Empowering Soweto’s Young Women
Growing up as a young woman in South Africa comes with real challenges. There is high teen pregnancy, with one in seven mothers still teenagers, and significant youth unemployment, reaching 46.1 percent in 2025.
That’s where the Way to Happiness South Africa volunteers stepped in, providing young girls with practical moral guidance to help them stay on track. At a young women’s empowerment panel in Soweto, the team reached dozens of students. Each received The Way to Happiness booklet. They also watched several public service announcements (PSAs) that vividly depicted each precept through real-life situations.
These included Precept 1, “Take Care of Yourself,” and Precept 17, “Be Competent,” teaching young women how to care for their health, study effectively and practice their skills until they master them.
As L. Ron Hubbard wrote in the book’s Epilogue: “One can feel at times like a spinning leaf blown along a dirty street, one can feel like a grain of sand stuck in one place. But nobody has said that life was a calm and orderly thing: it isn’t. One isn’t a tattered leaf nor a grain of sand: one can, to greater or lesser degree draw his road map and follow it.”
With the knowledge and guidance gained from the seminar, these young women left equipped to do exactly that—to chart their own course and walk a stable road toward happiness.
WE REALLY WANT TO hear FROM YOU
CALIFORNIA, USA
“My wife and I manage an apartment building, and one particular tenant was causing a lot of trouble. One afternoon, his sister called me because he didn’t answer his phone. I went to his apartment and found him sprawled out on the bed. He was skinny, pale and looked dead. The ambulance took him away to the hospital. I called the sister and gave her two copies of The Way to Happiness. My wife instructed her to go over sections of the book with him daily. Two weeks later, he returned home and was beaming when he saw me. He said, ‘I stopped taking drugs and alcohol. Look at my stomach! I’m eating and drinking juices. I read the happy book each day. I changed my mind. I don’t want to die anymore.’”
ITALY
“Today, I went back to a place where there is a guy I had talked to before about the booklet. He believed that this society was very negative and beyond redemption, and that young people did not act in a logical and sensible way. I asked him what was wrong with this society. He began to list things like how young people do not respect their parents and do not take care of themselves. For each statement, I found a precept that gave the exact solution to the problem he was describing. At that point, he told me enthusiastically that the booklet was now real to him and that he would read it again, but with a different outlook.”
GUATEMALA
“I have shared the program not only with my university students, but also in a juvenile detention center. The program motivates me continuously to learn more, share it widely and practice its principles with others. The program has strengthened my mission to share the message of life and peaceful coexistence. It also enriches my university courses. I would love to be involved to further strengthen the program’s message. Thank you for your support. May God continue to multiply his blessings in your lives.”
FACTS
45 YEARS OF HAPPINESS
The Way to Happiness: 45 years in review
144,000,000
BOOKLETS
distributed internationally
194
NATIONS
reached worldwide
119
LANGUAGES
that The Way to Happiness booklet has been translated into
270,000,000
PEOPLE REACHED
globally with The Way to Happiness
1,800,000
COURSE LESSONS
completed on The Way to Happiness online course
GIVE THE GIFT
OF HAPPINESS
Each of The Way to Happiness precepts is predicated on the reality that one’s survival depends on the survival of others and that, without the survival of others, no joy and no happiness are attainable.
L. Ron Hubbard stated: “If one keeps the edges on the road, one can’t go far wrong. True excitement, happiness and joy come from other things, not from broken lives.
“If you can get others to follow the road, you yourself will be free enough to give yourself a chance to discover what real happiness is.”
Therefore, we offer bundles of 12 The Way to Happiness booklets so you can read the booklet yourself and give copies to those whose happiness you care about.
