Educate Girls for Peace and Prosperity

To slightly modify a popular song:

           

            Let there be peace on Earth and let it begin with Tea.

Why tea?  According to Greg Mortenson writing in Three Cups of Tea, in the mountainous villages of Pakistan they have a saying:  “The first cup of tea we share, we are strangers.  The second cup of tea we share, we are friends.  But with the third cup of tea we are family.”  When we meet as strangers, we need to take the time to find out what we have in common, to build bridges.  When we meet as friends, we strengthen those bridges and begin to develop plans together.  When we meet as family, we recognize ourselves as members of the same close group and will work for our common good.

The goal, then, is to take the time to get past our differences and to broaden our definition of family.

Returning from a failed attempt in 1993 at summiting K2 in the Himalayas, Mortenson became disoriented and lost.  He was rescued by a Pakistani family living in an extremely poor, isolated mountain village.  After recovering in their home and sharing the symbolic three cups of tea, Mortenson discovered that what the people of the village most desired was a school for their children.  When Mortenson returned to the United States, he devoted himself to trying to raise enough money to build the school.  He eventually succeeded and, with the help of a generous benefactor who provided the initial endowment, created the Central Asia Institute (CAI).  As of 2010, the CAI has built over 130 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  https://www.ikat.org/

Three Cups of Tea details Mortenson’s trials, tribulations, and successes building schools in Pakistan.  The story continues in Stones into Schools with Mortenson’s efforts to build schools in Afghanistan amidst the fighting and threats from the Taliban.  The schools the CAI helps fund and build differ in many ways from other schools in these countries.  They are not religious schools.  Any girl who wishes to attend may do so.  In fact, many of the schools are built just for girls.  This is especially important in Afghanistan where the Taliban prohibited the education of all females.  The village people choose where the school will be built, donate the land, and provide significant labor resources to build the school.  In this way, the school is firmly embedded in the community.  It is part of the larger family.

As the schools were being built, Mortenson discovered that the adult women also craved opportunities for education.   CAI now supports dozens of women’s educational cooperatives in the two countries.  When women achieve more education, they are better able to have successful pregnancies and prevent infant and child mortality.  This leads to having fewer children with the results that the women remain healthier and that more resources are available for the fewer children in the family.  Educated women are also able to obtain better jobs and/or develop their own businesses, thus improving the economic standing of their families.  Improved living conditions lead to less conflict.  Therefore, the CAI (and many other NGOs) view the education of women as a critical step in achieving peace in conflict-torn nations.

A friend of Mortenson’s is quoted in Three Cups of Tea as saying that he fully expects that Greg will one day win the Noble Peace Prize.  Perhaps he will.  In the meantime, Mortenson was recently honored [October 29-31, 2010] with the International Peace Award during the annual Peace Colloquy in Independence, Missouri. http://www.cofchrist.org/peacecolloquy/   He joins a list of distinguished recipients.  http://www.cofchrist.org/peaceaward/honorroll.asp

As we enter the winter holiday season and thoughts to turn charitable donations, I would like to suggest donating to the CAI.  If true peace is ever to come to Afghanistan and Pakistan it will probably be in large measure from those girls and women educated with the help of the Central Asian Institute.   https://www.ikat.org/how-to-help/

Wellbeing: Research Shows that a Lower Tax Rate Won’t Necessarily Make You Happy

The Gallup Organization has just published a new book: Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements by Tom Rath and Jim Harter.  The five essential elements are presented in a fast 100 pages.  The remaining 100 pages or so are devoted to the worldwide research Gallup undertook that provides the support for the first 100 pages. 

In brief, the five essential elements are: Career Wellbeing, Social Wellbeing, Financial Wellbeing, Physical Wellbeing, and Community Wellbeing.  If one wishes to have overall wellbeing, these five elements need to be optimized.  A chapter is devoted to each element giving helpful tips for increasing your wellbeing in that particular element.

These tips can be summarized as follows:

            Focus on your strengths.

            Do work that you love.

            Have a good friend at work.

            Spend several hours each day with people who make you feel good.

Good experiences and donating to others improve your wellbeing more than “retail therapy.”

            Automate bill paying and saving.

            EXERCISE!

            Eat right: lots of colorful fruits and veggies.

            Get enough sleep: at least 7-8 hours.

            Contribute to your community.

All this seems pretty straightforward, and we probably are aware of all these tips.  So where do you rate?  You can find out here, if you buy the book and get the code: http://www.wbfinder.com/home.aspx

If you don’t want to do that, the website does have some other useful info.

However, the book does rate cities, states, and countries on three criteria of Wellbeing: 1] percentage Thriving; 2] percentage Struggling; and 3] percentage Suffering.  The highest ranks will obviously be filled with those having the highest percentage of their population Thriving.

Based on Gallup’s research, the top 10 countries from 1 – 10 are Denmark (82% Thriving), Finland (75% Thriving), Ireland (72% Thriving), Norway (69% Thriving), Sweden (68% Thriving), Netherlands (68% Thriving), Canada ((68% Thriving), New Zealand (63% Thriving), Switzerland (62% Thriving), and Australia (62% Thriving).  The United States comes in at #19 with 50% Thriving. 

Now, what is quite interesting about the Top Ten Thriving Countries is that except for Ireland and Australia (Australia’s tax rates work out to be about the same as that of the US), all of them have higher tax rates; generally, significantly higher tax rates, than does the United States.  See the table below based on OECD 2005 data.

Another fascinating tidbit, is that all of the Top Ten Thriving Countries also have universal healthcare.

As Arsenio Hall used to say: “Things that make you go hmmmm….”

So, it looks like the Top Ten are using their higher tax rates to provide their citizens with the kind of infrastructure and benefits that improve Wellbeing.

It gives you something to think about before the elections.