Welthy Honsinger Fisher

1964 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for International Understanding from U.S.A. (based in India). Welthy Honsinger Fisher founded the Saksharta Niketan or Literacy House which has trained 7,000 literacy teachers within a span of 11 years. These men and women have taught simple reading and writing to an estimated one and one-half million villagers and city laborers, for whom learning to write their own names made the difference between "being nobody and becoming someone." She spent 14 years of travel, writing and lecturing about educational systems she studied in South America, the Middle East and Asia. Fisher, who mobilized talents and resources and led in this effort, was 72 years old when memory of Gandi inspired her to work with the Allahabad Agricultural Institute in making technical knowledge understandable in the villages. From this beginning grew her vision of a house to help in some measure India's 320 million illiterates.