When SIL LEAD board member Dr. Margaret Jepkirui Muthwii is asked if she grew up having to help out on the family farm in rural Kenya, or if instead she was expected to focus on her studies, she laughs (she does that a lot).

Margaret says that she and her eight siblings were expected to keep up with their studies, but there was no question about whether or not they’d help out on the farm. “We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t argue about it,” Margaret says, “We just woke up and there was a schedule…”

Many of us have never heard of the exotic-sounding Quetzaltenango, a city in the mountains of Guatemala where cultures new and old meet to create a vibrant whole. But back in February of this year, SIL LEAD executive director Paul Frank traveled there to lead a series of workshops that would help spread Bloom software throughout the country, and contribute to the conservation of not just the Mam and K’iche languages, but entire ways of life. ..

When Dr. Kreeft Peyton attended her first-ever SIL LEAD board meeting in 2011, the board members went around the room to say why they were excited to be serving on the board. She went first (“Unfortunately—you know how that goes, since you can’t hear what everyone else has said and adjust”), and she said, “I am so excited to be here because I love language. I am passionate about language. I think about language in every situation that I am in.”

“It’s like the Georgetown University Linguistics Department t-shirt,” she continued, recounting her alma mater: “Analyzing your every utterance since 1949.” She laughed, remembering both the t-shirt and her slight embarrassment at everyone else’s (to her) more noble-sounding reasons for serving on the SIL LEAD board…

Thinking about exponential growth is enough to get anyone’s head spinning. But exponential growth isn’t just a brain-busting mathematical concept. When your goal is to give people the skills to train others, it can be an exciting possibility.

Double anything once, you end up with two. Use exponential math and double something ten times, however, and you’ve got yourself a massive exponential increase… which is just the kind of result we hoped for when we sent SIL LEAD executive director and Bloom Master Trainer Paul Frank to the “Enabling Writers: Bloom Software Training of Trainers Workshop” last month…

Do you like to read?

The World Health Organization estimates that there are thirty-nine million people in the world who are blind, and two hundred forty six million who have low vision. That is a lot of people who must rely on other gifts as they explore and interact with the world. Just imagine, for a moment, that you are one of that two hundred forty-six million people for whom accessing the information and ideas that can be found in books often requires extra effort...

Do you remember when you first realized that the world was much, much larger than your home, your neighborhood, or your city? Most likely it took a while, as over time you made new friends and saw new places. With each new experience, your world began to expand.

For SIL LEAD Director of Community-Based Programs Clare O’Leary, that process was accelerated by circumstance...

“Numbers have life; they’re not just symbols on paper.” – Shakuntala Devi

To a layperson, SIL LEAD board member Samantha Custer’s work as the director of Policy Analysis at AidData may seem a bit esoteric—involving, as it does, reams of data and endless number-crunching. But Samantha’s analysis functions as a sort of GPS for aid work, ensuring that when policymakers and relief organizations seek to address global problems, they can do so with precision.

Samantha Custer was born in St. Asaph, Whales – the second-smallest city in Britain. When Samantha was four years old, her family emigrated to Connecticut...

When you’re nine years old, new school assignments of any kind can be groan-inducing. This is as true for kids in rural Uganda as it is in suburban U.S.A.

Justine Kagoya, a primary four student in Uganda whose school has shifted its emphasis to local language learning, is quoted in an article in The Observer as being concerned over the difficulty she may face when she shifts to English-based learning later in life (in Uganda, English is the language of commerce).

Of course, not all students feel that way -- Nicholas Odeke, a student at the Kirinya Church of Uganda primary school, is quoted in that same article as saying, “Some of the English words are hard... teaching us in our local languages will help us understand more” -- but it’s easy to see where Justine is coming from...