NURTURE
Heal the World,
Make it a Better Place
Words
Farhan Shah
Photos
Room To Read
Over 100 million young girls
around the world will wake
up each day without the most
important thing in the world
– hope for a better future..
Every morning, Sum Sin’s mother,
an illiterate fish seller, wakes up
and heads to the village market. In
that enclosed space, she hawks her
produce for more than 12 hours. On
a good day, she earns about US$2,
barely enough to support the family. On
bad days, Sum Sin and her mother go
hungry, praying to the Gods for a better
day tomorrow. There are more bad
days than good.
Sum Sin used to have a father and four
siblings. Four of them – Dad and three
siblings – passed away before she
turned nine. Her final sister married at
a young age and was tortured to death
by her husband when Sin was 15. It’s
a tragic tale but in Cambodia, where
Sin and her mother live, and many
other rural countries around the world,
stories like these are commonplace.
Erin Ganju knew that she could no
longer sit in her cushy office chair and
watch silently as the world continually
put these girls through the grinder
and spat them out. “When I realised
that I was more passionate about my
voluntary activities than I was about my
full-time job dealing with investment
banking, I knew that I had to switch
careers,” says Ganju. Today, she is
the CEO of Room to Read, a non-profit
organisation that supports literacy
and gender equality in education, and
works alongside fellow co-founders
John Wood and Dinesh Shrestha
as well as a dedicated team of staff
and volunteers to become the social
change that the world is desperately
crying out for.
welcomed shot in the
arm for a first-world
citizen like me, so used
to electricity at the
flick of a switch and
with most of my daily
problems consisting of
what to eat for lunch.
This first-world privilege
that we possess is both a
boon and a curse. We live
in relative comfort while
folks like Sin suffer in abject poverty,
simply because the genetic roulette
favoured us.
In fact, first-world privilege is an
important issue that the folks at
Room to Read have bravely tackled.
Erin regularly brings her own young
daughter on her mission trips to Asia,
exposing her to a side of the world she
rarely sees. She similarly advocates
Singaporeans parents to do the same,
for sowing the seeds of empathy in
a young child moulds them to grow
up and become a responsible global
citizen. “One of the most incredible
gifts you can provide your child is to
teach them about the world and give
them an insight into how it’s like to
grow up in another country through
books and videos,” says Erin. “Children
love to read stories and pictures
from other children and there are so
many age-appropriate ways to teach
them how F