Every evening, 15-year-old Rashida returns home from school,changes out of her uniform, and rushes to a neighboring farm to help her motherharvest vegetables. Her father is disabled, so the modest profit the two ofthem earn must cover food, clothing and other necessities for all sevenchildren and their parents. Despite having precious little time to study,Rashida is one of the top students at her junior secondary school. But with somuch responsibility on her small shoulders, she admits that it is sometimeshard for her to imagine a more promising future.

Last year, Rashida was invited to join 155 other girls at CamfedGhana's first Girls' Career Camp, a program designed to inspire girls growingup in the country's Northern Region to dream big, and to support them to pursuethose dreams. “We organized this camp because we wanted to let girls know thateven if they are struggling with poverty, their lives will not be defined bylimitations,” says Dolores Dickson, Camfed Ghana's Executive Director.

    Over the course of five days, the camp led the junior andsecondary school students through a range of experiences and career opportunities that were entirely new to them. Dr. Agnes Apusiga, a lecturer from the University of DevelopmentStudies, ran the workshop on goal-setting and career choices, describing theuniversities and training colleges in Ghana that could help them achieve theirdreams. Participants then visited the University for Development Studies, wherethey toured the medical school and science labs. Another highlight was aworkshop at the computer lab at Tamale Secondary School. Many of the girls hadstudied information technology from a book but had never before seen acomputer.

   “When the girls arrived at camp, they were not ambitious,because they didn't have any idea what the world held for them,” says EugeniaAyagiba, Project Officer with Camfed Ghana. “Many had scarcely traveled beyondtheir own villages.”

“I think the most important thing that happened at the camp isthat we opened a window of hope for a group of girls coming from backgrounds ofpoverty,” says Eugenia. For Rashida, who has been laughed at in the past by herschoolmates because of her father's disability, the experience was important.“She told one of the camp mentors(辅导员) that whenshe is at school, she often feels like a misfit, and she prefers to keep toherself,” says Eugenia. “But at the camp, it was different. She made friendswith girls who have similar struggles. She took part in every single activity,every single game. On the last day, she said to her mentor, ‘The camp haschallenged me to study hard. Now I see that there is light at the end of thetunnel.'

    Tu Youyou, an 84-year-old female（女性）scientist, became the first Chinese to win a Nobel Prize in science on Oct 5. Before that, she ever won the 2011 Lasker Award for finding out artemisinin (Qinghaosu), which saved millions of lives. She was grateful（感激的）for the Lasker prize, but said, “It is just a scientist' duty. I will go on fighting for the health of all humans.”

    Tu kept her work in the 1960s and 1970s. In that age, Malaria (疟疾) could took away people's health. Scientists all over the world had already tried over 240, 000 times but failed. Tu Youyou, a member of the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Beijing, began to study Chinese herbs.

    Before 2011, people didn't know Tu very much. Many friends played jokes with her “the Professor of Three None's” : no degree（学位）, no study experience abroad, not a member of any Chinese national colleges. But she is hard-working. She read a lot of traditional Chinese medicine books and did a lot of researches on the disease.

    In February, 2012, Tu was named National Outstanding Females (One of the Ten) Tu is now a model of Chinese medical workers.

    Wang Mengshu, an expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said at a group discussion on the sidelines of the annual session of the National People's Congress that Wi-Fi should not be provided on high-speed trains, as it might disturb communication signals of trains and would also cost a lot in keeping trains in good condition. He also encouraged passengers to enjoy the views, instead of fixing their eyes on tiny screens of smart phones and laptops. However, on last Tuesday Beijing Youth Daily said it should be market demand that decides whether the Wi-Fi is offered on the trains or not.

    An increasing number of residents, especially young white-collar workers, are addicted to their smart phones rather than face-to-face interactions, thanks to the extensive Wi-Fi coverage across the country. That partly justifies Wang's opposition to the offering of Wi-Fi on high-speed trains, because they are not supposed to be dependent on high-tech devices. It is also evident that passengers on trains without free Wi-Fi will use their smart phones and other mobile devices less. However, whether the trains should provide a free Wi-Fi service fundamentally depends on customer demand.

    In other words, state-owned as it is, the China Railway Crop still has to obey relevant market rules, and provide technologically possible services to passengers if that is what they want. It cannot turn a blind eye to customers' wants "for the sake of their well-being".

    Free Wi-Fi, in fact, is already available on a lot of buses and coaches. This is a natural response to their competition with trains (especially high-speed ones), which are significantly faster and safer. The bus companies have been forced to improve their services to survive. It requires proper guidance, not a total ban on the bus, to make up for the negative effects of high-end technologies, such as people's increasing addiction to smart phones.

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    Downloading music over the Internet is pretty common among high school and college students. However, when students download and share copyrighted music without permission, they are against the law.

    A survey of young people's music ownership has found that teenagers and college students have an average of more than 800 illegally copied songs each on their digital music players．Half of those surveyed share all the music on their hard drive (硬盘), enabling others to copy hundreds of songs at any one time. Some students were found to have randomly linked their personal blogs to music sites, so as to allow free trial listening of copyrighted songs for blog visitors, or adopted some of the songs as the background music for their blogs. Such practices may be easy and free, but there are consequences.

    Sandra Dowd, a student of Central Michigan University, was fined US $7,500 for downloading 501 files from Lime Wire, a peer-to-peer file sharing program. Sandra claimed that she was unaware that her downloads were illegal until she was contacted by authorities. Similarly, Mike Lewinski paid US $4,000 to settle a lawsuit（起诉）against him for copyright violation (违反). Mike expressed shock and couldn't believe that this was happening to him. "I just wanted to save some money and I always thought the threat was just a scare tactic(战术)." "You know, everyone does it," added Mike.

    The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), the organization that files lawsuits against illegal downloaders, states that suing (控告) students was by no means their first choice. Unfortunately, without the threat of consequences, students are just not changing their behavior. Education alone is not enough to stop the extraordinary growth of the illegal downloading practice.

    Parents do not owe (欠) their children a college education. If they can afford it, they can certainly send them to a good university. But they needn't feel guilty if they can't. When children grow up and want to get married, their parents do not owe them an apartment. They do not have the duty to look after their grandchildren, either. If they want to do it, it must be considered a favor, not an obligation.

    Do parents owe their children anything? Yes, they owe them a great deal.

One of their obligations is to give their children a personal worth. Children who are always made to feel stupid and unworthy, constantly compared with brighter brothers, sisters, or cousins will become so unsure, so afraid of failing that they won't try at all. Of course they should be properly corrected when they do wrong, but it's often better to let children learn their mistakes by themselves in time. All their parents should do is to trust them, respect them, understand them and give them chances to try and fail. They must learn to stand failure. When criticisms (批评) are really needed, they should be balanced with a smile and a kiss. That is the way children learn.

    Parents owe their children a set of solid values around which to build their lives. This means teaching them to respect the rights and opinions of others; it means being respectful to elders, to teachers, and to the law. The best way to teach such values is by deed. A child who is lied to will lie. A child who sees no laughter and no love in the home will have difficulty laughing and loving.

No child asks to be born. If you bring a life into the world, you owe the child something.