LOW-PROFILE Yvonne Vaz Ezdani, till recently a higher secondary lecturer at Candolim (she insists the correct term is 'teacher grade 1'), is voluntarily working on career guidance together with Irene Delaney in Saligao village.
They are working to help students in choosing subjects, educational insitutions, etc, and have been collecting quite some material on various open school and correspondence course options specially for dropouts. They are contactable after the 8:30 am mass on Sundays, in the parish hall, Mae De Deus. Yvonne can also be contacted on phone 2409519. This career guidance is open to all. Says Yvonne: "I got into this because my ex-students used to come and ask me about career choices and courses and I couldnt tell them much." So she started seaching around and, now, each day, adds a "few cuttings from newspapers and magazines to my file". She says the situation is such that many students, including her former pupils, have been cheated by 'agents' into paying exorbitant amounts for seaman's courses, computer courses, medical transcription courses, and the like. Says she: "I really felt there was a need for someone to say 'hey, before you go begging for and borrowing the money, make sure someones not trying to cheat you.'" Some of the students here have meanwhile also 'graduated' from fake universities too. I think concerned people would do well to support the initiatives of people like Yvonne. What they need is not finances, but information (as much as is possible) and words of encouragement. In the long run, it would help youth from the village (and beyond) and our corner of Bardez and indirectly the state. Just thought of sharing this bit of information with you. Yvonne probably would not like me to have put it out. But then, good work deserves to be noticed. In fact, she did not pass on the above information with the intention of getting it quoted somewhere, but simply has been sharing this information in the course of an offline discussion on possible village level initiatives. Yvonne <raynon at goatelecom.com>, like many others doing interesting work in Goa, is a returned expat. She came back from Myanmar (then Burma) in the 'sixties. Maybe such initiatives would be better off if Yvonne and Irene could involve more people, take the initiative online (which today offers a potent medium for reaching out to the young), and replicate their efforts among others. Keep up the good work! FN ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Frederick Noronha (FN) | http://www.fredericknoronha.net Freelance Journalist | http://www.bytesforall.org http://goalinks.pitas.com | http://joingoanet.shorturl.com http://linuxinindia.pitas.com | http://www.livejournal.com/users/goalinks ------------------------------------------------------------------------- T: 0091.832.2409490 or 2409783 M: 0 9822 122436 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ########################################################################## # Send submissions for Goanet to [EMAIL PROTECTED] # # PLEASE remember to stay on-topic (related to Goa), and avoid top-posts # # More details on Goanet at http://joingoanet.shorturl.com/ # # Please keep your discussion/tone polite, to reflect respect to others # ##########################################################################
