Dear Source:
Literacy, happiness — is there a connection? For the last 15 years I have been doing volunteer projects in third world countries. Two weeks a year I spend working in the country and then came home and help to design the project. A high school in Borneo, an orphanage in Liberia, a hospital in India, sadly each time I came home I find the people in my community not as happy as the people that I just left. Now I look back on some of the projects and I wonder if the high school that I help build in the village on the Amazon in Peru was going to make the kids in the village happier. I really don’t know.
But I do know that being able to read in this community has a big impact on the happiness of each and every one of us. We all need to have a feeling inside of us that things will get better. It is a prerequisite of happiness, as important as a sense of community.
In our culture the ability to read is one of the most basic requirements of having the feeling that we can do better. We as a community are not doing very well in helping our children to feel good about themselves by teaching them to read. Our statistics are dread full. We can see the results in the papers. Kids drop out of school, cannot work at a meaning full job that they can take pride in so they join gangs, shoot each other and run wild, until they are killed themselves, or spend their lives in jail.
For many years Rotary East has been providing First Day of schools packets to first grades. I really enjoy going to Dober School in Savan to meet the first graders. They are all excited about being “grown up”, being in school. They were eager to learn. In a few short years they get behind in their education and begin to feel bad about themselves, from then on it is very difficult to change things. It really is sad.
One of the most important things for them to learn is to read. To learn read they have to have books. They have to have books at home. They have to have parents or grandparents or friends that help them to learn to read. What if every adult in this community bought a book and carried it around until we saw the right kid and gave it to them? Better yet helped them to read it? Do you think that it would help to make our community happy again? I do.
Greg Miller, St. John
