Adrian Cozette Chandler, a U.S. educator and colleague of mine, has come up with a great idea and hopes to see it materialize: the publication of a bilingual book, written in easy-to-understand English and Japanese, in which ordinary American and Japanese women review and candidly discuss issues crucial to human progress and confronted daily by Third World women.
More than half the world's 6 billion people are women, and four-fifths of them live in developing countries. Almost always, and wherever they live, women are the poorer and less privileged members of society.
Affluent women, including those in the United States and Japan, tend to think of their own problems first and are often unaware of the plight of working mothers in the less developed world, says Chandler. Although more girls now have a better chance of learning how to read and write, many still do not go to school, fetching water and collecting firewood in order to live.