The Woohoo! Report

IslamOnline.net & News Agencies

MURSHIDABAD, India – Lining up his friends and poor villagers at the backyard of his house, Babar Ali did not expect his play-acting teaching to become a reality.

“In the beginning I was just play-acting, teaching my friends,” the 16-year-old told the BBC.

“But then I realized these children will never learn to read and write if they don’t have proper lessons.”

Growing up in Murshidabad in West Bengal, Ali made a remarkable tale of the desire to help others learn amid abject poverty.

As the clock ticks 6 a.m., he gets up to start his daily journey for the Raj Govinda school, which requires a 10km (six mile) ride and a couple of kilometers walk.

“It’s not easy for me to come to school because I live so far away… but the teachers are good and I love learning,” he says in his neat blue and white uniform.

“And my parents believe I must get the best education possible that’s why I am here.”

His parents pay 1,800 rupees a year ($40) for Ali to attend school.

But many other families cannot afford to pay this small amount of money to admit their kids to schools.

Realizing that, Ali is volunteering to share the knowledge he gets in school with his fellow villagers.

“It’s my duty to educate them, to help our country build a better future.”

Ali launched his pioneering project when he was only 9, making him the world’s known youngest headmaster.

Poverty Challenger

Arriving back from school at 4 p.m., Ali rings the bell to summon his village students to his home backyard.

He lectures them on discipline and starts his lessons.

Along with Ali there are now 10 volunteer teachers at the afternoon school, all of them students at school or college.

The afternoon school now has 800 students, all from poor families, who come after finishing their day’s work.

“My father is handicapped and can’t work,” says Chumki Hajra, 14, who has never been to school.

Ever since she was five, Chumki has been working in domestic service against 200 rupees a month ($5), the amount her family bitterly needs to survive.

“If I don’t work, we can’t survive as a family…We need the money.”

But thanks to Ali, she is able to get some education with hundreds of poor children in his village.

They pay anything. Even books and food are given free, funded by donations.

The school has been recognized by local authorities after helping to increase literacy rates in the area and Ali was awarded for his outstanding work.

“Our area is economically deprived,” notes Ali.

“Without this school many kids wouldn’t get an education, they’d never even be literate.”

[source]

President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Paul Levy may have found an alternative to layoffs.

By Kevin Cullen
Globe Columnist

It was the kind of meeting that is taking place in restaurant kitchens, small offices, retail storerooms, and large auditoriums all over this city, all over this state, all over this country.

Paul Levy, the guy who runs Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, was standing in Sherman Auditorium the other day, before some of the very people to whom he might soon be sending pink slips.

In the days before the meeting, Levy had been walking around the hospital, noticing little things.

He stood at the nurses’ stations, watching the transporters, the people who push the patients around in wheelchairs. He saw them talk to the patients, put them at ease, make them laugh. He saw that the people who push the wheelchairs were practicing medicine.

He noticed the same when he poked his head into the rooms and watched as the people who deliver the food chatted up the patients and their families.

He watched the people who polish the corridors, who strip the sheets, who empty the trash cans, and he realized that a lot of them are immigrants, many of them had second jobs, most of them were just scraping by.

And so Paul Levy had all this bouncing around his brain the other day when he stood in Sherman Auditorium.

He looked out into a sea of people and recognized faces: technicians, secretaries, administrators, therapists, nurses, the people who are the heart and soul of any hospital. People who knew that Beth Israel had hired about a quarter of its 8,000 staff over the last six years and that the chances that they could all keep their jobs and benefits in an economy in freefall ranged between slim and none.

“I want to run an idea by you that I think is important, and I’d like to get your reaction to it,” Levy began. “I’d like to do what we can to protect the lower-wage earners – the transporters, the housekeepers, the food service people. A lot of these people work really hard, and I don’t want to put an additional burden on them.

“Now, if we protect these workers, it means the rest of us will have to make a bigger sacrifice,” he continued. “It means that others will have to give up more of their salary or benefits.”

He had barely gotten the words out of his mouth when Sherman Auditorium erupted in applause. Thunderous, heartfelt, sustained applause.

Paul Levy stood there and felt the sheer power of it all rush over him, like a wave. His eyes welled and his throat tightened so much that he didn’t think he could go on.

When the applause subsided, he did go on, telling the workers at Beth Israel, the people who make a hospital go, that he wanted their ideas.

The lump had barely left his throat when Paul Levy started getting e-mails.

The consensus was that the workers don’t want anyone to get laid off and are willing to give up pay and benefits to make sure no one does. A nurse said her floor voted unanimously to forgo a 3 percent raise. A guy in finance who got laid off from his last job at a hospital in Rhode Island suggested working one less day a week. Another nurse said she was willing to give up some vacation and sick time. A respiratory therapist suggested eliminating bonuses.

“I’m getting about a hundred messages per hour,” Levy said yesterday, shaking his head.

Paul Levy is onto something. People are worried about the next paycheck, because they’re only a few paychecks away from not being able to pay the mortgage or the rent.

But a lot of them realize that everybody’s in the same boat and that their boat doesn’t rise because someone else’s sinks.

Paul Levy is trying something revolutionary, radical, maybe even impossible: He is trying to convince the people who work for him that the E in CEO can sometimes stand for empathy.

[source]