FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: It looks more like a theme park than a school, and it’s not just the location. In one of Thailand’s most impoverished regions that’s unusual. The buildings are built of bamboo, a fast-growing, renewable resource, including a geodesic dome.

MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: Well, just to show that you can do things people don’t normally think can be done, such as getting underprivileged kids to be at the top of the scale of many, many things, of being good, being decent.

DE SAM LAZARO: The Mechai Pattana School is the cornerstone of an idea to attack rural poverty and stereotypes and to instill a new kind of learning.

MECHAI: This is our sex education wheel.

DE SAM LAZARO: The Wheel of Fortune game teaches about various sexually transmitted diseases.

MECHAI (spinning the wheel): Green is a safe color, of course. Aha! Oh, aha! HIV, oh boy, just missed that. Then they have a good laugh, because HIV is explained up there.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mechai has long relied on good laughs to explain HIV and sex education in this conservative Southeast Asian nation. He comes from a prominent family and was trained as an economist. But Mechai became a TV personality who spearheaded family planning campaigns in the seventies and, two decades later, condom use to prevent HIV. In this predominantly Buddhist nation, he invited monks to bless the efforts.

MECHAI: And in the Buddhist scriptures it said many births cause suffering, so Buddhism is not against family planning. And we even ended up with monks sprinkling holy water on pills and condoms for the sanctity of the family before shipments went out into the villages.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mechai is credited with bringing down Thailand’s soaring HIV infection rate and its high birth rate, work that won him numerous international awards, including the $1 million Gates Foundation prize for global health.

DR. MALCOLM POTTS: In 1960, Thailand and the Philippines had about the same population, about 60 million people, 50 million people. Today, the Philippines has 94 million people, and there’s a lot of poverty. Thailand has 1.8 children per family, it’s got about 68 million people, and it’s making progress.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Malcolm Potts, former head of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, was an early collaborator with Mechai. He says population stability has yielded many economic benefits.

POTTS: I think it’s a seamless evolution. Mechai, at least in the past, used to talk about fertility-led development, and once we had these contraceptive distributors in most villages, you know, after 3 or 5 years they were the people who had intensive chicken rearing, or who had a sewing machine, or had a microloan.

DE SAM LAZARO: Thailand is no longer considered a less developed country, but there’s a growing gap between the Bangkok area, where the factories are, and rural farming regions whose young people have to migrate to the city for work. Mechai has tried to develop sustainable ideas that would be accessible in rural settings. On a beach resort once owned by Mechai’s family—it’s now run by a nonprofit group he founded—is a garden of so-called intensive agriculture.

MECHAI: This is the new style condom. This is the poverty eradication condom!

DE SAM LAZARO: The unusual metaphor aside, he says these recycled bags of potting soil can grow produce, in this case, cantaloupes with a minimum of water and space and maximum profit.

MECHAI: You’d grow it four times a year, so that’s 24,000 baht. That’s just under a thousand dollars for this much space. Nearly as good as marijuana. Might be even better. Don’t have to share with the police, either.

DE SAM LAZARO: Joking aside, he says Thai staples like mushrooms, limes, poultry, and hydroponic produce could be grown in rural enterprises. To demonstrate, he took us to Buriram Province, about four hours from Bangkok. He’s worked here for two decades, introducing new ideas like intensive agriculture. Several older initiatives have taken off independently.

MECHAI: You have a factory in the middle of nowhere here.

DE SAM LAZARO: This shoe factory was started with international grants. It now provides work for 140 to 200 people, producing mostly for the multinational Bata shoe company.

MECHAI: We helped, from Canadian money again, to provide a loan for them to establish a factory building, and then helped to get Bata to come in, rented the machinery and then bought the machinery, and they’ve been on their own for about 15 years.

DE SAM LAZARO: A short distance away are buildings that were once used to train people to raise livestock. Those activities have since shifted to people’s backyards and, in the buildings they vacated, more factories making brassieres in this building, ice skates in the next.

MECHAI: How could you imagine an old chicken pen and an old pig pen making this stuff, or brassieres?

DE SAM LAZARO: Was it really a tough sell at first?

MECHAI: Oh, yes, took seven visits. They did it out of pity at first. Then they realized that it worked. And when we bring someone new down they can’t quite fathom it how it can be done because they’re so used to the perception that you do everything like this in Bangkok, in the city.

DE SAM LAZARO: These factories provide livable if not lucrative wages and social benefits. But to truly transform rural communities, Mechai says it will take new approaches in education, which is where the Bamboo School fits in. It is now three years old and serves grades seven through ten. Building funds came from profits from Mechai’s resort, the Gates prize money, and corporate donations. Longer term, the school is developing its own vegetable farm, a key part of the business strategy.

(speaking to Mechai): So when this is up and running and flourishing, the cantaloupes and the limes will be paying the teacher salaries here?

MECHAI: Amongst other things, yes.

DE SAM LAZARO: The motto here is “The more you give, the more you get.” Quite apart from academics, for every student there are strict work requirements.

MECHAI: The parents do community service, and the kids do community service, and for every lunch time or meal time you have to do one hour’s community service, so that payment is in providing help to other people, plus their school fees.

DE SAM LAZARO: As part of their service, these students were preparing lesson plans to teach younger children in a nearby government school. It’s part of their training in leadership and critical thinking and a departure from the rote learning standard in most Thai public schools.

RUTHAICHANOK JUNPENG (Student): The teachers are here to teach us, but they’re also like friends, like an older friend that you can go to for advice, not just about what you’re learning.

PIMPAKAIN SIRI (Student): My parents are rice farmers, and I expect my future to be quite different, because I want to become a doctor, and I believe I can do that. I’ve learned new ways to help my parents, who are used to doing agriculture the traditional ways and I can help raise their income.

DE SAM LAZARO: And because students at this school regularly volunteer, they feel connected to their rural communities, says teacher Nantina Saninchai. She says two-thirds of them will be able to create or find jobs here.

NANTINA SANINCHAI: So a number will stay here. They have computers, etc., similar to what they would in the city.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ideas from the Mechai school are catching on. On weekends here, children collect litter in exchange for spending time online in a new community center or in a toy and book library. Parents and elders prepare food for the children. The village chief says one reason this community thrives is that parents are around for their children.

CHAMLEUNG PANRIN: Eight years ago, migration was rampant. Everybody would leave, and you only had children being brought up by the grandparents. Now it has very greatly improved.

MECHAI: The only road out of poverty is through business enterprise, and this is what we’re doing. Teach them, train them, lend them the money—not give them the money —and the business skills. But probably very, very important to go with it too is community empowerment.

DE SAM LAZARO: And you need to start it young?

MECHAI: Yes. Yes, start them young. When you start learning how to give when you’re young, when you get older it is second nature. Just like stealing. Start young and you keep on stealing forever. Ask my politicians.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mechai says he won’t mind if more people steal his self-help model of building community and nation.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Buriram province, Thailand.

Teacher (speaking to students): So I want about four people per bench. Go. Grab your journals.

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: These boys, grades six through eight, are having fun examining mollusks and worms in a typical science class. The school they attend is anything but typical, however. There are only 40 students here—all boys—and though they study the usual subjects, these boys are here for something more. This is the Boston Archdiocesan Choir School. Boys come here to sing. Music is so important that this place has been described not as a school with a choir, but as a choir with a school. The music director is John Robinson.

JOHN ROBINSON: They would have started in the monastic tradition, when boys would have gone to the monastery to seek an education, and at some point during the time that the boys were getting this education, they would have joined the monks in singing.

VALENTE: Robinson, now 29, is the product of a famous choir school in England, where boys’ choirs have long been a part of the Anglican tradition.

ROBINSON: In England where I’m from, the choir schools began perhaps in the seventh century. Initially, the monks would have been singing chant, all on one note, and as the history of music progressed they started to sing in more than one part. They needed the boys to sing higher parts. The unique sound of a boys’ choir is particularly fascinating to work with, because we know it’s the sound that composers had in their ears when they were conceiving much of the music.

VALENTE: Boys’ choirs were never a large part of the Catholic tradition in the U.S., but in 1963 the choirmaster at St. Paul’s Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts established a choir school to help preserve and promote sacred classical music in the U.S. Today, the St. Paul Boys Choir is the only one of its kind in the country. There are no other Catholic choir schools. The reasons: changing tastes in music, the costs of training the boys, and the trend toward boy-girl choirs. Here, daily rehearsals start each morning before 8:00.

ROBINSON: At that first rehearsal, I’ll do some exercises to warm up different parts of their voices.

(to the boys) Okay, let’s get the lips warmed up.

ROBINSON: We do arpeggios with funny words. “My car has flat tires” is one that we often do.

VALENTE: The boys, most of whom are Catholic, must learn to sight-read hundreds of pieces of music.

ROBINSON: The boys sing music right from the word “go” in music history. They sing classical music as well as the music by Mozart, Hayden, Mass settings by those composers, and into the Romantic period with motet–Bruckner, Mendelssohn, Romantic composers, and then into the modern day as well.
Piano Teacher: Good. Let’s just try the right hand alone from here, okay?

VALENTE: Each student is also required to learn to play the piano. Some learn other instruments as well. Alex Pattavina, a tenth-grader, learned to play the organ when he was at the choir school and now plays at a Sunday Mass here.

ROBINSON (speaking to choir): It’s a lovely sound, but it’s just very unclear, the words “I cry out “Praised be the Lord.”

Singing ” I cry out, “Praised be the Lord.”

VALENTE: The rigorous curriculum makes recruiting a challenge. To find boys who can sing like this, Robinson visits dozens of schools in the Boston area, auditioning third and fourth graders.

ROBINSON: We’d sing a song, maybe “Happy Birthday” or the National Anthem or something like that, and then test them each individually, just very briefly and very positively, to see whether they have that ability to match pitch. When we say “matching pitch” with a boy we mean that we play or sing a note to a boy and we see if he can sing that note back to us accurately. The one word that defines what we’re looking for is “potential”—that we don’t expect to find boys who can already do all the things that we’re going to teach.

AIDAN LEWIS (Chorister): When I was in the fourth grade, I tried out for a play, and it had a singing part in it, and my music teacher said that I had an amazing voice, and she told my mom about this school, and she sent me here, and then when I came here I started to realize I had a good voice.

VALENTE: The school’s $5,000 annual tuition doesn’t cover the cost of educating the boys. The difference is made up through donations and money the choir earns from what are called “working scholarships,” that is, public performances like this one at Fenway Park. The have also sung at weddings and at funerals, including those of Rose Kennedy and Tip O’Neill. They sing at Masses six days a week. But some boys may have to drop out of the choir before they graduate.

ROBINSON: Boys’ voices are going to change, and there’s very little that can be done about that. For many boys it really is no man’s land vocally, and the sound that they can produce is unpredictable and sometimes embarrassing, so we just have to be very kind to them when that day comes because, of course, it’s quite shocking that suddenly their whole life for the last four years as they’ve known it singing these beautiful treble parts is no longer happening in that way.

VALENTE: Those whose voices have changed can sometimes continue with the choir, learning to sing in falsetto. Others will serve as altar boys or ushers or will sit with the congregation, singing to encourage those around them.

ROBINSON: When I’m conducting the choir so many things are going through my mind. You’re thinking about the effect it’s having on the people listening. Sometimes their concentration will wander. They’ll start to do something they shouldn’t be doing. You have to wave at them and that kind of thing, and that can be very distracting to a performance, so you’re constantly trying to train those things out of them and get them purely to focus on singing.

VALENTE: How do you impart a love of this difficult music to these very young boys?

ROBINSON: They come to it, and they find something intrinsically beautiful about it, and other times they don’t really get it, and then my job’s harder to try and show them what’s good about it or what’s interesting about it, and different boys react in so many different ways. Sometimes they learn from each other. You’ll get one boy who loves it, and other people catch on when they see that he loves it.

VALENTE: Forrest Eimold is twelve years old. He sings, plays the organ, and composes.

FORREST EIMOLD (Chorister): It’s one thing to sing or play a piece by somebody, like let’s say Mozart, and you can definitely express emotion in that, but it’s another thing entirely to be able to express your own emotions and to write exactly what you want.

VALENTE: What have you written? What have you composed lately?

EIMOLD: I’ve composed many works for piano. I recently finished my second piano sonata. I’m currently working on a Mass for the choir school to sing, actually. And I’ve done some other short pieces.

VALENTE: At High Mass on Sunday morning, the boys sing with the men.

ROBINSON: When the boys sing with the men of the choir on a Sunday morning, the dynamic is rather different. If they hear professional adult singers singing, they’re far more likely to imitate something which is good like that and to learn from the way that the adults around them are singing, so I think it’s a very positive dynamic.

VALENTE: The pastor of St. Paul Parish is Father Michael Drea.

REV. MICHAEL DREA (Pastor, St. Paul Parish): That music that the boys provide can be such a source of inspiration to Catholics as well as those who are searching to better understand who God is and to come to a greater knowledge and appreciation of the many gifts and graces that God bestows on individuals.

ROBINSON: I think the boys get an absolutely unique experience, because they’re learning confidence to sing in front of people from an early age. One of the most satisfying things of all is to see a boy who doesn’t realize he has potential and talent coming into the school in the fifth grade or the fourth grade and leaving three or four years later having learned so many skills that he would never even have imagined he could have learned when he first came in, and seeing that confidence grow is a wonderful thing.

VALENTE: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Judy Valente in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Rev. Leslie Hunter: I don’t know about you.

School children: I don’t know about you!

Rev. Hunter: But I’m ready for chapel.

School children: I’m ready for chapel!

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: It may look like a pep rally, but at Holy Family Ministries they call this chapel—the Wednesday afternoon worship service. Outside these walls is one of the highest crime neighborhoods in Illinois. In here, the students are enthusiastic and well-behaved.

“God is good…”

VALENTE: Holy Family Ministries calls itself a new model for Christian education at a time when faith-based schools, especially those in the inner cities, struggle to stay alive.

DR. MARTIN MARTY: They have always struggled, I think you’d say, but the only time they didn’t is when they were tied to a single congregation, a single parish, where every parent had a child, and they automatically supported it.

VALENTE: As neighborhoods change and congregations shrink, there aren’t enough students, parents, or dollars to support faith-based schools. Susan Work is president of Holy Family Ministries.

SUSAN WORK (President, Holy Family Ministries): These schools are the jewels of their neighborhood, and we need to save them. But we can only save them if we have economic models that are more sustainable than one parish, one school.

VALENTE: Holy Family Ministries dispensed with the traditional model of a church school to pass on doctrine. Instead, it created an umbrella organization that offers a variety of social programs in addition to classroom instruction. The idea isn’t to proselytize, but to instill ethics and values.

VALENTE: Holy Family started in 1985 as a small Lutheran school. It raised $7 million in private funds to build this facility three years ago. Today, Holy Family is a nonprofit social services center and an Episcopal charity, as well as a Christian school.

WORK: We’ve had census workers training in here, we have wedding receptions, we’ve had a lot of baby showers, birthday parties, funeral repasts, just all kinds of things. By having a not-for-profit entity over everything we could access some other sources of funding that we would not otherwise be able to attract if we just stayed as Holy Family Lutheran School, a private school.

VALENTE: Only fifteen percent of Holy Family’s income comes from tuition. It gets the rest from private donors, grants, and government.

Voice on school intercom: “Good morning Holy Family….”

VALENTE: To tap into that broad donor base, Holy Family draws a careful line between its social programs, which receive funding from the government and other secular sources, and its faith-based school, where the day begins with prayer followed by a mission statement.

School children reciting mission statement: We, the students of Holy Family School, faithfully commit ourselves to spiritual growth and Christian values….

WORK: I love the mission statement because parents wrote it. The children pledge to listen to God, accomplish miracles, and be the best that they can be each and every day.

School children: … and to be the best we can be each and every day.

Classroom singing: “There are seven days, there are seven days, there are seven days in the week….”

VALENTE: This is part of Holy Family’s secular outreach: a preschool program funded by the Chicago public schools.

WORK: Chicago Public Schools doesn’t really care where the program is delivered. They’re interest is in seeing that at-risk children all have a preschool experience that will prepare them for later success.

VALENTE: The preschool program has its own director and budget and offers no religious instruction or activities.

WORK: There’s a lot of research out right now about preschool that shows a correlation with later life outcomes. For example, lower rates of incarceration, lower dropout rates for high school, increased entrance into college.

VALENTE: Holy Family’s after-school programs, which emphasize fitness, and its nine-week summer camp are also secular. Both are funded by the government.

WORK: They are subsidies provided to parents to enable them to be out in the workforce. It subsidizes their childcare so that the parents can work.

Student: And now we have to do our multiples…

VALENTE: But from 8 am to 4 pm, Holy Family is a faith-based school for 200 children, kindergarten through eighth grade.

WORK: Teachers do what they’re comfortable with. We don’t impose a certain amount of religious activity in any teacher’s classroom.

VALENTE: Formal religious instruction takes place on Wednesdays.

Teacher: We’ve already talked about the spiritual life and our prayer life…

WORK: Our goal with every child is that they would have a personal relationship with God by the time they leave this school.

VALENTE: But the emphasis is on academics. Holy Family has a 100 percent graduation rate, and in the past five years nearly 90 percent of its students have gone on to either private high schools—with scholarships—or charter schools.

WORK: We want to turn out children of faith, but we know that those kids have to have skills. Otherwise, we’ve turned out wonderful human beings who don’t have a job.

VALENTE: This is what the Wednesday chapel service looks like.

WORK: We’re not putting up any barriers that would keep people of various faiths from joining in the fun. We make faith development a very lively and attractive part of our program here, and we just try and keep it accessible to all the children, no matter what their background is.

VALENTE: For the parents, religion is not the most important thing here. Martin Marty:

MARTY: They simply want the best education for their child. Trust is the big thing. They trust them to affirm the best in the family values. The schools are usually small enough that the teachers get to know everyone.

VALENTE: Tuition is $7200, but the school pays more than half of that and must raise more than a million dollars a year to do it. At events like this it tries to broaden its donor base by touting Holy Family as an investment in the community.

CHERYL COLLINS (Principal, Holy Family School): It’s safe, it’s affordable, it’s faith-based, and Holy Family gets results. It’s not uncommon at 3:00 to hear sirens instead of school bells in our neighborhood, and the sirens are going to these schools because there are gang fights and gang activity that take place.

Malik: My name is Malik and I’m in fourth grade.

VALENTE: To reach more affluent people Holy Family put its development office 30 miles away in the prosperous suburbs of Chicago’s North Shore. Half its income comes from donors, and that includes more than thirty congregations in the Chicago area.

Malik: Teachers and tutors help us, and then we can make better grades. I know, because I have been on the honor roll many times.

VALENTE: Michael Berkowitz is a business leader who caught the Holy Family spirit.

MICHAEL BERKOWITZ: It’s not about the faith ofwhat I believe in or what the students believe in. It’s the fact of the goodness that’s being done here. It has nothing to do with the religion, as far as why I would contribute my time and money. It has to do with how well they are treating students.

VALENTE: Martin Marty thinks other faith-based schools, including those that are Catholic, would do well to emulate Holy Family’s approach.

MARTY: I think the model of the faith-based schools would be an excellent model for Catholicism. They are just seeing their parochial schools die by the hundreds across the nation every year. I’ve been spending enough of my life on campuses to know how conservative, structurally, educational institutions are. If we’ve always done it that way, it’s awfully hard to think of the new.

Singing at service: “Lean on me…”

WORK: Sure, we’re one school, but we’re turning out leaders for the community for tomorrow. We’re turning out the kids who are going to be able to finish college—not just get in, but finish—and have good careers.

Singing: “Lift every voice…”

WORK: Also, I think we’re affecting the community in a less measurable way by the symbol of hope and optimism that we have brought into this neighborhood.

VALENTE: Supporters of Holy Family believe that as long as it can keep the lights on and the books open it can transform this part of the city—one child at a time.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Judy Valente in Chicago.

KRISTIN CORNWELL (Teacher, Hanley Elementary School, speaking to students): All right, I am going to give you five seconds to be settled.

BOB FAW, correspondent: In Memphis public schools, where only a small  percentage of students go on to college, Kristin Cornwell tells all her fourth graders they can be “college-ready.”

CORNWELL: The expectations haven’t been set before necessarily even that high, and they live up to it. One of the biggest delights is when I hear kids sitting in their groups, and they’ll whisper to each other, “Get college-ready,” and they’ll sit up straight, and they know exactly what that looks like, and they want that for themselves.

FAW: In a public school system where failure is common…

ERIN SVOBODA (Teacher, Kingsbury Middle School, speaking to students): Where’s the right angle in that diagram?

FAW: …Erin Svoboda’s goal is that 100 percent of her students pass the state math exam.

SVOBODA : A lot of my students are a little bit jaded, and they maybe feel a little bit even cheated. They understand that maybe they haven’t received the education that they should have. So I hope to maybe renewing their faith in their education and the schools and in what they can do with that later.

FAW: In this poor neighborhood, where reading scores are abysmally low, Katelyn Woodard praises her students for trying to find the right answer.

KATELYN WOODARD (Teacher, Hanley Elementary School, speaking to students): It’s by itself beautiful. Good job, Demetria.

Students: Good job, Demetria!

FAW: Katelyn, Erin, and Kristin are graduates of MTR—Memphis Teacher Residency, a  three-year-old program designed to give poor inner city students the same opportunities as students in wealthier areas. David Montague is the director of the school.

DAVID MONTAGUE (Memphis Teacher Residency): It’s absolutely an injustice, because there’s such a large academic achievement gap between students that are generally poor and minority relative to students who generally live in the suburbs and who are white.

FAW: Funded mostly by foundations and private contributions, this program takes college graduates and gives them housing, training, and tuition, even awards them a master’s degree. In return, they agree to teach in an inner city school here for four years. The program is faith-based.

MONTAGUE: What we’re doing here we’re doing within a Christian context. We believe in God’s word as revealed in Scripture, and that faith informs how you think about students. It informs your efficacy. It informs your belief that every child can learn.

FAW: There is something about this work that draws people of faith. Erin, for example, planned a career as a hospital pharmacist until her faith made her decide otherwise.

SVOBODA: I feel like this is absolutely where God wants me to be. I had much different ambitions for my life and much different aspirations. But I feel like the Lord kept putting this in my path.

(speaking to students): Remember what this page is called? What’s this page called?

FAW: Katelyn also sees what she is doing in the classroom as a kind of ministry.

WOODARD: How I want to live out my faith in the classroom is by constantly looking at the Lord and looking at how he deals with the world and reflect that in my classroom. If I treat them with that respect and that love that I really believe the Lord has for everyone, then they feel that.

FAW: Is there any such thing as an unteachable child?

SVOBODA. No.

FAW: To these teachers their students are not potential dropouts, but God’s creatures.

CORNWELL: I’ve seen kids who everyone said, “There’s no way. There’s no way that child is going to be successful.” And I’ve seen them overcome that when someone believes in them, when someone takes the time to sit with them and work with them and pull the assets that we can see from them, and they start to believe, “I can do this.”

MONTAGUE: What we still have particularly in urban education is what some people often call soft racism or soft bigotry, which is this idea of teachers at times having very low expectations of their students because of the race or class that they come from. So what we’re trying to do is say absolutely every single child can learn, and we’re going to have very, very high expectations for those children.

FAW: In this school, presided over by principal Rosalind Davis, the teachers from MTR have already had a huge impact.

ROSALIND DAVIS (Principal, Hanley Elementary School): They’ve changed the culture of the school. Their approach to the work, their work ethic, and their strategies, the way they interact with the students.

FAW: Because, says Davis, these teachers with strong faith bring something many other teachers often lack.

DAVIS: Sometimes what’s missing from a teacher’s belief system is a belief that something supernatural and miraculous could happen in schools. They might get knocked down one day, but they come back fighting the next because they prayed about it, they reflected and, you know, they get up.

FAW: Don’t be misled. The MTR program is not some roundabout way to impose doctrine, much less to proselytize, as Montague explains.

MONTAGUE: If you do a Bible study, and you explain why Jesus is the son of God and the only way to heaven, what you’re doing is you’re creating a very unhealthy and non-safe environment for every child in that classroom that doesn’t come from a Christian family, okay, and so you’re inhibiting your children, your students from being able to learn.

SVOBODA: I might not be able to necessarily tell them that I believe that they’re God’s children and that he loves them, but I’m trying to show that love to them.

DAVIS: Your faith isn’t something that you walk around beating people on the head with. People should be able to tell that you’re a Christian without you saying a word.

FAW: It is grindingly difficult work. Children coming here test well below students in more affluent areas. What is accomplished in the classroom is often offset by what they experience outside. Dealing with all that is a real test of faith.

(speaking to Erin Svoboda): You’re swimming upstream.

SVOBODA: That’s what it feels like most days, yes.

FAW: Your faith keeps you going?

SVOBODA: Yes. I will be honest. I don’t know how other people do it. Without that or motivating you have no ideal how anyone would willingly wake up and come to this every day. I don’t mean to make it sound that terrible, but it is hard.

FAW: The program is so new it is hard to measure its success. But test scores are climbing, and students are responding.

(speaking to student): She pushes you?

TEAVIKA JOHNSON: Yes.

FAW: You don’t mind the discipline? You like it?

JOHNSON: No, because it helps me more so I can understand more.

FAW: (speaking to student): The goal up there says 100 percent. So she really inspires you?

WENDY CABAERA: Yes. Actually, for me she is one of our best teachers.

FAW: And if the cynic were to argue that here they can make only the smallest of inroads, that progress will be scant and short-lived; that goals like Erin’s 100 percent target are not likely to be reached—if so, their faith, they insist, will not be diminished.

CORNWELL: I walk here in knowing that I come with my five loaves and two fish, my meager here’s my best that I have, and God’s going to have to multiply that. Whether he chooses to do that now or 20 years from now in urban education, that’s up to him.

WOODARD: What you come to learn through doing this job and through your faith is that there’s a deeper joy and peace and contentment than you could ever imagine that comes from knowing that you’re doing God’s work.

FAW: As they answer a calling and live their faith one student, one classroom at a time.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Memphis, Tennessee.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, Correspondent: Among emerging nations, Brazil is a leading power. It’s booming economy is now the world’s seventh largest. Yet this nation of 200 million remains very divided. Its poverty is on display along the hillsides, not far from Rio de Janeiro’s glittering skyline, or along the sidewalks of Sao Paolo, despite recent government attempts to address it.

MARIVALDO DA SILVA SANTOS: There’s still great inequality in Brazil. There still are people who don’t have a place to sleep, don’t have clothes, any happiness in their lives.

DE SAM LAZARO: Santos works for a Catholic social services agency in Sao Paolo called Bom Parto. Brazil’s government has increased the minimum wage and created a social safety net, and it’s relied on several faith-based groups like Bom Parto in its anti-poverty efforts.

About 70 percent of Brazilians are Catholic. Church attendance has dropped sharply in recent decades, except in newer Protestant evangelical congregations. But the demand for church-run social services has not dropped.

Bom Parto, short in Portuguese for “our lady of good delivery,” is the biggest such provider in Brazil. It’s headed by Sister Judith Lupo.

She grew up in a wealthy family, was educated in Brazil, the U.S. and France after joining her religious order, where she soon became its chief finance officer.

At Bom Parto, she combined government contracts with private philanthropy and built a single day care center three decades ago into an organization with 58 locations and 1100 employees, serving 10,000 people each day. It’s all pulled together with a modest $4.5 million annual budget—reflecting financial acumen; also a simple philosophy.

SISTER JUDITH LUPO: I think the first, first thing is to love people. They need money also to survive, but it’s not just to get money or to learn things, it’s to learn in a way that it’s with love.

DE SAM LAZARO: As an example of the approach, she says this homeless shelter provides much more than a roof and a meal for its 600-odd clients. There are baths, clinics and career counseling among other services—even entertainment, like this traditional dance called capoeira.

DA SILVA SANTOS: Bom Parto has given me continuity. It took me to college, it helped me understand public policies not only to help myself but others. It offers not just food and bathing services, it teaches about need to work, instruction, training, pleasure, culture. It enables you in a way.

DE SAM LAZARO: Thirty-six year old Santos is a poster child. He came here in 2002, an alcoholic down on his luck. His life is more than restored, he says. Bom Parto employs him and is also helping with part of the tuition to complete his degree in social work.

DA SILVA SANTOS: Sister Judith insists that people on her staff come out of places like this. She has this poem called “I Am You.” She’s put herself in our position, feeling our pain, feeling our situation. That’s how she’s able to help us and that’s the same thing she is getting us to do.

SISTER LUPO: I feel the young people and children, adolescents, all of them, they all need an opportunity. It’s, I don’t think poverty has to take them out of a normal life. They should not live always in a bad house. They should not be always in a favela. And to go out of those places, they need a good education.

DE SAM LAZARO: Poverty is endemic in Brazil despite its bountiful natural resources and a modern economy. Sister Judith blames much of it on an unequal education system that traces back to slavery, which was abolished in 1888.

Bom Parto serves a wide range of needs, caring for abandoned HIV-infected infants. Also destitute elderly. However the major focus is on education and training to enter the prosperous mainstream of Brazil’s economy.

On the outskirts of Sao Paolo, where many of the city’s poor reside, Bom Parto’s day care facility is at its capacity. It cares for 3,300 preschoolers across the city. Eventually, many of them will enter this school…

SISTER ADRIANNA APARACIDA ROMAO: Here in this place, we serve about 1,100 kids. And given our waiting list, we should have at least three spaces this big in order to serve all of our community.

DE SAM LAZARO: Public education is widely perceived as substandard in Brazil, and that accounts for the strong demand for schools like this one, run by Bom Parto.

SISTER ADRIANNA: In the 27 years that this school has been here, we’ve seen great change, improvement in the community and in the lives of these children. The evidence is when we’re watching them during recess. They’re calmly interacting with their friends, not supervised, not gated in like the public schools, where they’re still very unruly. Here they’ve learned to behave.

DE SAM LAZARO: Older students receive vocational training. Most are placed in good jobs and the school sends promising students into a college prep program. A few miles way, a Bom Parto-run program trains auto mechanics and machinists.

LEANDRO AGUSTO DA SILVA, Shop Teacher: Traditionally this eastern edge of Sao Paolo has been excluded, marginalized. The general view is that people who come from here are not going to be able to climb the economic ladder. But we provide opportunities to the kids who are leaving here that differentiates them from the rest of the population in this area. We’ve already had several examples of students from this program that have graduated and gone on to work in the elite areas, other areas of the city.

DE SAM LAZARO: Some graduates have returned as teachers and mentors.

SUELEN RIBEIRO DE CAMARGO, Teacher: In terms of vehicle repair, maintenance, et cetera, I’ve always been interested. In terms of being a teacher, I thought maybe but my sister really pushed me to consider this. I didn’t think it would happen so soon after finishing this program. I was able to get several different apprenticeships and while doing that, this job opening came and I was invited to come back and teach here, and my whole family told me to jump at it. It was an honor for the whole family.

DE SAM LAZARO: About 25% of students here are female, keeping with a trend in which women—from the country’s president on down—are in jobs historically held by men.

SISTER LUPO: If you can cook well, you can repair car well.

DE SAM LAZARO: If you can cook well you can repair a car well?

SISTER LUPO: If you learn, why not?

DE SAM LAZARO: Asked about her own outlook, 68 year old sister Judith Lupo offered few words. They come from the scripture, she says.

SISTER LUPO: It’s from the gospel. We have to give opportunity to everybody. Everybody was created to have life and to have life in fullness.

DE SAM LAZARO: For Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro, in Sao Paolo.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Nestled in the hills between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is a small village called the Oasis of Peace—in Hebrew, Neve Shalom and in Arabic, Wahat al-Salam. While the Middle East conflict continues to churn all around, here they are trying to create a different reality, one that says Israelis and Arabs can live side-by-side in peace.

ABDESSALAM NAJJAR (Oasis of Peace): It’s possible. We need to learn how to make the impossible possible. We don’t take in our consideration impossible. It’s possible, let’s do it now.

LAWTON: Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam was founded more than 30 years ago by an Egyptian-born Dominican monk, Father Bruno Hussar, who died in 1996. He wanted to create a place where Jews, Muslims, and Christians intentionally lived together in mutual understanding and respect.

NAJJAR: His interest was to deal with the conflict. Why do we have a conflict? How can we influence the dynamics of the conflict and how can we change it for dynamics for peace building?

LAWTON: Abdessalam Najjar is an Arab Muslim from the Galilee region of Israel. He was part of the first group to move here 33 years ago.

LAWTON: Why did you want to do this? Why did you want to be part of this?

NAJJAR: You ask me a very difficult question. You assume that I know the answer. I don’t know. For me, I said, ah, it’s a way that we can deal with the conflict in an alternative way. Cooperation instead of confrontation. Dialogue instead of fight.

LAWTON: Today, 55 families live here, and another 30 families are in the process of moving in. Others are on a waiting list if space becomes available. The community screens applicants and chooses who will live here.

NAJJAR: We need groups that are capable to understand that differences between us and not trying to change the other, mainly to work on the self, and the transformation will start from within and not transforming the others.

LAWTON: In Neve-Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, there’s a big emphasis on education, not just for those who live here, but for the greater community as well. The bilingual Hebrew Arabic primary school has 200 students, the vast majority from outside the village.

NAJJAR: The most important thing that we are keeping, trying to keep equality between Arab and Jewish pupils and the staff, also Arab and Jewish teachers.

LAWTON: And there’s adult education as well. Nava Zonenshein directs programs at the School for Peace, which sponsors encounter groups and conflict-resolution seminars.

NAVA ZONENSHEIN (Oasis of Peace): People have to learn history they didn’t know of the other side, learn power relations and how to share more equally, learn how to change the images that they have of the other side. So these are challenges we have to deal all the time with.

LAWTON: Zonenshein, who is Jewish, also moved to the village more than 30 years ago. She raised her three children here.

ZONENSHEIN: They don’t see the other as an enemy. Everywhere they go they will fight for equality, for justice, so it’s something very deep in their experience, not just they heard about it but they lived this.

LAWTON: Rabbi Ron Kronish says Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam is one of several interfaith projects taking place despite the ongoing tensions in the region.

RABBI RON KRONISH (Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel): These things don’t make the news. I often joke, because we don’t kill anybody, we don’t make the news and we don’t make page one anyway. So I’d like people to know that there are a lot of people in this country who are into dialogue, education, getting to know one another, trying to live together.

LAWTON: Kronish has lived in Israel for 32 years and directs the Interreligious Coordinating Council based in Jerusalem. Interfaith work here has two tracks. One is promoting dialogue inside Israel proper between the majority Jewish population and the 20 percent who are Arab Muslims and Christians. The other track is promoting dialogue between people from Israel and the Palestinian territories, which can be especially difficult given security concerns. Kronish says the ongoing political stalemate does complicate all their work.

KRONISH: When there’s not a war or lots of terror and counterterror and all that, it’s easier to bring people together, on the one hand. On the other hand, the lack of political hope and the lack of political progress keeps people from coming out in larger numbers. Some people say, what for?

ISSA JABER ABU GHOSH (Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel): When sometimes there is something on the political arena, the conflict, some, let me say, violence, terror events somewhere, the whole issues became very complicated, very mixed.

LAWTON: Kronish works closely on the council with Issa Jaber Abu Ghosh, a Palestinian Muslim who lives just outside Jerusalem in the Arab town of Abu Ghosh, which is named for his family. They believe building relationships between individuals lays the groundwork for peace.

KRONISH: We don’t invite people to our dialogues to solve the problem. We invite them to get to know one another, to be in place, to do what you can, to mitigate violence and hatred.

LAWTON: Kronish admits the lack of political progress can be discouraging, but he takes heart in his interfaith work with kids.

KRONISH: My hope is more in the younger generation, to tell you the truth, who are less cynical and less tired and who don’t have easy political solutions, because we don’t have those around here, but who are reaching out to know each other, to encounter the other, to work with each other, to do small things together, to do what’s feasible at the current time.

LAWTON: At Neve Shalem/Wahat al-Salam many say spirituality is also a key part of building the framework for peace.

NAJJAR: I believe, and there are some others believe, that peace education and the peace actions in the absence of the spiritual factor will be not complete, and if we will use the spiritual factor, we will be more able, more courage to do a peaceful action.

LAWTON: Here there are many places where people of all faiths, and those of no faiths, can pray or meditate. One of the most unusual spots is called the Space of Silence.

NAJJAR: See in the shape, very beautiful, you can come inside, you can pray, you can meditate as Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, anything, but everything should be in silence.

LAWTON: Here there are no walls and no sharp edges. Najjar says the founder, Father Bruno, believed you can’t talk to others until you talk to God and yourself. His vision was that by pursuing peace, people are doing God’s work, whatever their belief system may be.

NAJJAR: This is the most important thing, the outcome, the results. If the results is what God wants from us to do, we do it, everybody with his own way.

LAWTON: And that’s the work they intend to continue and expand, no matter what happens in the political world outside.

I’m Kim Lawton in Israel.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: In thousands of schools across India, teachers will tell you to add one more “R” to reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic. Recess, they’ll tell you, may be the most critical part of a student’s school day. That’s because nine a.m. recess is when 300 students in this school in the northern province of Rajasthan are provided a hot meal, as are a few younger siblings who are allowed to come along.

DINESH SHARMA: In this school, only about five children in all are able to bring a lunch from home.

DE SAM LAZARO: Anywhere from a third to 40 percent of the world’s undernourished children live in India today, and about half of all children here have stunted growth. The statistics are all the more telling given India’s strong growth rate and its booming economy in recent years.

BIRAJ PATNAIK: India finds itself acutely embarrassed. Its ambitions of being a global power are very poorly reflected in social sector indicators, and there is acute embarrassment that the second-fastest growing economy in the world has almost half of its children malnourished.

DE SAM LAZARO: Patnaik works for India’s Supreme Court advising a commission that monitors compliance with the court’s orders. About a decade ago, civic activists, saying the government was denying children their basic right to food, took their case to the court. The justices twice upheld this right and ordered that every child be provided a cooked meal in school. At first, Patnaik says, there was resistance from government officials.

PATNAIK: On the grounds that there was no infrastructure, that teachers would get overburdened, that India just didn’t have the financial resources to start a program of this nature. But the Supreme Court reaffirmed that fiscal constraints can never be allowed to come in the way of children’s right to food, and if the government had to tighten their belt, that had to happen elsewhere.

DE SAM LAZARO: With the stroke of a pen, the court ordered the largest school meal program in the world. That left the daunting task of implementing it.

CHANCHALAPATHI DASA: The challenge in our country is how to deliver it and deliver it up to the last mile. That is the challenge. Because a large country with 120 million children in hundreds of thousands of schools that delivery is a genuine challenge.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dasa heads a nonprofit group called Akshaya Patra. It was started in the nineties when a group of Hare Krishna devotees began preparing a few hundred school lunches. Although it is one of the world’s oldest belief systems, the modern day Krishna consciousness movement was led by Swami Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada and was especially visible in the West in the 1960s and ’70s. The call to serve meals was inspired by an encounter the swami had after attending a banquet.

DASA: He saw there was leftover of all the food, and the plates strewn there, and there was street children, poor children from the village and some stray dogs fighting for the leftover of the food. When Prabhupada saw that there were tears in his eyes, and he called some of his disciples and said, “Just look at this. You can’t allow this to happen.”

DE SAM LAZARO: That exhortation formed the spiritual basis for Akshaya Patra’s work. But when school lunches became the law of the land, the group went to the government for funds to expand and to India’s corporate sector for expertise.

DASA: Passion alone is not enough. You need to have organization. You need to have organizational capabilities. You need to have management capabilities. Akshaya Patra has been a very unique marriage of dedicated missionaries and professionals coming with a heart.

DE SAM LAZARO: And with their wallets. Among India’s growing middle class there’s a dawning of philanthropy, he says. Many people are attaining wealth at a much earlier age.

DASA: My parents probably would have a house—we come from a middle-class family—would have a house when they were probably 50 years of age. In today’s India, by the time someone—and someone working in a software company in India—by the time they are 28 or 30 years old they already have a house, they have a car, and then what? They still have a lot of disposable income, and they are genuinely looking for opportunities where their money can be used well for social development.

DE SAM LAZARO: Akshaya Patra, which means “bottomless pot,” is now the largest of many nonprofit school lunch providers. It serves 1.3 million children every day from kitchens like this one, efficient and productive as any in the world.

GOVINDA DAS: Every day we cook about 150,000 meals in three hours time, and the ingredients that we use, something like 7000 kilograms of wheat flour every day, and from that we make about 300,000 chapatis—flatbreads—per hour.

DE SAM LAZARO: Hours before students show up at school, workers begin feeding wheat flour and water into giant mixers. At the other end, lightly greased flatbreads called chapatis emerge, 40,000 of them every hour, in spotless conditions. Elsewhere, in industrial-sized cauldrons, rice and a lentil stew called dhal are prepared. Flavoring varies by regional preference, but there are no animal products. Hare Krishna devotees are vegetarian in principle. So are most students, by economic necessity. In Rajasthan’s desert summer, school starts early, and the meal arrives as early as nine a.m. Four years after Akshaya Patra began delivering meals in this area, the most visible impact is in school attendance. It’s up 11 percent, no surprise to the principal.

MADHU KILANI: They belong to very poor families. They belong to labor-class families, and their parents are also not very much literate. And some of the students have, their economic condition is so poor that at night also they are not able to eat food in their home, so they depend, many of their strengths depend on their midday meal.

DE SAM LAZARO: For the whole day’s nutrition?

KILANI: Yes, for the whole day nutrition.

DE SAM LAZARO: She says the students have more energy and improved concentration in class. For its part, Akshaya Patra aims to expand its lunch program five-fold by 2020. Still, not all children have benefited equally from the Supreme Court’s order, says compliance officer Patnaik.

PATNAIK: Jharkhand, for instance, is a state where I often visited, and I despair at the quality of the meals that are being served there. Even in states where the meals work well, in the more inaccessible and remote parts of the state you have meals which are not comparable at all in quality to what children in the rest of the country are getting.

DE SAM LAZARO: “We like it,” these children said when asked about their Akshaya Patra meal. When I asked how many students have to go hungry on days when there’s no school, the response was also nearly unanimous. And they are the more fortunate. Despite the Supreme Court order and despite recent initiatives to address it, malnutrition is the root cause of 2500 child deaths in India—every day.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Jaipur, India.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: In recent years, thousands of rural communities in Senegal have held extraordinary public rallies they call “declarations,” and they’ve declared an end to a deeply rooted practice, one rarely discussed in public, one commonly known as female circumcision.

MOLLY MELCHING: Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that I would be sitting here years later, saying that 4,792 communities in Senegal had abandoned. In the beginning it was just unthought of, unbelievable, because it was so taboo.

DE SAM LAZARO: Molly Melching founded a group called Tostan—“breakthrough” in the local Wolof language—in the early ’90s. She had modest goals: to educate people about health and human rights, especially in rural areas and in local languages. The Illinois native is fluent in the ways of Senegal but she keeps a low profile in the work of Tostan.

Tostan’s work often begins with an ice-breaker, like an old movie. Many in the audience have never watched a film. To overcome the language barrier, the selection is a Buster Keaton silent movie classic from 1923, and it’s a hit. A more serious film followed, on vegetable gardening. It’s all part of seminars on nutrition, health, basic human rights, and other issues—in groups, songs, dances, and drama.

Skit: She needs to be cut. All girls need that.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s proven to be one of the most promising attempts in history to wipe out what Melching calls female genital cutting [FGC], a practice that dates back 2000 years. Each year, the World Health Organization says up to 3 million girls in Africa are subjected to genital mutilation, and up to 140 million women live with its consequences.

Skit: You can’t have a recognized marriage if she is not cut.

DE SAM LAZARO: That cut is a painful rite of passage for girls across a wide swath of predominantly Islamic African and Middle Eastern countries. However, the practice goes back hundreds of years before Islam or Christianity and is also practiced in both faiths and religions native to this region. It’s thought to have originated in the harems of ancient rulers as a means of controlling women’s fidelity, or as a sign of chastity among those who aspired to be consorts.

MELCHING: Those who were in the rest of society could move up, and you could marry someone who was more prestigious or had more money, more status, if you underwent this practice, because it was a sign of good reputation, and as the years went on, I mean 2,200 years, it became very much a part of what was considered criteria for good marriage.

DE SAM LAZARO: Melching came to this West African nation as a student in the 1970s and later as a Peace Corps volunteer. She stayed on to work on improving health education, which she found sorely lacking.

MELCHING: When you see a friend that you’ve known for several months and you’ve gone to her house for lunch, and then she tells you her child has some problem, that it’s someone who has cast an evil spell on the child, the baby, and that she’s going to take them to a religious leader to get the spell taken off, and you don’t know what to say, and it turns out the baby was dehydrated.

DE SAM LAZARO: But from the health education, women began to understand infection, and Melching says they began to connect the dots.

MELCHING: So suddenly as they started learning germ transmission and the consequences of FGC and how these infections occur and why they had more problems in childbirth than other women who had not been cut, they started saying wait a minute.

Seminar: People used to be afraid to talk about this before. Not anymore.

DE SAM LAZARO: But how did women in conservative, patriarchal societies become able to speak out, especially on a sensitive sexual topic? Melching says it’s because Tostan involves men and religious leaders who’ve confirmed that cutting is not required.

MELCHING: We share our modules with the religious leaders so that they see that everything that we do is for the well-being of the community, the health, and all these things are things that Islam espouses, and so they’re very happy in general, but first of all they’re happy because we start with them. We respect them.

DE SAM LAZARO: And that respect also carries over in the group’s message on genital cutting.

MELCHING: Tostan found that using approaches that shame or blame people really was just the opposite of what would work in changing social norms. When you say to someone, we know you love your daughter and you’re doing things because you love your daughter, but let’s look at this and let’s try to understand together exactly what are the consequences of this practice. But you are the ones who will have to make the decision. Then suddenly people are willing to listen. They don’t get defensive.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s far more effective than the approach of many aid groups—religious, government, and private, says Princeton University professor Gerry Mackie.

PROFESSOR GERRY MACKIE: Not hectoring and preaching but having pro and con discussions. When we think of an ideal way of making a change, we’d say it’s democratic. We all get together and talk it over and decide what the best thing is to do. Whereas some development approaches would, say, force them to do it, pay them to do it, trick them into doing it.

DE SAM LAZARO: Tostan’s volunteers and staff who conduct its seminars all hail from the local communities. Often they are leaders and elders speaking from personal experience or anecdotes. Diarre Ba used to make a living as a female circumciser.

DIARRE BA: I was part of this process. I felt bad. This is not right. But I didn’t know anything at the time. I had no learning.

DE SAM LAZARO: Others have painful, vivid memories. Ibrahim Sankare was very close to an older sister growing up. He walked into her room one evening.

IBRAHIM SANKARE: I saw her lying in a pool of blood. I thought someone had really hurt her. I screamed. My father explained to me. Since then, even now I get goosebumps thinking about it.

MARIAM BAMBA: It was very painful. I will never—you ask me if I can forget it? I will never forget the pain. So painful.

DE SAM LAZARO: Marieme Bamba is a long-time campaigner against genital cutting, and she’s spared her ten-year-old daughter the trauma. Yet before she became involved with Tostan and early in her marriage, she was determined to keep up the tradition. Even her own husband was opposed to genital cutting.

SULEYMAN TRAORE: She insisted that she had to do it. There were so many problems if you didn’t do it. If you cooked meals, no one would eat your food. It’s because we didn’t know. People told us that it was our religion. If you don’t do it, you’ll be going against your religion. All this is false. But I alone can’t do this in the village.

DE SAM LAZARO: They say Tostan was able to insure they were not alone—that communities in which they intermarried were also thinking alike, that their daughters would still be marriageable. The large declaration ceremonies have been critical.

MACKIE: One part of bringing about a change like this is to get everyone to change at once, what we call “coordinated abandonment.” Everyone has to see that everyone else sees that everyone is changing.

DE SAM LAZARO: Genital cutting is not the only tradition they want to change. Many communities have vowed to end the frequent practice of allowing older men to marry adolescent girls, acknowledging both the health risks and the girls’ human rights. Molly Melching says there’s plenty of historical precedent for abrupt changes in social norms and attitudes. She sees a very current example every time she comes home. That’s in American views about smoking.

MELCHING: People were smoking, and nobody said anything about it much through the ‘50s, the ‘60s, and even the ‘70s. As people became more and more aware of the harm that it causes, more and more people—there was a critical mass of people who started really protesting. It was amazing for me, coming from Senegal to the United States, to see how quickly things turned around.

DE SAM LAZARO: Tostan’s efforts have now expanded to 14 other African nations.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Kaolack, Senegal.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: His name is Fethullah Gülen. He is a 69-year-old Turkish Islamic scholar and author, apparently in poor health, who came to the US seeking medical treatment. He lives a secluded life at a retreat in Pennsylvania. So why was he voted by his admirers in a survey by Foreign Policy magazine as the most significant intellectual in the world? Among those admirers are Kemal Oksuz and Alp Aslandogan.

KEMAL OKSUZ (President, Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians): Kind, modest, humble, generous. We see him as a source of information, inspiration, but never prophet. He would be the one who would be troubled the most if he hears that followers or inspirers see him kind of prophet.

ALP ASLANDOGAN (Institute for Interfaith Dialogue): Personally, he is definitely very knowledgeable, very sincere in wanting the best for the people—not just Turkey, but for all humanity.

SEVERSON: Gülen has inspired his followers to build schools, provide humanitarian aid and engage in interfaith dialogue. University of Houston Professor Helen Ebaugh, who wrote a book on the Gülen movement says the movement got its start when Gülen was an imam in Turkey.

PROFESSOR HELEN EBAUGH (Dept. of Sociology, University of Houston; Author of “The Gülen Movement”): When Fethullah Gülen began preaching in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in Turkey, his message was we don’t need more madrassas. We need schools that would promote science and math and secular subjects, and his contention was that one can be modern and one can be scientific and still be a good Muslim.

SEVERSON: Bill Martin is a senior fellow in religion and public policy at the James Baker Institute at Rice University. He says the Gülen movement is different from fundamentalist Islam because they respect all faiths and believe religion is compatible with science.

WILLIAM MARTIN (Senior Fellow, James Baker Institute at Rice University): I think it’s fair to say that Islam has had difficulty in coming to terms with modernity, and in that I think that the Gülen movement offers a much more positive picture of what Islam can be.

SEVERSON: Gülen-inspired volunteers from Turkey bring Turkish language and culture with them. In Houston they sponsor a Turkish Olympiad where American students compete in Turkish dance and song. The winners compete in an annual competition in Ankara, Turkey. There are more than a 1000 Gülen-inspired schools and universities in over 100 countries.

MARTIN: Gülen has always emphasized education, and that really lies at the core of this movement. To be a good Muslim meant to be well educated, and to be a good Muslim who participated in modernity meant to be conversant and well educated in science, math, and technology.

OKSUZ: Education helps you overcome ignorance, poverty, corruption, hate, extremism, racism, whatever, all the illnesses of the society. Because of that education is very important.

SEVERSON: In Texas there are 33 nationally recognized public charter schools with over 16,000 students grades K through 12. They’re called Harmony schools, and the Turkish superintendent insists they are strictly secular and in no way connected to Gülen. Professor Ebaugh says there’s a reason for this kind of sensitivity.

EBAUGH: I think a lot of that is related to the Islamophobia that exists in this country. I think there is a lot of fear that Islam is trying to take hold of this country and countries around the world—that it’s trying to spread itself.

SEVERSON: About 60 percent of the kids in the Texas Harmony schools come from disadvantaged neighborhoods. The schools say they have a 100 percent graduation rate. No wonder there are 21,000 kids on the waiting list.

MARTIN: I think the Harmony schools are an outstanding example of what the Gülen followers have been able to accomplish in particular with respect to education. Of the three high schools that had graduating seniors this year, only three students had not already been admitted to a four-year college at the time of graduation.

PHOEBE TAYLOR (Teacher, Harmony School of Innovation): I know teachers who stay up here seven o’clock at night, eight o’clock at night who are also working at night from home.

CHUCK LAMBERT (Teacher, Harmony School of Innovation): They know our expectations for them. Through kindergarten all the way through high school, they know this is a college school. Our goal is to get you into college.

SHARON QUINILTY (Teacher, Harmony School of Innovation): I have never worked harder. But you really see the results. Because the parents are very involved, the kids really respond.

OKSUZ: Gülen—not only he urges teachers to go and work at these schools, on the other hand he urges people from all walks of life to go and support all these schools. Build up schools instead of mosques. Build up universities instead of mosques. Build up cultural centers, interfaith organizations, aid organizations, hospitals instead of mosques.

SEVERSON: Supporters say Gülen owns nothing himself but has persuaded others to give generously to many independent organizations.

EBAUGH: The movement has become quite wealthy. It’s one of the richest movements in Turkey. It has private hospitals, it has all these private schools. There’s a big media industry, one of the biggest in Turkey. It has the Zaman newspaper. Kimse Yok Mu is one of the latest. That’s their relief organization. They help disaster victims all over the world.

SEVERSON: Kimse Yok Mu and in the US Helping Hands contribute millions of dollars in humanitarian aid each year. Professor Ebaugh says in Turkey Gülen urged businessmen to grow their businesses and give a part of their earnings, as much as a third, to support humanitarian aid and education.

EBAUGH: The movement is financed not only by these wealthy businessmen, but more importantly it’s financed by everybody in the movement. Everybody contributes, and the average seems to be about 10 percent.

ASLANDOWAN: I go beyond the expected level in my income level. For all of this my motivation is that just like God loves us as human beings we also should act in a manner that is pleasing to God. And I believe that all of these actions—charitable donations, volunteerism—are pleasing to God. That’s why I’m doing all of this.

SEVERSON: Alp is a volunteer in charge of the Institute for Interfaith Dialog in Houston, which is located in the Raindrop Turkish House. This is a mockup of the projected interfaith center, which will include a Jewish synagogue, a mosque, and a Christian church. Gülen has always stressed the importance of interfaith dialogue to promote peace and has met with Pope John Paul II and reached out to leaders of many religious minorities. And he may have been the first Muslim leader to condemn the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

ASLANDOWAN: He immediately posted an ad clearly saying that this was an anti, a non-Islamic act. It’s not even a human act. The people who committed this are not Muslims; they can not even be called humans. He said Bin Laden is a monster and people around him are monster if they think like him.

SEVERSON: Alp Aslandowan says Gülen teaches that suicide attacks cannot be justified in Islam.

ASLANDOWAN: Some people try to justify the killings, homicidal killings, by saying that those people who are engaged in those, they don’t have any other means, and he said that this is not a Muslim’s view. It cannot be a Muslim’s thinking, because for a Muslim if the end result, if the end goal is virtuous, worthwhile, holy, then the means should also be holy.

SEVERSON: Professor Ebaugh says the movement could do better by placing women in leadership roles. Gülen is not without his critics.

EBAUGH: The big issue in Turkey for the critics is the fear that the movement is becoming very powerful, very wealthy, and that there is a sub rosa agenda to create an Islamic state, and they always compare it to Khomeini and Iran.

MARTIN: I think there’s no warrant to the charges that Gülen wants to take over and impose Sharia law. I think that, frankly, is an absurd fear.

OKSUZ: The movement is neither sect nor cult. It is a civil society movement.

MARTIN: Sometimes they are accused of being a missionary, a missionizing entity. As far as I know, I don’t know anyone through the schools or otherwise that they’ve tried to turn into a Muslim.

SEVERSON: For the time being, those who follow Gülen, both critics and admirers, seem to agree that he is leading one of the most important movements in Islam.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Houston.

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LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: The first thing an outsider might notice at the Universal School in Buffalo is how well behaved the students are. The chaos that sometimes erupts between classes at public schools is not to be found here. Universal is an Islamic school for students in pre-K through eighth grade. It’s one of 240 private Islamic schools in the country and is supported through tuition and fundraising. Kathy Jamil is the principal.

KATHY JAMIL (Principal, Universal School, Buffalo, NY): We hope to instill in our children what it takes to be a responsible, caring and giving person who is God-conscious, and we believe we can only do that if we develop a whole child. So we focus on academics, but it’s just one small part of everything else, because we actually feel if we can hit the other realms, we feel like the academics just skyrocket.

SEVERSON: God-consciousness, they say, is meant to be a constant state of awareness of Allah throughout the day. Tamer Osman directs the Islamic studies program.

TAMER OSMAN (Director of Islamic Studies, Universal School): There are times when students are traveling in the hallway that maybe an adult’s eye may not be on them for just that moment. If they remember that God is watching, they may not do those type of things that we find in other schools, whether it is ridicule other students or bullying. We have a lot less of those types of things at the school here, and I think part of that reason is because we are trying to inculcate the idea of God-consciousness in the children.

SEVERSON: They are reminded of God five times each day during prayer. Universal is a state-accredited school so the students are taught the same curriculum as those in public schools and their test scores are on grade level or above. But here they’re also taught Arabic and Islamic studies, including the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. They learn about values from the teachings of the Prophet.

JAMIL: The Prophet, peace be upon him, as we believe, is the best of all mankind, and he embodied all the beautiful qualities and characteristics that we want to work on in our lives.

OSMAN: One of the wisdoms in Islamic schools today is that if you look at our core American values, they coincide with a lot of our Islamic values.

SEVERSON: Those shared interests apparently include the love of sports, like soccer, which is popular in many of the different countries these kids’ families emigrated from. But one of the challenges at Universal is to separate the religion from the attitudes of the culture they left behind—attitudes, for instance, detrimental to women.

JAMIL: I work with some domestic violence clients here in the US on relation to immigrant families and Muslim families and with the conversations that I have with the court systems, you will hear a man walk on, sit on the stand and say “I have the right to,” from a religious perspective, and we are there saying you absolutely do not. You clearly don’t understand your faith tradition.

SEVERSON: Islam considers homosexuality a sin, and in some Muslim countries the punishment is severe.

ALET SIAM (Eighth Grade Student, Universal School): Being gay is forbidden in Islam but you cannot make fun of that group or people who are like that. You’re supposed to be nice to everybody, but it’s still forbidden. You can’t do that.

OSMAN: As Muslims, we shouldn’t be judgmental. Just like in many of the other faiths it is frowned upon. It’s not seen as something that’s praiseworthy. But at the same time, it’s not—we don’t see it as if the person does that then that’s it, they are condemned forever.

SEVERSON: The school found its home in an unlikely place—a former Catholic church and convent. Students from Universal and St. Monica Catholic School share interfaith programs throughout the year. Nancy Langer is with St. Monica.

NANCY LANGER (President, NativityMiguel Middle School of Buffalo): What I’ve noticed is that they don’t seem to look at each other and see any differences. They seem to accept each other for who they are, and they’ve become instant friends. It’s really wonderful.

SEVERSON: Universal opened its doors three days before the 9/11 terrorists attacks. Suddenly there were bomb threats. Police were patrolling the school—not a good time to be a Muslim in America, and it was perhaps the worst time to open an Islamic school.

JAMIL: That evening we had an emergency board meeting. There was just silence. Everyone was quiet. We didn’t know what to say. We didn’t know what to think. We didn’t know what to do.

SEVERSON: Ultimately they decided that keeping the school open presented an opportunity to reach out to the inner-city neighborhood that surrounds the school. Ray Barker teaches social studies. He’s not a Muslim but is impressed with the mission of the school.

RAY BARKER (Social Studies Teacher, Universal School): It is really looking at developing the whole person through a moral structure set up by the religion. It very much is creating a strong foundation for them for these years and the rest of their lives.

MIRIAM AHMED (Eighth Grade Student, Universal School): You just do good in school.

SEVERSON(speaking to students): So are you good all the time?

For some parents, learning good values was only one reason they wanted their children in a religious school. Even before she gave birth to her three kids, Maha Zaatreh didn’t care whether they went to an Islamic school or a Catholic school as long as it wasn’t a public school.

MAHA ZAATREH: Discipline, really—that was my concern. Discipline, respect to their parents, respect to older people. That was my first goal.

OSMAN: Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessing be upon him, he talked about how important gentleness was—that God is gentle, and he loves gentleness. At our school you would find it very rare that you’d have a teacher raise their voice.

SEVERSON: They may not raise their voice but they do achieve discipline. Listen to Alet and Hakim.

ALET SIAM: You know that room downstairs right before you come up here, the library? In there you spend the whole day with the guy at the desk downstairs, Brother Jabor. Oh, man, he can give some punishments.

SEVERSON: Like what?

HAKIM ARMAN: He gives us all this writing to do. Sometimes, like last year, there was the other hall monitor. They’re kind of strict. If you walked down the wrong way, they make you walk up and down like 80 times.

ZAATREH: It gets me worried to know the fact that when my daughter is a teenager, she’s going to start thinking, “I want to date, I want to go here, I want to go there.”

SEVERSON: She needn’t worry about Universal. Dating is not allowed here for a host of reasons. Some are found in the Quran’s views on chastity when it refers to Miriam, whom Christians call Mary, the mother of Jesus.

OSMAN: In the Quran God uses Miriam as the example for our young girls, on how he had so much love for her because of her chastity, because of her modesty before God, because of her purity and her internal beauty, and that’s all part of it. We don’t want to necessarily come down on them and say dating is bad, dating is bad. Rather, we want to tell them how positive a healthy family is.

SEVERSON: Why do you think it is that they don’t want you to date?

ALET SIAM: Because you don’t want any like diseases. Like because of the STDs going around.

SEVERSON: Values are enforced and behaviors like gossip and bullying strongly condemned. Bullying is a very real and personal concern for these students. Some come looking for a safe environment.

(speaking to student): Why were you bullied?

HAKIM ARMAN: I was bullied because I’m Muslim. I got like punched a couple of times.

SEVERSON: Girls who wear the head scarf, the hijab, often feel the insecurity of being the object of stares, of being different. Some wear their hijabs only at school. Others wear them as a badge of honor.

KHADIJO ABDULLE (Eighth Grade Student, Universal School): I started wearing hijab when I was little in first grade. I have been wearing it since then, outside even, and people just used to look at me, and then I used to have to act like them and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to be me.

SEVERSON: So it made you feel bad.

(speaking to students): Do you think Muslims get a bad rap in this country?

FADUMO MOHAMMED (Seventh Grade Student, Universal School): Because they don’t know who we are.

MIRIAM AHMED (Eighth Grade Student, Universal School): If they see the truth, it’s very obvious that we are good people.

SEVERSON: Universal started with 17 students. Today they have over 100. The eventual goal is to expand Universal to include high school.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Lucky Severson in Buffalo, New York.

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