District support of Literacy Programs
At their regular meeting at noon at Prante’s on Tuesday, May 13, 2014 the members of the Wahpeton Rotary club were privileged to hear the District 5580 Rotarian of the Year Award recipient (announced at the District Conference gala banquet Saturday evening, May 10th) District Literacy Chair Heather Ranck.
To understand Heather one must understand where she comes from; not just that she moved to Fargo a few years ago from Philadelphia, PA. She was born of American parents in Brazil and returned there as an exchange student in her teen years. It was during that trip that she became aware of the poverty that many lived in; it was life changing as she resolved to help solve poverty.
Her undergraduate degree was in international studies and by living in the countries she has learned Portuguese, Spanish, French and Lingala (a Bantu African language). {Her side bar here was that being thrown into the fire and learning a language on the ground is the only way to go as opposed to five years of language classroom instruction after which a person speaks ten words.} She also holds a Master’s degree in international studies and professionally is an international trade specialist. She has lived in Brazil, Mozambique (where she ran an extension like program teaching farmers to move beyond subsistence growing too commercial growing) and the Congo. These experiences have led her to passionately believe that the key to eliminating poverty is education. This brought her to Fargo and in 2009 to The Rotary Club of Fargo where she has become District 5580’s Literacy Chair. She likes the Rotary programs due to the emphasis on results, accountability and transparency.
She discussed why so many people in the world are afraid to become more global believing that it is fear equating such people to a figurine in a snowflake ornament; protected but only enabled to have a narrow scope. Yet it is well documented that knowledge of foreign language lowers the incidence of dementia and Alzheimer disease. More important to the education of children at home and worldwide is the evidence that reading to children from birth to five gives them a huge head start. Thus she discussed the newborn reading programs that some district clubs are active in and the Dictionary Project that many clubs, including Wahpeton, do as well as programs of reading to students in elementary school. Thus to aid children at home there are any number of literacy projects supported by the District that clubs can do.
On the international scene she referenced the project by the Wahpeton Club a few years ago with District and The Rotary Foundation matching grants that placed books in mountain village schools in Guatemala some of which, working with Fargo-Moorhead AM club our members had help build. There is a great need for literacy projects and education projects in the world to help alleviate poverty. A more educated population is also less likely to reproduce out of control and more likely to seek a peaceful life.