Elisabeth Oosterhoff of West Windsor organized area people at West Windsor Community Park on Tuesday, October 16, in conjunction with Stand Up And Speak Out, a worldwide call organized by the United Nations Millennium Campaign and the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP). ##M:[more]##
During the 24-hour period millions showed that they refuse to stay silent or seated in the face of poverty. In 2000 leaders of 189 countries signed up to the Millennium Development Goals, a global plan to cut poverty in half by 2015. According to Oosterhoff 50,”000 people die because of extreme poverty and the gap between the rich and poor is getting wider.
Born and raised in Norway until she was 12 when she went to live in France and Switzerland, she took the French Baccalaureate in Switzerland, and then received an associate degree in business administration in Oslo, Norway. She followed that with a full-time one-year course to the University of Barcelona, Spain to study Spanish history, geography, literature, and Catalan (the language spoken in the Eastern part of Spain). She returned to Norway and studied Spanish at the university for one year with a goal of being a teacher.
“After teaching French and Spanish to adults, I decided that was not for me,” she says. “To get some closure of all my different pieces of study, I ended up taking a one-year secretarial course in Oxford, England.”
After a one-year internship program in New York City, she began work at the United Nations in 1992. Oosterhoff is an administrative assistant in the executive office of the Department of Public Information of the United Nations. She works with contracts, attendance, and personnel issues.
Her husband, John Peter Oosterhoff, commutes daily to work at the United Nations Environment Program in Washington, D.C. His background is half-Dutch and half Liberian. Her son, Nama Soukouna, 12, is an eighth grade student at Grover Middle School.
The family moved from Queens in the summer of 2003.
