The White House Conference on Global Literacy

MS. MEDINA: Good morning. My name is Sonya Medina. I am a senior advisor to Mrs. Bush. I want to thank Kevin for (inaudible) this morning. I'm delighted to be here. I actually accompanied by some of the -- Mrs. Bush's staff. But in particular, I have Maria Miller who is Mrs. Bush's Deputy Director of Projects. And as you can imagine, we are delighted to be in New York City this week in preparation for Monday's very important event and I'm going to go ahead and get into it and give you a little background on the conference.

As honorary Ambassador of the United Nations Literacy Decade, Mrs. Bush will be hosting the first ever international White House Conference on Global Literacy on Monday, September 18th, at the New York Public Library here in New York City. We are delighted to announce this conference. In particular, it's a product of several different partners, interagency partners, and the different partners are U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Education, USAID and UNESCO. And we're very thankful for all their hard work and their partnership in this. This conference will be led and hosted by the First Lady.

The Conference came about as a result of Mrs. Bush's visits around the world where she has witnessed how efforts to expand literacy are improving lives, especially with girls and women and their families. And as many of us know in this room, Mrs. Bush has been a very strong advocate for many, many years regarding literacy and reading. Even as First Lady of Texas she has focused very much on the importance of reading, early childhood development. And over the course of the past years as First Lady, she has continued those efforts and it's an honor for her to now take this cause, take this focus to a global level.

MODERATOR: Let me interrupt you for just a moment. I'm noticing some difficulty with the translation, the simultaneous translation. So might I suggest, Sonya, you speak in -- just break it up a little bit and then provide an opportunity for our interpreters to relay to our presenters and that will probably -- if I'm noticing correctly, that might help everyone hear better. Would that be helpful? Okay, sorry.

MS. MEDINA: Okay, thank you. As I was saying, this conference came about as a result of Mrs. Bush's visits around the world where she has witnessed how efforts to expand literacy have helped improving lives but especially among women and girls and their families.

Many of us are aware of her dedication to the importance of literacy. I know Dr. Klass you're very familiar with her long-time efforts. As the First Lady of Texas she championed the importance of literacy, the importance of reading and in particular the importance of early childhood development. And over the course of her years as First Lady she has continued those efforts and now it is an honor for her to take her efforts to a global level to focus on global literacy and the importance literacy -- combating illiteracy around the world.

Across the globe there are 800 million people who are illiterate, 85 percent of them live in just 34 countries concentrated in the most impoverished regions around the world. And of the 771 (ph) million adults who cannot read or write a basic sentence, two-thirds of those are women. So the conference will help other first ladies, first spouses, ministers of education and national decision-makers -- national and international decision-makers -- from all over the world to implement successful literacy programs in their own countries. We are delighted to announce that approximately 30 first ladies from around the world will be attending this conference on Monday and joining Mrs. Bush at this conference.

And we'd like to share with you the three different themes that the conference will be focusing on or highlighting on Monday. They're three very important literacy themes. The first theme is mother-child literacy and intergenerational learning. And I think you have a packet on your -- great. As you know, early childhood development is the most critical part of a child's life in the human development phase of one's life. And so this panel will ensure that as mothers are first teachers learn to read, but also so that they can impart those skills to their children, beginning a cycle of literacy that continues from one generation to the next.

The second panel is literacy for health and this will focus on to ensure adults can make informed decisions and wise decisions about how to protect their health and their families. If we can read, we can read a medicine label on a bottle. A mother can read how much milk she needs to feed her baby. We can read hazard signs in our own communities.

The third panel is literacy for economic self-sufficiency. And this panel will ensure that adults, especially women, can learn basic business skills that generate income, foster independence, and boost local economies.

All three of these themes position literacy as a catalyst to advance social and economic participation, human development, and they play a critical role in poverty reduction.

I would now like to introduce or hand this over to the panelists who will all be speaking at Mrs. Bush's conference on Monday. We are delighted to have them here. Many of them are here in the United States for the very first time and we want to thank them for traveling from around the world to be with us today. I know Mrs. Bush is so excited to meet with you. And I want to say on behalf of her, thank you very much for all your hard work. What I'd like for you to do is to give perhaps a brief two- to three-minute introduction and maybe an overview of the good work that you are doing in your own countries and then perhaps we'll let our friends ask some questions.

Dr. Klass let's start with you. And Dr. Klass is our United States program representative.

MODERATOR: Why don't you say what panel you'll be sitting on?

MS. MEDINA: That's a good idea -- what panel because they can follow.

DR. KLASS: Absolutely. I'm on the first panel, the mother-child literacy and intergenerational learning. And I am representing the Reach Out and Read program which is a program that works all through the United States. I'm a pediatrician and we work through the people who provide health care to young children: pediatricians, nurses, doctors, health workers. Training these health workers to talk to the mothers of very young children, six-month olds, one-year olds, kids too young to talk, about how important it is to talk to babies, to read babies, have them grow up with books. And we give a book along with this advice at every visit from six months to five years, which is ten books before a child starts kindergarten with this advice so the children come to school loving books and understanding the joy and the interest of that kind of mother-child reading. We work mostly with children growing up in poverty, trying to address the problem of the one-third of children in this country who come to school with the basic skills you need to learn to read and are at high risk not to learn to read or real well on time.

I would just say it's a tremendous honor to be part of this group and to think our view is that every country needs to provide health care to young children, mothers everywhere want to do it right and this is an opportunity to bring up this very important subject very early. And we're honored and grateful for all the help from the Department of Education and the First Lady's office and to be part of this group.

PARTICIPANT: Yes, I'm Hasila (ph) from Afghanistan and from Learning for Life project, which is other help for girls' literacy project and working for nearly -- for just women and older girls not males. And the project is working in 12 (ph) of Afghanistan's 34 provinces and it has designed two programs. One is foundation and the other is bridging and objectives of that project is to increase the literacy rate among women and girls, especially in the rural areas and to improve health and hygiene practices in their families and communities. And it also increased the pool of women eligible for training as community health workers and midwives. So that (inaudible) programs were designed by the Learning for Life project and over 8,000 women were covered by the project. So we are hoping that this will help improve the literacy rates among women in Afghanistan. And I'm really proud that I'm participating in this big and huge conference and I represent my project, literacy project and their functions. Thank you.

PARTICIPANT: I'm Florence Mandapi (ph) coming from South Africa. I'm actually on the --

MS. MEDINA: Florence, can we talk a little louder?

PARTICIPANT: My name is Florence Mandapi (ph) coming from South Africa as a facilitator on the (inaudible) project which our guide how to live (inaudible). We also find that there were many in that area, all in the (inaudible), so we want to improve the literacy in (inaudible) areas. We teach the adult how to live and (inaudible) and also teach about the (inaudible), like how to teach their adults at home. There are adults not in military (ph). They are not able to help their (inaudible) at homes with (inaudible) as we teach them. And so we saw that there is an improvement because they had actually done (inaudible). They also do the literacy for young children between zero (ph) to five in order to help them to get (inaudible) children know something. We know that today the parents are the best teachers because they help children at home.

We also help the health support group in our project. Some people comes like the IMCI (ph) and teach them how about health messages. (Inaudible) messages. All the learners come out of school and also visit the other families to spread with the health messages that they're going to get others interested. We also have some tools that we deal with that in the home visit which teach the adult about health and we also teach the young ones at home for that family. We have some games that we play with that -- the young ones. We also have some books. We also have some puzzle that help the children to improve their minds before they go to schools. We also have some magazine where we cut the pictures and talk with the children about that -- what they say in the book and their parents write it down. We also have the child-to-child (inaudible) at school and teach them about the current things about the current issues. And then we have some tools that we do there and we encourage children to like books. And they are (inaudible) area they didn't know anything about books. And we also have the teenagers where we visited, where the teenagers come and we also teach them about health, like how to prevent HIV and AIDS. Thank you for coming to this big meeting.

PARTICIPANT (Via interpreter): My name is Maria Kata (ph) and I represent Mali and I'm from Mali. And I work for the Institutes for Popular Education, IET (ph). And our program here focuses mainly on intergenerational literacy and this is a part of our program that is called Education for Home. In Mali 81 percent of the population is illiterate and 88 percent of that number are women. And more than 60 percent of the young females in the country, the girls, do not go to school. And so our program aims at that particular population so the girls and women do have access to school and so that they can learn to read and write and do their math. And since there are very few literate people in Mali, we have a lack of teachers. And so we train teenagers and younger women to help take care of the younger teacher from the very earliest time. And this is one of our ways of mobilizing the population and to direct them toward the schools. Thank you.

PARTICIPANT (Via interpreter): My name is Sala Setay (ph) and I'm from Egypt. I work for a nongovernment organization in Egypt which is called Karetass (ph) Egypt and we have worked on literacy efforts from the very beginning because we realize that this is a very important issue for Egypt and there are still 11 million people in Egypt who are illiterate, despite our efforts.

And we have devised and designed a program that is based on a method which is based on dialogue. And the purpose of this dialogue is for those who are to be taught to express what their needs are. The majority of the early participants programs were women and the issue that concerned them the most was that of health. And because of this, we created a second program, which (inaudible) the first which is devoted to health issues. And this program has four aspects to it: Fundamental hygiene, reproductive health, nutrition and the environment. And it seems that by putting the emphasis on these four main areas that women are able to indeed profit from this program health-wise.

And we have established a link between literacy and health, that is when issues do come up we create posters and booklets to help educate the population and this is done with -- by working with organizations such a UNICEF, Save the Children and other organizations. For example, we have created special classes for children who are below the normal weight for their age in order to teach mothers how to prepare proper food for these underweight children. And these courses take place two times per week and the women who come to these courses, these mothers are required to write down what the nutritional needs of their child are and we also educate these mothers on the other issues, for example, how to take medication properly. And we also encourage these mothers to transmit what they've learned to other mothers, as my colleague mentioned earlier.

And we believe that the best way to change society is to get those people who would be least amount of (inaudible) society, be able to take care of themselves and to become empowered so that they in turn, may actually change society from the (inaudible). And so those are the essential points that I'll be making on Monday, but I would also like to let you know that it's a wonderful opportunity for me to be here and to learn from the other panelists what their issues are, for example, in Mali, Burkina Faso and Afghanistan.

PARTICIPANT (Via interpreter): Good morning. I am from Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso back in 1987, 1988 was in a very bad situation when I first took over my responsibilities as a coordinator of this program. And I say this because at that time, there are 52 percent of women in our country who lived below the threshold of poverty. And 85 percent of women in Burkina Faso work as agricultural workers. And agriculture is the basis for economic development in Burkina Faso. And about 90 percent of these women were illiterate. And how can a country develop in such conditions? And this concerned us a great deal and we had to work at two different levels. First of all, is to target this population of women who live in the agricultural (inaudible), so that they might become literate, but also so that they might develop income generating activities.

And the second aspect of our program was a bilateral program partly funded by an agency outside the country and it was Swiss -- what they call Swiss cooperation. So we've discovered that the ministry of education spent only 1 percent of its budget on the literacy of these women. So you see, to one degree, this is not considered to be a priority project at the government level. And so what we had to was engage in a real dialogue with the government, so the government would be convinced of the necessity of teaching literacy skills to these women. And if we are here -- the reason we are here today is because our efforts were quite successful. And the government itself of Burkina Faso has now created a national fund for literacy. And what is even more important is there is a ministry now whose sole goal is literacy. And more and more women now are able to take advantage of this program and because of these literacy efforts, they are also able to engage in income-generating activities. And so we want to show that not only has this program itself been successful, but the country itself is becoming more successful and we are hopeful that will be able to expand this program nationally, but that also other countries may learn from our experience and be able to have a similar program. And, in particular, I would like to thank the first lady for inviting me to come. Thank you.

PARTICIPANT (Via interpreter): I'm (inaudible) Munro (ph) from India. As a (inaudible) for (inaudible) on literacy for self-sufficiency, I am building our experience in the state of (inaudible) Bangladesh (inaudible) that work on the literacy program to improve the literacy rate of women.

Under this project, certainly we tried to establish a link between literacy and (inaudible) programs. Actually, the government at the national -- the Indian Government at the national and state level again raising (inaudible) mention of woman self-help groups as a tool for (inaudible). And we tried to link -- establish a link with these two programs. And this program, particular literacy program which we call it (inaudible) -- it means literary women. This program relied on her self-help spirit. And the numbers of the group actually they pool their resources and they first get the benefit from the economic activity -- they take up economic activity as a part of self-help groups.

And then in the same way, they share the literacy skills. For example, if there are women -- non-literate women in a group, they are independent non-literate women and there are further (inaudible) literate women (inaudible) are in neighborhood. And see that the illiterate women are taught by the (inaudible) women without any financial commitments.

This program was very successful and now in most other states in India also implementing this program. And around 6 million people have become -- women have become literate under this program in last five years. So I’m presenting this program in the conference (inaudible). Thank you.

PARTICIPANT: I’m Hujeen Nastades (phonetic) and I represent an NGO in Brazil which is called (inaudible). We work with literacy of young people and adults for more than two main goals. And the first one is to begin to initiate the literacy project based on this huge demand of people who are not literate. And the second phase is to promote, to encourage the continuity of education so these students will stay in school.

And we conduct our program through a very huge network of NGOs, so you know the private sector, non-profit, the government, universities, and the community themselves. And throughout this network, we have been able to assist over 5 million Brazilians. And also the particular experience that we have had in Brazil has been taken and adapted to other countries of Portuguese language and also Spanish.

And so it’s a great pleasure for us to be at this conference not just to share our own experience but also learn from all the others that she brings to the table.

PARTICIPANT: Good morning. I’m Gonzalo Perillo from Bolivia. I’m the Director of Alfalit Boliviano. Our main office is in Miami, and Alfalit is working in 23 counties and all over the world. We have Alfalit in Angola, in Brazil -- well, in many places.

My biggest -- my country is big, not so big as U.S.A., not so big as (inaudible), but we have one million square kilometers, and we are working in more or less 800,000 kilometers in Alfalit Bolivia. Actually, we have 20,000 people studying with us and 76 percent of this population are women. The most of the illiteracy people in Bolivia are women. And most of them speak one native language called Quechua. And we start teaching to our participants in Quechua, and gradually we introduce all the Spanishes.

In the future, we want to work with women, with the mothers, because all the healing possibility in the homes are -- is part of the women. When someone in the family is going to be sick, they have to heal. They worry about that, not the men, the women. And in the future, we want to change them to keep a good training about the heal, how to heal kids. I think we are going to do that.

We are founded by USAID and we have 50 institutions in Bolivia working with us giving different kind of resources. And we’re proud to be here in the middle of these -- such a nice people. Thank you.

MODERATOR: I guess if you want to open it up to questions now, that concludes the introductions. And if you have questions, please feel fee. First round, if you just state your name and affiliation just the first time.

QUESTION: I’m Glen Ashby from Trinidad & Tobago News. Okay, my first question concerns special education and learning disabilities. No one mentioned those areas. And what provisions have been instituted to address those concerns.

MS. MEDINA: There may be some presenters that can speak to any provisions that they have in their programming for special education. The key to how these programs came to be presenters is that UNESCO, as one of our partners, put out a request to basically their like countries, they’re like-initiative program countries and asked for programs that were basic literacy that were for the countries that are the most illiterate and would be able to be replicable and also that showed progress and success. And so those were the tenets that we used for these programs was very basic literacy skills.

As to whether or not -- we didn’t look specifically to special education because that would be an extra caveat. So I don’t know if anyone has any particular piece that they want to mention.

PARTICIPANT: (Via interpreter) I want to thank you very much for bringing up that issue. Our program’s main focus is the development of young children and, in fact, it’s at that age that we run into the needs for special education. And it’s in this respect that we rely on the mobilization of women.

Our culture is essentially an oral culture, and so we need to listen to the women and find out what they know about their own children when it comes to the upbringing of their own children. And in fact, they have helped us learn how to deal with children with special needs. And these mothers have passed along this knowledge to teenagers who are now in themselves teaching younger children. We now have 150 communities that have developed programs for children with special needs.

In addition to children with special needs are adults with special needs. We’ve development special literacy programs, for example, for women who have hearing impairment needs and for blind women as well. For example, we had never done any training using Braille before. And when we saw the needs of this adult population that wanted to learn how to read and write, we had to bring in special trainers, we had to develop special programs, and we had to realize that one of our strong points was to be able to adapt to the needs of the people who wanted to be trained. And I think we have begun to do that, and I want to thank you very much for that question.

QUESTION: Lillian Lin, Central News Agency from Taiwan. And I have a question for anyone. Do women have a defined and confined role in your country? And is it an obstacle for this illiteracy problem? This is my first question. And the second question is this, in my country we have a compulsory education, elementary, another nine year compulsory education. And do you have this system in your country or any difficulty to promote compulsory education?

MODERATOR: Gina (ph).

PARTICIPANT: In Brazil in this last years we have like an inversion of the situation with women in greater need than the men. And what happened now that we have reached a level of like universal education or compulsory education for children as you mentioned. And unfortunately, the public school system cannot address the needs of all, you know, the youth and adults that have been received education because the system failed to provide it.

We have about 60 million absolute illiterate people in Brazil and another 32 million who were not able to finish the first four grades even though education is a right by the Brazilian Constitution. Now what we have to do is to organize, set up a public policy that will make it a reality.

And that’s why in our experience we work with the two prongs, not just literacy but also the continuation of education so all these young people and adults will achieve what is a right by the Constitution.

PARTICIPANT: (Via interpreter) To continue along the same lines brought up by Gina (ph), I would like to mention that in Egypt we do have compulsory school. But given the population explosion, the schools are not able to receive all of the new students, and we are also lacking in the necessary number of teachers.

And this proves to be a major issue for the government because there are two issues here at the same time: How do we make sure that we have adequate schooling for everyone, and then still we have to have additional programs to reach the illiterate population. And for budgetary reasons, then you have a government that is emphasizing formal education programs but sometimes to the detriment of the literacy programs. And this means it’s the NGOs, the non-government organizations, that often have to take charge of this non-formal education, that is the literacy program.

And to get back to your question about the women, there are still a number of villages in Egypt where, because of long-standing ancestral traditions, women are simply not allowed to leave the home. And that’s one of the reasons we have organized special literacy training programs that actually take place in individual homes; that is women can meet together with their neighbors in a private home and not have to go outside of the home to get their education (inaudible).

And the fact that we also have this other aspect for educational efforts that is the health aspect, that makes it easier for many to accept the fact that the wife is going out to learn something useful for the family.

PARTICIPANT: I’d like to say something about the question. In Bolivia, the education is compulsory, but it’s very hard to see what’s happening in those faraway communities because they don’t have schools. So they can’t study. They want; they can’t.

Now in Bolivia, the men would say yeah, I’m the boss. I’m the head of the home. That machismo -- how you say, machismo -- but it’s interesting. The woman is very, very important in Bolivia. In the countryside, the men is -- he is not going to do nothing without consulting his wife. And his wife is going to say where is he going to work, where -- how much they are going to spend money because she got the money, she keeps the money. And it’s very important. They don’t have problems to go to the school; they like to go to the school. There’s 76 percent of our people are going. And that’s a very good thing because they like -- the women like to teach to other people and it’s good policy.

QUESTION: One final -- two questions. The first is, are young men getting left behind in this program that seems to be targeted for women? That’s number one.

And number two, what incentives do you have for attracting foreign teachers, foreign English teachers? For example, in Afghanistan, I’d like to know like how many men are illiterate, how many boys are illiterate -- for you program is strictly for girls. So how many young men are illiterate, and what is being done to address that situation?

PARTICIPANT: Yes, thank you. In Afghanistan, over 80 percent as a whole are illiterate, men and women. And in the rural areas, it is more higher. It is about 90 percent. So there are many literacy programs for the male and female, but it was just our project for women. Yes, because the opportunities for women are very low. So -- but in many provinces the men also -- we have been asked why it is not for male because our project was very successful. And even when the women learned something, they shared that with their families. So they were very willing to have such a program for the males as well.

MS. MEDINA: And I’d like to add from the White House perspective, we very much think of this conference as a focus on both boys and girls, men and women. But again, when you look at the statistics, you know, there is a greater need when you look at women and young girls. So it’s not to say that we’re excluding boys or men at all, in fact, I know Mrs. Bush back in her domestic initiatives, has taken on helping America’s youth, which focuses very much on young boys. So I want to make that very clear. But when you look at the international statistics, young women and girls are very much in greater need.

QUESTION: And on the second question concerning the incentives for foreign teachers and what provisions are there in the budget to attract -- whether it’s through marketing, advertising for teachers or skilled teachers to come to your country and feel comfortable?

PARTICIPANT: (Via interpreter) Well, your question is a very interesting one because we have to deal with that when it comes to the training of our teachers and our own facilitators. And for us, literacy training is a sort of continued education -- continuing education and so a lot of our younger trainers do want to be trained in English if only to gain better knowledge in the area of teaching in general because they can learn about teaching from English courses.

And we have launched a program which is called "Service Learning," and anyone who wants to come and teach in our program is more than welcome.

PARTICIPANT: (Inaudible) in the rural areas. In the rural areas, 90 percent of the illiterate people are women. I think that’s the reason (inaudible).

QUESTION: My name is Marta Torres Ruiz. I work for La Razon newspaper based in Madrid. In some places of your countries, women are not allowed to go out. They have to stay at home, but they are very important for economies. How are your governments working to let people know that women and men should have the same rights and obligations?

PARTICIPANT: My problem, again, is that women are not allowed to go out, especially in the rural areas. That we had a very hard time in the beginning, in fact, to introduce the project which is working for the women and asking the women to go in someone else house for studying.

There is the story that one, there was a man that doesn’t let his wife to go to her classes and since she was very interested she went without her husband’s permission. And just -- she had learned something. And then she had asked her husband a question, but he couldn’t answer. (Laughter.) So she said that I know the answer, and I have learned it from the schools, the literacy class. And he was wondering, and he was very willing after that to send even his daughter to attend the classes.

So it is really strange for the rural people to let their women and girls to go out or to study or to -- well, for example, to go to bazaar for shopping. But our program is trying to encourage the people that men and women all have the same rights and female also need to go out, and they should be free to go out or to study or to learn. And some of the lessons help a lot of people to Arab women because our project is for women, but the lessons learned by the women, they can share it in their families.

And there are many activities that encourage the women to do it in the community or to share it in their families such activities. Even we proved in our office that over 20 percent of our staff were women. But in other projects it’s not like that, so we begin with our office and then design some lessons to encourage people to allow women to go out.

PARTICIPANT: (Via interpreter) I’d like to add a few words. How does the government let women know that they have a right to education, that they have a right to be literate? First of all, in looking at (inaudible) you have the educational policy itself. And this policy first had to recognize the role played by civil society, because literacy training is not something that was very organized at the national level, at the government level, it’s rather non-government organizations, communities, small groups, grassroots organizations that led the battle in this area.

And the government’s role is to organize the training of the trainers, and to certify teachers and also to determine what are the specific steps to be undertaken. For example, there’s a large population of women with young children home from infants to children up to 5 or 6 years old. And so in addition to satisfying the educational needs of these women, we have to make sure these children are cared for while they are studying. And so this is the reason that we also -- the government encourages programs that will help these women develop income-generating activities, because that’s what will bring them out of poverty. And this will also allow women to have a sense of autonomy, independence.

And also the way that the literacy programs are carried out is extremely important. For example, let’s say that you’re dealing with a woman who earns her livelihood by selling bread in the street. And if you bring such a woman into the classroom and use traditional teaching methods, it simply doesn’t work. For example, if you rather based education on her life experiences, for example, how many loaves of bread did you sell yesterday; did you earn money yesterday; did you lose money yesterday. For example, and if the activity was profitable, what was done with the profit? Did you save it? Did you have to spend it? Did your husband take it away from you?

And so what is particularly important is that you have an approach to literacy training that allows these persons to be able to become responsible for themselves. And what is also important is that the group that you are targeting, the group of learners, show solidarity with each other. And so this is what I mean by talking about the programs that are outside of the regular formal education for them.

MS. MEDINA: I don’t know if there are any other questions, but I’d be happy to set up --

MODERATOR: She wanted to --

MS.MEDINA: I'm so sorry, my apolgies.

PARTICIPANT: I am glad to hear that question. In South Africa we have that problem at the beginning. The women like to come to their classes, but the men didn’t want their women to come. They say they are going to waste time going to school because they are old. But as we continue for those who comes in the class, the men say that the (inaudible) between the women who stayed home and the women who attended at school. As (inaudible) said, that we have some skills that women -- they learn and also have some skills that they have at school. For that, they also say that there is a different because they have the skills that they do at home, and they also have the direction that’s helped them to do -- to have some skills. After that, the other men that didn’t allow their women to come, they said please go to school. I see the difference between learning and staying at home. They are men that are not staying at their home. They are going out to search for a job. They comes at home and then see the difference. (Inaudible) they see the machine that comes to the project and see the guardians, the (inaudible) because they have some money. The women who attend have some money, and they also (inaudible) sitting at home. The other mens go to the town and they didn’t bring money to their homes. So they see the difference.

And they also -- those who didn’t -- those who they didn’t come to school, they also ask me how I will not ask us to come to their class. And we also said this class is allow anyone to come. But they say we are not allowed to attend with the women you have. Can you do some class which is only the women only? And I also arranging it.

MODERATOR: I would be happy to arrange one-on-ones today or --

QUESTION: (Inaudible.)