We asked ONE members for submissions to The Big Read book — a collection of stories from people around the world supporting education for everyone. Although only one member story will be published in the book, the runner-up submissions, including the one below from Lisa Treumuth of Ann Arbor, Michigan, were so good that we wanted to share them with you.

You can show your support for The Big Read and help ensure a pathway out of poverty for children around the world. Endorse the book by adding your signature here.

Thanks for reading!

-Emily Stivers

The Breakthrough

By Lisa Treumuth
Ann Arbor, MI

In the summer of 2006, I had the opportunity to travel to Ecuador as part of a service trip sponsored by the University of Michigan. We went to the capitol city of Quito for a month and worked with an organization that paid poor children’s school fees so that they could get an education; to help them succeed, we provided them with free after-school tutoring.

We worked especially hard with the family who let us tutor the neighborhood children in their yard. Though the main tutoring session was in the afternoon, one of us would go to the house each morning to work with the kids in the family who were still too young to go to school.

One child who required a lot of attention was a little four-year-old named Diego. Try as we might to teach him colors and numbers, no matter how many times we drilled him, he almost always mixed up rojo and azul, and he skipped the number siete when counting to ten. We were beginning to wonder if he was beyond our ability to help him.

Then one day when I was working with Diego, I decided to write his name in dashed lines so that he could trace over them to practice writing his name. I had him do it several times until he formed the letters correctly. Finally I praised him for his hard work, gave him a paper and crayon and told him to draw whatever he wanted. To my surprise and delight, he immediately sat down and wrote his name, all by himself.

I showed the paper to the other tutors, and we cheered with joy! Responding to our praise, Diego wrote his name several more times, yelling “Yay!” along with us every time he did.

Diego had proved us wrong — he was perfectly capable of learning. All it took was a little encouragement and effort, and he acquired the ability to write his name, to say to the world, “I AM DIEGO!”

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how profound this breakthrough was: if even Diego, who lived in a house with no heat, who sometimes had nothing to eat all day but soda, bread, and porridge, could make a breakthrough like this, who knows what could happen if all children were given access to an education.

Think of all the children living in slums who, if given the chance, could stem the tide of global warming by finding sources of new green energy, or find a cure to a deadly disease, or end the poverty that threatened to disable them. Who knows what wondrous impossibilities could become possible, if we equipped all people with an education.

After I came back from Ecuador, I had the chance to lobby on the Hill in Washington, DC with RESULTS, a partner organization of ONE. I shared Diego’s story with many Congressional aides and legislators, and they were energized as they caught a glimpse of what could happen in a world where all children have access to an education.

And now, leaders of the world: I am asking all of you to share in this vision, and to act to make it possible. The children of the world have the power to create a new kind of global community. Will you give them the chance?