The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt

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MEEKER, Colo., Monday—I want to tell you about one of the results of a bill which was recently passed by Congress. This bill allocated certain farm surpluses to meet the needs in the United States and then allotted to various organizations surpluses which could be shipped overseas to needy friendly countries.

The Christian Rural Overseas Program, which is usually known as CROP, has sent me a release saying that they were shipping 2,000,000 pounds of surplus dairy products and cotton seed oil to refugees and earthquake victims in Europe and to supply much-needed fats to uprooted people in Korea and to displaced Arabs from Palestine. This means that 780,000 pounds of butter, 526,000 pounds of cheese, 538,000 pounds of powdered milk, and 180,000 pounds of cottonseed oil will start on their way soon.

The Christian Rural Overseas Program is the food-collection arm of Church World Service, National Council of Churches relief agency. The overseas freight for surplus foods released under this till will be paid by FOA. Any donations to CROP go towards defraying the expenses of the enlarged distribution program undertaken by representatives of these church groups.

Two convenient little dictionaries, one French-English and the other Spanish-English, have been sent to me from Random House. They are small enough so that a man could carry them in his pocket or a woman could carry them in her bag.

They give helpful notes on pronunciation. I have always found that pronunciation of a foreign language is very difficult unless you have a good musical ear. If you have that and are in a country where you constantly hear the language you are trying to learn, you will almost unconsciously find the correct pronunciations, but learning pronunciation from a book is very difficult, I think.

There are little tables in these dictionaries that give the names of the months and the days of the week. There is also a table of weights and measures. For instance, a kilometer is .621 of a mile. But when I am travelling in a country where all the distances are measured in kilometers, I usually just calculate that a kilometer is less than a mile and let it go at that!

The French dictionary gives the basis of the French monetary system, and the Spanish book gives that of all the Spanish-speaking countries. The difficulty, I find, is the change in value of these various currencies in relation to our dollar—and no dictionary can give you that satisfactorily!

E.R.

(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1954, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART PROHIBITED.)



About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, July 20, 1954

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
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Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

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Transcription created from a photocopy of a UFS wire copy of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
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