy is not easy.

Still struggling with this as a parent. It's incredibly vexing. I love to read. I can read, all day long. I can even read, to some degree, other latin-root languages without translation assistance.

But I don't know how to teach someone else to read.
Reading, and teaching someone to read, are not the same things.


This is why I love teachers so much. They do things I cannot.