Comments

That was what I did when I was 6 - 7 years old(?!) baskets are amazing toys, and very versatile, if your imagination is wild. In my case, they doubled as body armour. hahahaha

It was a basket made of bamboo strips then, which also doubled as a football of sorts when the teacher wasn't around.. :-)))))

Thanks for sharing that image. It certainly brought back some very happy memories at St. Vincents in Pune, India.

Posted by Arun Sadhashivan at August 9, 2006 4:40 PM

I hope those two kids never change - it's a real shame what that thing called 'work' does to creativity and 'difference' :-)

Posted by Trevor Gay at August 9, 2006 4:59 PM

I guess its a good thing they were not carrying boxes or solid sided trash cans.

Posted by eSearing at August 11, 2006 9:14 AM

About women in my country... Enjoy it!

Women in Chile
Left behind
The Economist
Will Michelle Bachelet help women or hinder them?

CHILE, which has South America's most successful economy, elected its first female president this year. But the lot of Chilean women is by many measures worse than that of their sisters elsewhere in the region. A smaller proportion of them work (see chart) and fewer achieve political power. According to a recent report by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, an association of parliaments, 15% of representatives in the lower house of Chile's Congress are women, less than half the proportion in Costa Rica and Argentina and below the level in eight other countries in the region, including Venezuela and Bolivia. Chilean women hope that Michelle Bachelet's presidency will improve their position but there are worries that she will do more harm than good.

No one is sure why Chilean women lag. The wage gap with men is relatively large. Women earned 19% less than men in 2003, according to a government survey; the gap was nearly 40% in jobs requiring high levels of education. Chile may also be more socially conservative than other South American countries. The women's affairs ministry still finds such phrases as “boys like to learn, girls like to play at tea parties” in textbooks that it vets for discrimination.

To these factors María Nieves Rico of the UN's Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean adds the economy's heavy dependence on natural resources, which slows the development of service industries that typically employ women. Yet, she admits, even taken together these things do not fully explain the situation. The result is that “Chile is throwing talent out the window at a rate that is exponentially damaging to the economy,” says Kathleen Barclay, an American banker in Santiago.

Ms Bachelet began her assault on inequality by appointing women to half the cabinet posts in her centre-left government. A new labour code for the public sector forbids pregnancy tests, removes mention of a candidate's sex from job applications and requires training during normal working hours. The government is encouraging the private sector to adopt the code as well.

Ms Bachelet has started to build new day-care centres and has promised universal nursery schooling by the end of her four-year term, which will help mothers who want to work. A controversial plan to impose a quota of female candidates for Congress on political parties is being prepared. “We'd like it to be 50% but haven't decided yet,” says Laura Albornoz, the women's affairs minister. Opposition to the quota means that, if it passes at all, it will probably be lower. Activists want the government to legislate against the wage gap, but that would have even less chance of overcoming resistance from business and the right-wing opposition.

Women worry that whatever good Ms Bachelet does for them specifically will be undone if she fails generally. The early months of her presidency, which began in March, have been rocky. She handled shakily mass protests by students against the poor quality of state education. She has been accused of taking a soft line in a dispute with Argentina over the price of gas, unfairly since Chile has no choice but to import it. According to a poll released last month, 57% of Chileans think that her government has “acted weakly”.

Many of her countrymen put Ms Bachelet's problems down to her sex. “The government should put its trousers on,” is a grumble heard frequently, but by no means exclusively, from male members of the opposition.

“Being a woman was an advantage while Ms Bachelet was a candidate but stereotyped concepts of authority have now turned against her,” says Marcela Ríos of FLACSO-Chile, a research institute. Now “all the government's problems are being attributed to the fact that she's a woman.” Such attitudes probably explain those peculiar statistics.

Posted by Sofia at August 11, 2006 10:01 AM