How the Story Began...
Published May 05, 2009 @ 02:50PM PT
In 1991, I was in the Nyaminyami District of western Zimbabwe studying why so few girls beyond the age of twelve went to school.
On one of my walks between the villages, I met two teenage sisters - Cecilia and Makarita. They invited me to their home, a hut they had built themselves. Inside, it was immaculate. A shelf suspended their books from the mud floor. A battered tin trunk held a broken mirror, two worn toothbrushes and a jar of Vaseline. Their shoes, worn only on special occasions, hung from the rafters. Hand-written English spelling lists decorated the walls. And four tomatoes - a gift from the school vegetable plot - were being saved for their evening meal.
They had come sixty miles to attend Mola Secondary School because the costs were much lower than those of the schools near their family. Yet they did not know whether enough money would be available for them to return to school the next term.
Their story was to change the course of thousands of lives, including my own. I returned to Britain, determined to do something to help them and others get the education they so wanted. CAMFED was born of their story. But why had it resonated so deeply with me? Was I influenced by my Welsh grandmother, passionate about education, yet who had left school aged twelve to care for her father, brain-damaged in a mine accident? Was it my experience as a young mother of three children with the responsibility to provide secure and happy childhoods? Or was it the enduring memory of utter powerlessness in the face of the terminal illness of our baby daughter?
Vulnerability unites us all. All the young women in this book have experienced a degree of vulnerability that is terrifying. Yet they have been able to transform their experiences of pain, exclusion and poverty into power - through education. The power is now in their hands to help and inspire others who are facing the same problems they used to face. They offer us all the opportunity to work for a more just world - an opportunity we cannot afford to ignore. Join with us to give girls the education that is their right, and watch them transform our world
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