Shining Example Amid Darkness
Hearing my 23-year-old son talk about seeing kids in Ghana who walk three miles to and from school, and they consider it a privilege because there are some years when their village cannot afford to hire a teacher, shines a new light on education.
From another Third World trip, to Mali, my son tells of village children cut off from attending secondary school for four months each winter because a river with no adequate bridge floods during the rainy season.
And so every time I see a new report with same old news that the United States is slipping down the educational ladder – ranking 17th according to a global report by the education firm Pearson – it angers me. Any excuse offered for this dismal showing is as lame as a fourth-grader claiming, “My dog ate my homework.”
I wish every American youth could travel to Ghana or Mali or someplace similar and witness first-hand how kids there value the opportunity to attend school.
More simply, I wish every classroom in America would require its students – and parents – to watch a three-minute documentary by award-winning filmmaker Eva Weber titled “Black Out.” (You can see it online at http://www.one.org/us/2013/10/08/the-dark-side-of-education/).
Imagine countless Rocky Balboas with a tattered textbooks and you get a feel for “Black Out.” It should make every American student embarrassed to not finish a homework assignment or fail to study for an exam.
The powerful video opens with this somber statistic: “Only a fifth of Guinea’s 10 million people have access to electricity” followed by this dark reality: “Every day during exam season, as the sun sets, hundreds of school children begin a nightly pilgrimage to find light.”
Onscreen on a dark, lonely night we see a teenage boy, wearing a backpack, sitting next to a gas pump and studying under the outdoor lights overhead.
“We don’t know what to do,” the boy says, his words translated into English. “We don’t have electricity at home. We have to go outside where the electricity is working. We study out here and then go back home.”
A handful more students turn the gas station into a library al fresco. One boy uses a trashcan as his desk and a girl speaks this cold truth: “I come from far away to study here. Sometimes I have to spend the night here. As a woman it can be dangerous to go back around 11 p.m. Sometimes were are forced to spend the night here because of the lack of electricity.”
One recent evening shortly after first seeing this video, I saw a girl of similar age reading a textbook at a local soccer practice. As dusk arrived she did not move to beneath a light at the restrooms or in the parking lot. There was no need; there will be illumination at home later. She pulled out a video game.
The kids in “Black Out” have no lamps, no desks, no chairs. They balance schoolbooks on their knees and on trashcans; they sit on curbs and on the ground.
Two minutes into the mini-documentary comes the most chilling, and yet the most inspiring, footage of all. Outside the international airport is a large parking lot. The lined spaces are empty of cars, but the lot is not at all vacant – the blacktop is filled with kids reading, doing math problems, studying.
A boy in the parking lot explains the young human gridlock: “We all come here because we don’t want to fail our final exams.”
Jets arrive and depart, but the kids stay through the night.
Another boy with no electricity at home adds this: “My parents are a little bit worried. We are worried, too. We want a different future. That’s why we come here.”
They come by the hundreds. Beneath the glow of streetlights meant to prevent crime, crime is being prevented in the best way possible – with education for brighter futures.
“Black Out” then fades to black, but its message is enlightening. Every American kid who offers an excuse for not doing his or her homework should be forced to study in a supermarket parking lot for a week.
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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for the Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. His new memoir WOODEN & ME is available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com and Amazon.com.