I have made contact on an international level!!!

I have some great news!!!  I have established contact with an early childhood professional in Germany.  I had to dig deep to make contact outside of the United States.  I have not had any luck contacting the 50+ email addresses that I have previously tried. I ended up asking around at work (Head Start) whether any of my co-workers knew of ECE professionals. In the end, my director previously worked with a woman many years ago.  She began as an aide, teacher, and on up through the system.  She is now the director over the entire CYSS program in Germany and has been overseas for 12 years now.  She will be returning to the United States next month, but she was willing to speak with me and discuss our questions, and curiosities for this assignment.  She has been great and I am very excited to hear back from her hopefully within the next couple of days.  So because I have not quite heard back the responses to my initial questions regarding the issues, trends, and her concerns and dreams, I have researched the alternative website for purposes of the due date of this assignment.  I will keep you all updated when I have receive a response from my international EC professional colleague!!! J

On the website: http://www.childhoodpoverty.org/, it provided so much valuable information related to child poverty all around the world.  It was a grant that funded this program which is no longer funded, according to the site, but it still provides an enormous amounts of useful data related to poverty.  Three points that I gathered from the site were:

1.       “In South Asia alone, more than 90 million children go hungry every day. (UNICEF)  Every three seconds one of the world's children dies from a preventable cause - dehydration, hunger, disease, violence - more than ten million a year. (Grow Up Free from Poverty Coalition)” (http://www.childhoodpoverty.org/index.php?action=countryo).

2.       The link to the photos really bring home the visual connection to the stories that are attached.  The photo that stood out to me was of an 11 year boy who is forced to work as a child coal miner to make ends meet for his family.  “55% of child laborers under the age of 12 worked in a hazardous occupation or situation in 2000. (ILO)  There are more boys in hazardous work than girls - in both 12-14 and 15-17 age brackets, boys account for 60% of children in hazardous work in 2000.(ILO)” (http://www.childhoodpoverty.org/index.php?action=policy).

3.       “121 million school-aged children in developing countries do not attend school at all, while one third do not complete four years of primary education, the minimum needed for basic numeracy and literacy” (http://www.childhoodpoverty.org/index.php?action=rationale).

What shocking and disturbing facts!!!  This breaks my heart to think of children not having a choice to make a future for themselves because of the environmental factors that surround them.  Like many websites I have looked into, the website is primarily about educating others about poverty and providing knowledgeable ways to become proactive and involved in changing our future.