"Why in the name of the Powers are we doing this??"
"We're going to change the world!"
"By..... teaching a bunch of street-kids how to read and write?"
"Let me explain to you about what happens when you throw a stone into a pond again." -- Anon Guest
It was a world gone to hell. Polluted and lacking anything of worth, except the people. The CEO's had used the final 'D' of abominable business practices[1] and found somewhere else to use until they wrung it dry.
People were scraping just to get by. Working every hour just to survive long enough to work another day. The Alliance had stepped in to help clean up the mess, but they could only do so much, so quickly. They could bring in things to help the survivors. Patch the wounds on the system until they could build a new one. And in all of that, other things fell through the cracks.
Like children. The CEOs insisted on people having a lot of children, but never had any systems to look after them. They were all about the right to life, and little about the right to live comfortably.
The kids ran wild in the streets, playing with debris and not having much in the way of supervision. They returned to their domiciles at sunset and that was enough for the people who were nominally their family. There was a lack that could be a problem, but it was nothing that many had time for.
Steveodore Arn was one of the few who had a bundle of hours to spare. She gathered some fellow Steveodores during the hours in which they were waiting for the next ship.
"Listen. We can change the whole future here. One little thing can make huge ripples in the fate of this world. We're just spinning our wheels for hours at a time over here. We can flakking use them."
"To change an entire world?"
"Yeah. Ripples in a pond style."
"All right. What's the scam?"
"No scam," said Arn. "We teach these kids basic literacy and numeracy. We set up some boards near their scavenging sites and hand out comics and stuff. You know. The little primers. And teach them the alphabet and phonemes."
"Teaching gutter brats to read," deadpanned Xun, ze was the skeptic of the group. "How the flakk is wasting our time on those ferals going to change a world?" Xun was a deregger expatriot. Some of the politics still followed hir around.
"Ripples in the pond, Xun. You teach a kid to read and they can learn about stuff. They can chase their curiosity. They can find answers. They can teach others."
"Bet you a tray of doughnuts they won't even want to hang around to learn anything."
"Well. Like I learned from my school, the best way to lure a kid and to get them to learn... is to start them off with a good breakfast."
Not the MRE's handed out in the Alliance kitchens, but the Steveodores' griddle-fried pancakes and scrambled eggs, with an option for sausage patties if they showed keenness to learn the previous day.
The bribery worked. In two weeks, the kids all over that city were singing their alphabet song. Graffiti sprang up on the ruined buildings. Most of it at kid height.
Poisonings dropped to near zero.
Inventions sprang up in the rubble. Kids using found material to create little devices to help them, their friends, and their family with various tasks. Many of them were washing machines. Plenty were water filters. Some were little kitchens where the kids used scrounged ingredients to attempt to recreate the Steveodores' cooking.
That was just the beginning, but some ripples take decades to make their influence felt.
[1] Deny, Delay, Distract and, when all else fails, Decamp before the people decide on their own 'D' - Defenestration.
[Photo by Noita Digital on Unsplash]
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