About Schooling...

One Million Bones has four really fantastic interns from Amy Biehl High School, which is located just a few blocks away from our office.  Amy Biehl is a year-round school, and this week marks the first week of their fall break.  These girls are busy.  They take high school classes, college classes, are responsible for 100 hours of community service, and some of them work jobs, too. And then of course, there’s an American teenager’s social life.

That got me thinking about education for kids in IDP camps.  What does that look like?  Do children in the camps even have the opportunity to go to school?  Those questions and the miracle of “google” brought me to this: A report by the Population Council and Women’s Refugee Commission on Schooling and Conflict in Darfur: A Snapshot of Basic Education Services for Displaced Children.

This is an excerpt from the preface:

“Education has been long neglected in emergency relief efforts. In 2007, Save the Children estimated that more than 39 million children and youth who are affected by armed conflict do not have access to education. In mid-2007, the Women’s Refugee Commission (formerly called the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children) approached the Population Council about conducting research on the protective role of education in conflict. The result was a collaboration between the two organizations on a research project in Darfur, Sudan. The Darfur region has been significantly affected by displacement from ongoing conflict. Given the large size of the affected population, the level of international involvement, and the documented violations against children and youth, Darfur serves as a compelling case study of the extent of educational coverage for primary-school-age children in this setting as well as certain basic elements of educational quality. The ultimate goal of the project was to improve the well-being of displaced children and youth through increasing the provision of quality and safe education.”

This link will take you to the report in its entirety.

And, this is from a blog about the school situation in Dadaab Camp near Somalia.

“In one of the largest and oldest refugee settlements in the world, education is a luxury denied most of the 90,739 children who live there.

Set up at the outset of Somalia’s civil war in 1991 to accommodate 90,000 refugees, three camps near the northeastern Kenyan town of Dadaab – Hagadera, Ifo and Dagahaley – are now home to more than three times that number, and persistent conflict in Somalia, from where 95 percent of the refugees originate, means the population grows daily.”

This link will take you to the website where you can read the entire blog.

Half the Sky

I'll bet most of you have heard about Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book, Half the Sky:Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.  If you haven't, we'll just say that it's definitely on our must read list (hint, hint).

Now, we're particularly excited to share that they've made a four hour television series of the same name and it's previewing on October 1 and 2 on PBS.  There's more information here about that. (hint, hint again).

It's fairly common knowledge that the title comes from a Chinese adage that states, women hold up half the sky, but I also found this Chinese Folktale called, Holding the Sky, when I was looking it up that I'd like to share.

Holding the Sky

One day an elephant saw a hummingbird lying on its back with its tiny feet up in the air.

"What are you doing?" asked the elephant.

The hummingbird replied, "I heard that the sky might fall today, and so I am ready to help hold it up, should it fall.”

The elephant laughed cruelly. “Do you really think,” he said, "that those tiny feet could help hold up the sky?”

The hummingbird kept his feet up in the air, intent on his purpose, as he replied, "Not alone. But each must do what he can. And this is what I can do.”
 

(hint, hint)

Yes, you heard right!

We have reserved the mall for our big installation June 8 - 10, 2013! Mark your calendars, make some bones and meet us there!

One Million Bones Florida

Teaching Resources

I came across this article today in a google alert, Shoah offers tours, class resources. It was in The Daily Trojan, the student paper at the University of Southern California, which is also the home of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute.  

I had to see what it was all about!

From the USC Shoah Foundation Institute website:

"History of the Institute

Inspired by his experience making Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994 to gather video testimonies from survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. While most of those who gave testimony were Jewish survivors, the Foundation also interviewed homosexual survivors, Jehovah’s Witness survivors, liberators and liberation witnesses, political prisoners, rescuers and aid providers, Roma and Sinti (Gypsy) survivors, survivors of Eugenics policies, and war crimes trials participants. Within several years, the Foundation’s Visual History Archive held nearly 52,000 video testimonies in 32 languages, representing 56 countries; it is the largest archive of its kind in the world.

In January 2006, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation became part of the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where the testimonies in the Visual History Archive will be preserved in perpetuity. The change of name to the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education reflects the broadened mission of the Institute: to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry—and the suffering they cause—through the educational use of the Institute’s visual history testimonies. Today the Institute reaches educators, students, researchers, and scholars on every continent, and supports efforts to collect testimony from the survivors and witnesses of other genocides."

This link will take you directly to the page where you will be able to see some of the many testimonies that Shoah has collected.

This one will take you to their home page where you can get more information about all their activities.