Today,
20 years ago, November 20, 1989, the United Nations unanimously accepted the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This article contains the child’s right of access to education. Education of the child is named 21 times over in the full 54 Articles.
Today,
 there is a silence from all the big organizations in respect of that fact.
Today,
 I, Anne Wesselingh, 13, sit in the dilapidated High School in the village of Barbullush in Northern Albania,  together with some 700 other children and in their name, because:

Today:
1. They can't speak English, because the level of teaching is too low and the best teachers give lessons in the private schools to children whose parents have the money to pay.
2. They have no access to communication media, and have no idea what's happening in the world. Similarly, they've never heard of the Convention on the rights of the cat at.
3. They have no access to clean drinking water nor sanitary facilities, through which young girls have to miss a week's lessons every month, as poor as the lessons are.
4. There's no electricity in the classrooms, and so during the winter, when the days get dark, our books are unreadable. No heating either.
5. They are frequently smacked with a rule, because they don't pay attention, and yet at the same time the teachers have no way to put over the lesson material to the children.

Today,
 I, Anne Wesselingh, have had enough of all the talking about the Rights of the Child, when in practice so little is actually done.

Today,
 I've had it up to here that money is being made by big organizations at the cost of we children.

Today,
 and every day, I speak up on behalf of the children whose voice is strangled because they are afraid, downtrodden and sit in a vicious circle, called POVERTY.

Today,
 I discover that it’s our turn to have a voice and not the people who sit in their ivory towers, thinking they know what goes on. They have no real idea what poverty really feels like, smells like and tastes like. I know, I live in the middle of it, not as an outsider, a Westerner, but as one of them.

Today,
is the day the children have their say and decide what happens to them.

Yes, Today!      Help us today, Anne Wesselingh