edu illustrated

good morning,
prepare for another string of entries--these will be fun though since they're all based off of photos i've been meaning to post. i lost the cord that connects the camera to the computer, so i got all 1400 some photos put on a dvd, and then went through them to see which to show you.
no work yesterday or today (besides writing/research on my own). my boss' brother-in-law passed away, so everything's been on hold. today i was supposed to head off to one of the colleges to help promote AIESEC (we're in the midst of recruitments), but that was postponed. around 11 am, i'll be heading off to run an HIV/AIDS workshop with some @ers, but that's still 2 hours away...
so! 7 entries (count 'em)...here we go.
it has been really awesome to see signs and posters that illustrate the effort, time, and money india is putting into education, especially for girls. these two were both taken at the school where the ramdarbar AGP camp was held.

like you would ever, ever see a sign in the US that said, "a girl child is nation's pride"--not just because it's a grammatically incorrect sentence--but because i'm sure some parent or teacher would claim it as sexism and change it to "every child is the nation's pride" or something like that. it's like the bus seats for ladies only--if you look at it one way, it seems to be favoring women over men, girls over boys. but you have to look at the history, the background, and what has led us to the point of having to make these changes and adjustments and compensations. it also made me very excited to see the attendance count for girls v. boys. in a country where female literacy is around 42% and male literacy is closer to 65%, it's encouraging to see that girls are indeed getting attention and finding their way to school.

this is the program i mentioned in an earlier entry--the topic of a paper i wrote in may for the violence against women (vaw) course. in hindi it means "education for all." The programme aims to achieve the goal of universalization of elementary education of satisfactory quality by 2010. as i said, i've heard mixed reviews about it, and i'm sure both sides of the fence are correct to some degree. it's just so freaking cool to see something like this, after spending hours and weeks reading articles about it, seeing the logo online, looking up stats and numbers. but this? it's real.