Nigeria, My Mother and a Word about Education

Back in the early fifties a young woman from Vermont felt called to attend seminary.  So she packed up her bags and headed for Bangor, Maine.  It turned out she was one of only two women enrolled in the school, and so she had to bunk in a room next to the dining hall kitchen, where the cook could keep watch over her and the other female student.

The woman from Vermont met an older student--a dashing young blond fellow from Florida.  They fell in love, and in time they got married.  She got pregnant, and so after finishing her second year, she dropped out and had . . . me.  She would have made a great minister, but things took a different direction.

Her love of learning, however, never died.  She read voraciously--and when her four children were older, she went back to school.  High school.  Not for a diploma, she had that already.  But rather to learn Latin!  Fast forward a few years, and a move to Nebraska, and she finally finds her way back to the task of working on a degree.  She blows through her BA with a 4.0.  Goes on to get a Masters, and then a PhD.  All while maintaining that 4.0. 

While working on her doctorate, she becomes a full-time lecturer at the University of Nebraska, and one of the course she taught every semester was English as a Second Language.  She had students from all over the world--the Middle East, Africa, South America, Asia.  No doubt she probably had some women from Nigeria who wanted to learn English and better their lives.

When she gets her hood, she moves to Kentucky, and teaches at a small liberal arts college for over a decade.  She changes the lives of any number of students with her gentle, yet firm approach.  Including some women who, like she had been, were back in school after years of motherhood and work.  She even advised the Non-Traditional Students Club on campus.

My mother, Dr. Constance Jane Sherwood Danner, was no less a mother or wife because she was educated.  Well-educated.  Indeed, I can't imagine her without her education.  Nor can I imagine the lives of all her students had she not been instrumental in helping them discover the joys of literature and composition.

The group that has kidnapped the 273 young women who were finishing up their exams in Nigeria is called Boko Haram.  In the local tongue the name means "Western education is a sin."  Some of the girls were Christians, some were Muslims.  All of them wanted a chance to enrich their lives and many of them, I'm sure, the lives of the husbands and children they would have in the future.  How can that be a sin?  If it is, my own mother is chief among the sinners.  And while we can talk about the theological implications of that statement, like many sons, I am quite convinced she is not so much a sinner as a saint.  And, I suspect, so do those who were fortunate to learn at her feet.

It is time we stand up for not only the kidnapped girls in Nigeria, but for all women and girls who want an education.  What better way to celebrate Mother's Day?

(Photo:  John & Connie Danner      Credit:  Doreen Birdsell)