Gordon Dryden thelearningweb.net shares 25 years of school kids enjoying internet age:
Some possible
highlighted panels Three
countries. Three different models. Three success stories. But not one mesmerized by technology itself. Only fools worship their tools. A digital network that links teachers, students and home so the entire family can be part
of the learning, discovery process. 'We try to marry the art of teaching with the science of
learning, and the benefits of interactive technology.' All five year-olds do computer animation.
Six-year-olds compose digital stories . . . twentyfirst-century literacy.
Imagine a country the
same size as an average American state, with four million people, 500,000
students at 2,700 K-12 schools. And every one of those schools — private
or public — is a charter school. Each one of the 2,700 charters is a two-part compact with the Government: • First, to meet or exceed national
curriculum standards. • Second, to achieve excellence in specific fields. But to give individual professional teachers and principals a free hand to create those "models of excellence" as "Tomorrow's Schools". Now imagine
that several school leaders experiment with marrying the world's best learning,
teaching and thinking methods to the world's best interactive technology. (1) Now what might happen if several of those "lead schools" use their combined practices to reinvent education? It could just result in the world's best program to use digital technology as the catalyst
to transform learning, teaching and schooling. And that, I believe, is what isolated New Zealand, in the
South Pacific, has started to do — with great results, specially
in elementary school. England
has achieved similar results in high school—but using a different method, and IT again a major component. And in Singapore an international school, with a global curriculum and a striking digital network linking teachers, home, students and their families is also creating a different school to model first invented over 300 years ago. 1 The resulting challenge is simple: to lead
the world in "digital schooling", simply marry the best from
the rest of the world with the best from your own culture. The New Zealand experiment Leadership, timing, corporate drive and a brilliant role model have combined to help New Zealand use IT to reinvent several aspects of schooling — specially at elementary
level. The role model is New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson who, as a kid, implored his parents to buy him an 8-mm camera and then to let him dig up part of the family's back garden to make movie sets. Years later Jackson's passion, talent and drive was to produce the world's biggest blockbuster movie trilogy, Lord of The Rings. And in one night to see him and team pick up 11 Academy Awards. Then, as a bonus, to turn hometown Wellington into one of the world's most innovative movie capital. Now New Zealand kids all want to become another
Peter Jackson—if they can't become international rugby football
or basketball stars. The
leadership came from former Prime Minister David Lange, who in 1987 also became Education Minister. He then asked a leading corporate businessman, Brian Picot, to head up a Commission to rethink the administration of New Zealand schools. Picot's plan swung into operation as the 1980s merged into the 90s. Its aim: to release the multi-talents of the country's most innovative teachers in a drive for "excellence"
in "Tomorrow's Schools". The timing: all this coincided with the launch of the World
Wide Web, network browsers like Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer,
plus the instant-communications revolution of Yahoo and Google. This
helped link the newly unleashed teacher-talents with the new breakthroughs
in instant-communications. And the corporate drive came from the newly formed Apple Education division of the New Zealand agent for Apple Computers. Recruiting good teachers as staff, it's since shown how to use the new interactive technologies for a complete rethink of their impact on school-reform. The early highlights of this inter-linked reform program: • The Government first abolished its Department of Education — just like that! • The replacement: a scaled-down policy-advising
Ministry. • Then
it abolished all the regional Education Boards — wham! •
And it turned over all power —and the saved administrative costs—to
individual charter schools. • To gain a charter, each school board (elected by parents
and teachers) had to spell out how it would achieve "excellence"
in any field it chose—relevant to its community and within curriculum
guidelines. Many schools with a large Maori (Polynesian) population
set out to excel in both Maori and English. In the main city of Auckland,
with the world's largest Polynesian population, other schools opted
to teach in Tongan and Samoan as well as English. Others, in farming,
timber-processing and fishing areas, set up school farms, forestry plantations
and trout-hatcheries. Others in tourist areas set out to link schools and tourist industries together.
Still others
decided to use latest developments in digital technology as the catalyst to reinventing schooling itself. And the first big innovations came from schools that were about to be built from scratch. Like Tahatai (Maori for "by the ocean") Coast Primary School (2), in the low-income seaside suburb of Papamoa: the first new one to be built under the "tomorrow's schools"
philosophy. More than 35 percent of its population were Maori—traditionally
the grouping most failed by traditional "talk and chalk" schools.
Today hundreds of teachers
from around the world visit Tahatai every year. In a "digital sense",
this is what they find: •
All five-year-olds do computer animation. • Six-year-olds compose digital stories on laptops
and Apple computers. • Seven-year-olds design their own websites. • Eight-year-olds, working multimedia teams, study an illustrated story by a prominent New Zealand author— and, using all their different talents, turn it into
a Disney-type animated cartoon. • Nine-year-olds design 3-D animation to invent their "ideal
school of the future". • Ten-year-olds write, shoot, edit and record music for award-winning video productions. • Eleven-year-olds produce, and videotape, their own musical. • No graffiti or truancy at the school. In fact, students
line up from 7 a.m. each day to get into school. • And the school sends home no
written reports; instead all are digitally recorded: on video, CD-roms
or DVDs. And for any home without a computer, students can take home
school laptops overnight. But Tahatai hates to be called an "IT"
or "ICT" school. They regard themselves as new twentyfirst-century
school, aimed at producing twentyfirst-century global citizens, "competent
and confident to tackle any problem or challenge in life" on the basis of a four-part "inquiry" process: 1. How do we do it now? (the present) 2. Why did we decide to do it this
way? (the past history and culture) 3. Who else is doing it better? (benchmarking the existing alternative world models) 4. And how can we invent even better solutions? (creating
a better future) The New Zealand school year is split into four "terms",
rather then two semesters. And at Tahatai the entire school investigates
one "inquiry topic" every term? Topics like "learning
how to learn", "communications" or "conservation". They'll then use a wide range of learning technologies and methods both to research the issue and communicate their results. And all other "subjects", such as reading,
writing and mathematics, will be blended into the inquiry. They find the "whole-school inquiry"
model excellent for New Zealand's many small-roll primary schools in
farming and similar areas, enabling senior students to act as mentors
for younger ones.
Computer
industry leadership While
New Zealand's changes quickly produced great new ideas in a handful of schools,
it didn't at first provide a conduit to share that knowledge. Enter Apple Education. Since 1997, it has: • Organized regular teacher retraining
conferences — linking a new philosophy of education with the new
interactive technologies. This year's conferences: 15, spread around
the country. • Run Apple bus tours to take teachers to exemplar schools. •
Sponsored Apple tours to America: to computers-in-education conferences
and visits to IT companies. • And set up its own permanent IT training rooms, where teachers
and others can take one-day or two-day courses in IT applications. Government role Despite its success, the New Zealand experiment soon exposed gaps. The new structure provided no set-up to share results: to benchmark best practice. So the Ministry appointed Carol Moffatt, principal of Oxford
Area School—in a small rural community—to head the drive
to change that. And in the decentralization spirit of "Tomorrow's
Schools", she invited the principals of the 23 best-performing IT schools
to meet and brainstorm the opportunities. The result: to set up a program of "IT clusters", each linking a well-performing "lead"
school with between six and 10 others in the same area. Any school could
apply for "lead" status—and was selected on the basis
of its proven results. Eight
years later, the cluster program has been spectacularly successful. More than half New Zealand's primary schools have been through the two-year cluster-process. Better still, the program has spurred some brilliant new ideas: • Some
public schools, notably Sherwood and Gulf Harbor Primary, have set up fully
"digital classrooms", where every child has its own computer (families pay $US340 a year extra). In their first week in first grade, every six-year-old at Sherwood learns to shoot and edit videotape. Every seven-year-old learns computer animation. • Pomaria Primary, with students from 57 countries, including Pacific Polynesian traditional song-and-dance cultures, encourages all to learn and compose "digital music". • All new schools have experimented with new layouts. Many don't even look like schools. • And one new public elementary school, Discovery 1, has turned all Christchurch city and community into a classroom. (Students use a Disney-like fun-place adjoining the main city bus terminal as their core center—but then study botany at the city's botanical gardens, learn mathematics, marketing and design in a supermarket; then use computers to record their findings.) 4
New high school models New Zealand's primary schools have been quick to grasp the new IT challenges probably because even well before the computer age they've been Dewey-modeled "discovery" centers. Most high schools around the world, however, tend to stick with traditional 50-minute "subject teaching". And here England has provided some of the best alternative
models for linking new learning and IT methods with a traditional subject-based
curriculum. This started
with the "accelerated learning" methods pioneered by the Bulgarian psychologist Georgi Lozanov, using music and other methods of "relaxed alertness" to learn foreign languages much more effectively. In the 1980s English entrepreneur Colin Rose took these and turned them into tape-based do-it-yourself language courses, and followed up with his book, Accelerated Learning, (3) adding such methods as Howard Gardner's "multiple intelligences" and Tony Buzan's "mind mapping" to
the mix. In 1994 his company published The Learning Revolution. (4)
And soon Scottish teacher Alistair Smith (5) produced the first of his
books on accelerated learning in the classroom, highlighting how traditional
"subject" classrooms could be transformed by a stimulating, enjoyable,
highly-involving "accelerated learning cycle". His one-day teacher-retraining seminars took off. And nowhere more quickly than at Cramlington Community High School, near the industrial city of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, where Smith ran his first introductory course for all staff in 1997. Head teacher Derek
Wise and Science head-of-department Mark Lovatt were soon to take that
"accelerated learning cycle" and start linking it to the new
world of IT. Their remarkable
journey since then is told in their inspiring and practical joint book, Creating
an Accelerated Learning School, and in their more recent one, Accelerated Learning: A User's Guide. (6) Says Lovatt, who is now Director of Learning at the School: "We try to marry together the art of teaching with the science of learning, and the benefits of interactive technology: what the learning revolution is all about." Of all the technology they use, few tools are more effective
there than interactive digital whiteboards. Here the British Promethean
company has become a world leader with its digital ActivBoards, and
Cramlington as one of the main "working models" for its online
"collaborative classroom" project: sharing lesson plans from around the world. At Cramlington every teacher and student learns how to use these state-of-the-art teaching-learning tools. English school performance is monitored by Ofsted, the United Kingdom education review authority. It's been very critical of many botched and costly attempts to introduce interactive technology in schools. But it has singled out Cramlington as a model for how
to use interactive technology as a core component for tomorrow's schools,
even where restricted by a traditional subject-based curriculum. New school of the future For such a school curriculum, visit Singapore
and the Overseas Family School. This is a private international school,
with 2000 students from more than 60 countries. It was 5
the first in Singapore, and one of the first in the world, to introduce the full International
Baccalaureate (7) curriculum for all grades from early childhood to
senior high school. But
it's done much more. It has integrated the full IB curriculum with a digital network that links school administrators, teachers, students and homes, so the entire family can be part of the learning, discovery process. At elementary school, IB study centers round six six-week or seven-week global or universal themes each year: planets of the universe, oceans of the world, endangered species—and all other "subjects" are woven into those themes. But the Singapore
school's program goes much further. It uses IT and its school-family
network as major components. And it adds a choice from six international
languages from age six: English, Chinese, Japanese, French, German and
Spanish. Each is integrated around the current global theme, so if eight-year-olds
are studying the human body, their second-language lessons will be on
the same subject. And, in computer labs, they'll be exploring interactive
programs on the human brain and respiratory systems, then using other tools to record their findings in graphical, colorful ways. As they move through high school, these students can not only sit, if they choose, the rigorous exams for International Baccalaureate university-entrance diplomas. They can also carry through life their own digital portfolios, stored on the school's network, to
actually show proof of their talents in action. The school even shares
its methods with the world, through its "School of the Future"
16-page full-color report on its website.(8) Three countries. Three different methods. Three success stories. All involve the new world of interactive technology and instant
communications. But not
one is mesmerized by technology itself. Only fools worship their tools. Instead, each one has used the whole new era of twentyfirst-century technology to invent part of the new school of that same century. Just like Comenius did over 300 years ago when he used new technology
to invent mass-produced textbooks and with them the "modern"
school. Just like Maria
Montessori proved a century ago: create the right, stimulating environment
and even small children will "explode" into self-directed learning. Only now the "right environment" includes twentyfirst-century interactive tools.
Get your children to
use them to reinvent schooling — and you could be surprised at the
results. Gordon Dryden
is the New Zealand-based co-author of The Learning Revolution, a book that
has sold 10.2 million copies in China. gordon(@)learningweb.co.nz 1. The author prefers to use "IT" for "interactive technology" rather than the cumbersome ICT for "information and communications technology". 2. http://www.tahatai.school.nz 3. Colin
Rose, Accelerated Learning, published by Accelerated Learning Systems, Aston
Clinton, United Kingdom. 4. Gordon Dryden and Jeannette Vos, The Learning Revolution, current edition published by Network Educational Press, Stafford, United Kingdom. 5.
Alistair Smith, Accelerated Learning in Practice and The ALPs Approach
(accelerated learning in primary school), with Nicola Call, published
by Network Educational Press. 6. Derek Wise and Mark Lovatt, Creating an Accelerated Learning
School and Accelerated Learning: A User's Guide, published by Network
Educational Press. 7. http://www.ibo.org 8. http://www.ofs.edu.sg — open "School of the Future". | .=======living document cataloguing grameen and
bangladeshi social business and sustainability investment systems
- version july 09 Dr Yunus 69th birthday dialogue special edition ===================================== Core Social Businesses originated for members/owners of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh 1.1 Grameenmicrocredit –a
collateral-free and peer to peer microentrepreneurial system of loans and savings and village centre hubs and life insurance
for the rural poorest where the first 100 Taka saved (just over a dollar) makes the member an owner of the bank which
by Bangladesh law since time of constitution in 1983 is primarily owned by members with about a sixth owned by government.
Established as one of a kind legal identity for poorest owned banking in 1983 from social action project begun in 1976 by
4 co-founders – Professors Yunus and Latifee, 1976 Youth Ambassadors Mrs Begum (today’s head of training and personal
development and education social businesses Grameen Shikkha ) and Dipal Barua (today’s co-managing director of Granmeen
Bank and head of Grameen Energy/Shakti (1996) -futher references leaflet grameen at a glance; leaflet by nobel
prize judge on his july 08 speech to bangladesh youth see also 12 year old reading club search youtube.com for yunuschoolusa;
bangladesh legal constitution bookmark 1.2 Housing franchise & loan (the grameen house for the poorest, awarded mid 1980s the aga khan architecture
prize, is minimum structure with monsoon proof roof , cyclone proof pillars, pit latrine – the whole is put in ownership
of female members so that wife and children cannot be evicted if husband divorces) 1.3 Student loans for university (ie graduation beyond secondary schooling) -this compounds
the 15 year long expoential flow promised by 16 decsions of putting all village children through primary and beyond so that
each leaves the system at best time for her or his microentrepreneurial freddom to produce and market 1.4 Loans to become a mobile telephone lady and interconnect nearly 150000 hubs (known as
grameen centres –a local community and collaboration space for every group of 60 members) –search also for Grameen
Telecom (since 1995) and Grameenphone (since 1996) –also search “Grameen Cybernet” 1996 , “Grameen
Communications 1997 ; these loans were the first time entrepreneurs started ending digital divides in a worldwide collaborative
way; in other words just as banking for the por stated in 1976 or 1983, inyernetworking for the poor started in 1996; today
bangladesh with such as http://www.grameensolutions.com/ is a world leader in using mobile for the poor picking off partrnerships with india and china; its as yet unclear
in the history of the sustainability of the world whether 1976 or 1996 was the most magic date especially with microgreen sustainability exponentials also beginning 1996 round
grameen epicentres for goodwill multiplication and 1996 also being the year in chich the hard work for getting over 2000 yes
we can peopleto connevct the greatest networking process ever http://www.microcreditsummit.org/ was connected -formally announced washington dc 1997; also 1996 was when grameen started taking healthcare insurance to a
new level at $2 per family per year as it started to develop a rural national health insurance collaboration map - see
grameen kalyan below 2 Other social businesses
originated for members of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh 2.1 Secondary school scholarships about 70% geared to girl power 2.2 Grameen Check – the marketing of products nationally and internationally of garments
manufactured by members who weave clothing as a villagers cottage-based industry –further keyphhtrase searches
Grameen Check, Grameen Uddog (1994) & Grameen Shamogree (1996), Grameen Knitwear (1997) Other Social Businesses originated by Grameen for Bangladesh 2.3 Vegetable seeds – for villagers to plant and
end childrens night blindness and other vitamin deficiencies 2.4 Grameen fisheries and livestock –keyphrase search Grameen Motsho O Pashusampad 1994,
also grameen krishi 1991 2.5 Solar electricity – Grameen Shakti currently installs more solar units than the whole of the USA so that electricity is brought to villages for first time and
in a carbon-zero way; in 2009 it has helped form a Bangladehsi consortium that willalso manafactrure solar panels in Bangladesh
. Biogas Biogas ovens FOR THRIVING ZERO-CARBON ECONOMIES BEGIN AT http://www.gshakti.org/ 2.6
Grameen Kalyan 1996 - Wellbeing insurance – 2.7 Vocational Training http://www.grameen-info.org/grameen/gshikkha/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=39&Itemid=112 *Employment Services 3
Social Businesses originated by Grameen and International Partner Premiering in Bangladesh (and Indian subcontinent)
3.1 Grameen Danone – hi-nutritional
affordable food brand for village children 3.2 Grameen Eyecare hospital – replication of the Indian social business franchise aravind –end
unnecessary blindness – social business loan funding was begun by the social business pop group – www.thegreenchildren.org (duo of mila sudne and to bevan mentored etc by Grameen America )
3.3 Grameen
Veolia – drinking water by filtering out arsenic contamination Social Businesses involving Grameen outside Bangladesh *Gramen Intel (health and digital knowlgow) *Gramen GE (health and digital diagnostics)
*Grameen Pfeizer *Grameen Mayo Clinic *Grameen BASF (malaria nets and childrens nutritional
supplements) *Grameen German
Saudi Arabian Hospitals – Teacher Training Hospitals Construction of Health City as training epicenter for rural practitioners
to be *Grameen Glasgow Caledonian
– Training nurses and grassroots paramedics in Bangladesh FOR HEALTH – BEGIN AT WWW.GRAMEENHEALTH.COM AND http://www.grameenkalyan.org/ -read discussion leaflet circulated by dr yunus at 2009 http://www.worldcongress.com/ *Grameen bankabillion.org – social business partnerships towards owning mobile money’s standard – FOR INTERNET & MOBILE TECHNOLGY FRO THE POOR START AT
MUCH MORE AT WWW.GRAMEENSOLUTIONS.COM (1999) which is the world’s premier r&d incubation
for internet for the poor partnerships –also search Grameen IT Park (2001), Grameen Inforamtion Highway (2001), Grameen
Star Education (2002), Grameen Bitek (2002) 4 Other social businesses originated internationally by Grameen
and with local partners 4.1 Grameen Trust http://www.grameentrust.org/ (since 1989)– funding and replication of microcredit for the poorest around the world *Grameen Credit Agricole to be a social business fund promoting worldwide student and other
competitions among social business designers with a likely priority emphasis on Africa . Part of an emerging family of European
funds which include Monaco ’s *Prince Albert Fund for Environmental Sustainability projects and prize competition networks
such as Ashden Awards microenergy prize system and alumni. Back in Bangladesh Grameen bank has always seen its mission as
helping to plant a “giant seedbed for entrepreneurship” –early keyphrases “Grameen Fund (1994) and
Grameen Byabosa Bikash” 2001 and “Grameen Capital Management” (1998) 4.2 Grameen Carlos Slim – Grameenmicrocredit system for Mexico –Latin American
alumnin of microcvredit need to check models ownership by the poorest very carefully. Major US NGOs have introiduced unsustrainable
models. Alumni of the 4 microcreditsummits Bali, Indonesia 08, Columbia 09, Nairobi, Kenya 10, Madrid Spain 11 are invited
to develop hi-trust networks around this issue – the Bangladeshi originated youth ambassador5000 being one; the southern
hemisphere accord between queen sofia, ingrid munro of Kenyan Jamii Bora and Sam Daley Harris of microcreditsummit.org being
another; *the 93 congressmen proposal to the world bank being another. 4.3
Grameen -and other bottom-up microcredits - wors in association with http://wholeplanetfoundation.org/ to connect microcredit and fair trade organic markets - projects under way in about 12 countries - major partner John Mackey
(new book conscious capitalism) who aims with wholefoods to do to the future of foods supermarketing what Bangladeshi
microcredit aims to do to future of financial services for and by people 4.4
Grameen with HEC paris - the first SMBA legend
used in above: * means agreemenet signed - project developing OTHER YUNUS CENTRE NEWS The Yunus Centre is currently in the incubation period to create joint
ventures with the following companies: - Felissimo, Japan
- Otto, Germany
- Shaklee, USA
The
Yunus Centre is also in the process of setting up Social Business Funds with the following organizations: - Islamic
Development Bank
- Monaco Fund
====== Other Rumors of what's posible involve adidas in next
world cup, volksvagen, and allianz
Listing
started by YunusForum Transatlantic Supporters Mostofa Zaman (Bangladeshi Villager and London Uni undergraduate),
Sofia Bustamante in London, Alexis Sumsion New York (NYU undergraduate), Chris Macrae Washington DC – any errors are
solely Chris Macrae’s |
Dear Alexis, friends of yunus 20 year olds and younger
as far as I know the dialogue went well; on dr yunus birthday 100 bangladeshis and our 9 person foreign
team were invited to the opening of the new yunus centre http://muhammadyunus.org/new . - in his 20 minute speech in bengali dr yunus stopped to thank international dialogue group for joining in the celebration;
and I even got forgiven for calling mrs begum mother of microcredit
mostofa and your and other people's years
work on youth ambassador5000 was well received as per slide attached the next day in our 2.5 hour personal session ; a delegate
from the british council and 2 senior people from BRAC joined in
mostofa will work next month in dhaka; the idea
is to plant groups of up to 10 students per group on specific themes by 1 sept; students can form their own small friends
team (eg social action group as per chapter 11 of blue book) or a student club or anything in between ; those who select a
particular theme will be put on their own circulation lists at september 1 and asked to tell each other how each is going
to start the year with the theme
would you like to be a theme leader on womens microcredit or journalism of social
business or pretty well anything you choose; I found out that yunus wasnt immediately aware of who is partnering or grameen's
behalf with goldman scahs 10000 women so I will fix that with anne black partner in charge at goldmans , and try to start
getting a list of new york region employers to be who actually support micro up which was one of many great ideas your 10
hours of diocsussions with me helped clarify; I think that our celebration report is probably something that can even be sent
to the likes of jeffrey sachs to get him to come off the fenbce on which side he is on micro or macro? similarly I will be
surveying shareholdres of The Economist- we only need one positve reply per 100 of the great and the good to get flow
bbc reporter paul rose has started blogging http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8130130.stm Bangladesh is the most crowded place on Earth and will become even more impossibly packed in the next 30 years. Approximately
20% of its land will be lost to the rising waters brought about by climate change. Today's 150 million Bangladeshis
also have to face cyclones and arsenic-contaminated water. About half of the population is illiterate and a third live on
less than one US dollar a day. While others make plans for overpopulation, global warming mitigation and sustainable
development, in Bangladesh, it is time for action. And the leadership is coming from within. BBC presenter Paul Rose
has travelled to Bangladesh to meet Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, the pioneer of micro-credit and visionary of
hope for the world's poor. He will also visit villages, field projects, and schools; and talk to the country's leading
innovators to report on life at the "front line of sustainable development".
DAY
ONE: SO MUCH WATER, BUT NOT ALWAYS THE RIGHT STUFF "We must do everything we can to provide enough safe
water for every Bangladeshi," says a representative of the environmental services firm, Veolia. "Climate
change has meant that our monsoon is no longer reliable and we are desperately short of water." In the small village
of Goalmari, about a hundred local people gathered to celebrate the opening of the first arsenic water decontamination plant
built by Veolia. It is the result of another successful partnership between Grameen Bank and big business. Professor
Yunus set up Grameen Bank in the 1970s to provide financial services for the rural poor.  Heavy rain falling in Goalmari almost drowned the camera |
On the stage, Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank officials and local dignitaries all agreed enthusiastically with the
opening remarks. But at the exact moment we all applauded, the heavens opened with the mother of all thunderstorms.
The noise of the heavy rain on the tarpaulins overhead made it almost impossible to hear the presentations. When the
fabric began to sag and leak there was a scramble to cover those on stage with umbrellas. We all moved around to the
dry spots, and young lads pushed up on the sags with long poles and drained the water to the sides. Then then the music started.
Girls danced on stage, everyone bopped to the music, while rain poured in through every seam. There were no
dry places now so we took photographs of our wet selves and had lovely laughing conversations with the villagers. It
didn't matter that I speak no Bangla or that their English was limited; we were having a great time. And the event
was worthy of a celebration; The Grameen and Veolia partnership means that these people will now have clean water to drink.
Throughout their lives so far, the only water that has been available to them was contaminated with arsenic. Traditionally,
people here have used rivers and ponds for drinking water. But by the 1970s, the lack of sanitation and water-borne disease
was killing an estimated 250,000 children each year. The solution seemed simple: Tube wells for every village. Millions
of wells were sunk and the unlimited cool water and reduction in the child death rate seemed evidence of success. But
no-one had checked to see if the ground water was safe; in fact it contains large amounts of naturally-occurring arsenic.
It took over 20 years before testing of the well water over the border in West Bengal showed that it was contaminated,
and that it was poisoning large numbers of people. Early symptoms of arsenic poisoning include skin blisters and dark
blotches. This is followed by internal organ damage and arsenic-induced cancers. Solving this crisis is a huge task.
It will take longer to test all of the tube wells than it took to drill them. It will take longer still to set up decontamination
plants. And even longer than that to communicate the problem to the millions of people who remember the well water as something
marvellous that saved them from the surface water diseases. In the meantime, over 50 million people are still drinking
water that is poisoning them. So we really did have something to celebrate at Goalmari. The innovative partnership
of Grameen and Veolia started to save lives from the first batch of clean water. The music stopped, the final messages
of congratulations were sent from those on stage; and the rain stopped immediately. Surely a good omen for the success of
this essential project.
==============================
estelle is working all month in dhaka on films
that youth can show each other on the deeper aspects of how bangladesh's microentreporeneur revolution is changing the world'
she will be co-launching in new york and paris in september, and works closely with the team preparing the blockbuster yunusmovie ;
hope you get a chhance to meet since there is no 20 year old in amerca who | find more credible in wanting to end old banking's
normaly than you
I think I know reasonably well the 6 people who will help dr yunus around europe in connecting
social business knowhow to be every youth's opportunity; now I know where conflicts with youth have enetered
into the global branding system I will make sure they are surgically removed before I waste any more young peoples'
time
assuming I have made progress on that, tell me if there is a convenmeint time to have a collaboration cafe
in new york before september 1, so I can maximise how younus goodwill networks can help your career flows
with
microeconomics truth - yes we can take down wall streets and berlin walls and every other man made folly that english colonialim
spun for far too many centuries
chris |
