Getting to Know Your International Contacts—Part 1

When searching for podcasts one really jumped out at me and caught my attention. It was by a woman named Irma Allen who is the Chairperson of the Swaziland Environment Authority (the equivalent of the EPA in the United States), and a member of the World Forum Nature Action Collaborative for Children. She lives in Swaziland, a small kingdom between South Africa and Mozambique. Irma has a very strong passion for early childhood itself but specifically for the nature dimension of early childhood. One of the challenges in the EC area that she faces is training the community people and teachers to become teachers of the early years. What is different in this area is the fact that there are no classrooms, nature is the classroom. The local environment is the preschool center as well as the materials and everything. In this area they rely vastly on the grass, the trees, the weather more than ever. When there is water and when it is raining they take that opportunity to work on water activities. Doing this creates a greater respect for the environment and conservation, where the environment gives us lessons about life and death and that decomposition leads to new life. She speaks about one of the first students of the early childhood center that joined them for a farewell party they had had for a women there that was a teacher. He spoke during this party about how his early childhood experiences had taught him how to appreciate his home country and his environment and how those experiences gave him strength and determination later on in life. He felt that he had a place in life and a role to play. During his struggles and failures throughout his life he always kept thinking about how important his early childhood was and the experiences he had.

Sometimes we can take for granted the fact that here in the U.S. we have classrooms to teach in, materials such as blocks, puppets, books to use to teach our students. In some places around the world all they have is the nature and environment around them to use as their materials and manipulatives. Having teachers and educators like Irma Allen that spends there time focusing on the children that are less fortunate than the children here in the U.S. is amazing. She is giving the children of Swaziland an amazing early childhood experience using the resources that are available to them.

Since reading this podcast I became more interested in South Africa’s childhood poverty level. I read an article where the title was “More than half of South Africa’s children live in poverty”. This really grabbed my attention. I was unable to link to childhoodpoverty.org, so I had to search out my own resources. Aislinn Laing (2012) the author of this article posted by the Telegraph in the UK gave us some disturbing news, the Unicef report found that 1.4 million children live in homes that rely on often dirty streams for drinking water, 1.5 million have no flushing lavatories and 1.7 million live in shacks, with no proper bedding, cooking or washing facilities. Aida Girma, Unicef's South African representative, said that two thirds of child deaths were preventable with simple improvements in primary care for children and that if "drastic" changes were not made immediately, South Africa would fail to achieve the 2015 Millennium Development Goals of eradicating child and maternal mortality and malnutrition (Laing 2012). Reading this article broke my heart and I can’t fathom what life is like for children in South Africa.

Reading more and more about the poverty levels in children around the world just becomes more disturbing for me. I am actually ashamed that I haven’t realized the severity of these struggles children face sooner. There is more demand now that ever to educate people about childhood poverty here in the U.S. and around the world. I am very lucky for what I have in my life and the materials we are offered here to help in educating our children.

Here is the link to the article about childhood poverty in South Africa.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9280481/More-than-half-of-South-Africas-children-live-in-poverty.html