Fear and Courage

Yesterday I found a folder that I'd been using a number of years ago to store ideas for a project. I was going through it this morning and found this:

Create a Fear and Courage newspaper with your class/club.
* Have your students bring in magazine or hand-drawn pictures that illustrate either fear or courage (or both).
* On a bulletin board or wall, draw a front page of a newspaper on plain paper. Title it "The Classroom Daily" - Fear and Courage Issue.
* Talk with your group about fear and courage. Use their ideas to write newspaper articles. Post the pictures as illustrations.

The very next bit in my folder was part of an article from Idealist:

Zakia Zaki hosts a children’s programme on Radio Solh - a community radio initiative in Jabulsaraj in the central Afghan province of Parvan. Establishing Radio Solh was not easy, given Afghan traditions and the power of local warlords. "We got
letters from a local warlord threatening me with death, just after we opened," Zaki said, noting that as a woman, it had been tremendously difficult to run an independent radio station in a conservative male-dominated society. But she persevered.

She sounds like a perfect example of courage, doesn't she? I looked her up to see how the children's radio program was doing (the info I had was from 2004), and saw that she was assassinated in 2007.


Zakia Zaki is in the center of the photo above. Today is a great day to think about courage -- to honor it in others and appreciate it in ourselves, in whatever form it takes. For some people, courage will mean going to school despite the possibility of having acid thrown at you for doing it. For others, just getting up in the morning is an act of courage.

“Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, 'I will try again tomorrow.'”
~ Mary Anne Radmacher