Being 12: the End or the Beginning?

I came across the above quotation from The Girl Effect today and it has really gotten me thinking. Thinking - about all the 12 year old girls in Kimokouwa and Longido who will be finishing Standard 7 in October - at the end of this term. What will the future hold for them? TEMBO will sponsor as many of the girls as we can and, hopefully, other organizations will do the same. Otherwise, the girls will miss the greatest opportunity in the world to set the course for the rest of their lives: Secondary School education. Yes, it really is that important.

Consider this excerpt from Girls Count: A Global Action and Investment Agenda from the Center for Global Development in Washington:

If you want to change the world, invest in an adolescent girl. 

An adolescent girl stands at the threshold of adulthood.  In that moment, much is decided. If she stays in school, remains healthy, and gains real skills, she will marry later, have fewer and healthier children, and earn an income that she’ll invest back into her family.

But if she follows the path laid down by poverty, she’ll leave school and enter marriage. As a girl mother, an unskilled worker, and an uneducated citizen, she’ll miss out on the opportunity to reach her full human potential. And each individual tragedy, multiplied by millions of girls, will contribute to a much larger downward spiral for her nation.

There was another quotation from an entirely different source that struck me, as well: "If you can't feed 100 people, then just feed one." Mother Teresa's words. I put them in the context of girls and school. Individually, we can do little more than help just one girl. And, if you think for one minute that this is not HUGE, it's only because you don't know the girls at Longido Primary School and Kimokouwa Primary School that I know.

Even with sponsorship, the girls face enormous challenges that threaten their success.

I am imagining a backpack filled with encouraging words and wishes and quotations from people all over the world. Imagine that every new girl TEMBO sponsors for Secondary School gets one of these backpacks at the beginning of the school year. If you could drop something inside that could be summed up in a word or a sentence, or a wise saying, what would it be? If you'd like to leave something, click on the 'comments' line just below the post and you can do so. You can also add your name and country, if you like. When I travel to Tanzania in September, I will bring all of your words and wishes and give them to the girls whose lives will be opening up because they are continuing in Secondary School - the next step to changing everything.