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 Allowing Travel and Questions to Stretch Your Mind
The first blog, Helping Women and Children Change the World, and the first Q-and-A Club questions of 2008 reflected my response to the state of women and children in Egypt and Kenya. They were written between washing a month’s worth of clothes and taking naps to get over jet lag and weren't as edited as I wish I had been able to make them.
Nevertheless, if you read the blog, you can learn how it was that what I saw and what I learned from asking questions allowed me to understand a part of countries I had only been able to know second hand.
Many of what I learned caused me to conclude that education of children and opportunities for women provide the best chance for creating economic progress, social justice and greater stability on that continent, and throughout the world.
Certainly business and political decisions can also make a difference. But focusing on women and children is a major step in the right direction for many reasons. For example, when women obtain full equality and participation in society, they can contribute their talents more fully than acting primarily as the source of hard labor in a home (everyone with whom we spoke in Kenya said women carried the major burden of work in the family) and the bearer of children. And since those children are the future of a country, education is essential if an undeveloped country is to keep pace with the rest of the world. In fact, in recognition of the roll of women in raising children, large billboards throughout Kenya say, “Educate a girl and you change the country.”
The Q-and-A Club questions for category of "Expanding Your Horizons" focus on what you have learned from visiting a new culture and, especially, from asking questions.
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What have I learned through travel that I wouldn't have known otherwise?