What do Rose Mayala (our coordinator) and I do between literacy teacher trainings anyway? (Besides the administrative details of reading, tabulating and responding to teachers’ reports, doing financial reports, etc?)
Well, we’re combing our environment for recipes to make all sorts of things, writing them down for classes, translating short articles, writing brochures and booklets, writing project proposals, lobbying the national assembly, and preparing to meet the governor of Bandundu Province.
Since we returned from our teacher training trips at the beginning of April, I have been writing a brochure in Kituba on menopause: its symptoms and how to reduce them. Most of our students are women. This brochure adds a much-needed follow-up to our booklet on reproductive health issues. I also have been correcting and editing a Kituba translation of the Navigators’ lesson booklet on discipleship.
The literacy lobbying campaign is serious. A member of the provincial assembly who is a friend of our work has urged us to meet with the governor of Bandundu as soon as possible. The purpose is to acquaint him with the need for adult literacy in his province, what a successful program will require, and what the CBCO literacy program could offer. I have been writing an introduction to the program, describing our aims, our strengths and the elements that would increase chances of success for an adult literacy campaign in Bandundu Province. A meeting will not happen before I leave for US assignment this June, but Rose can do it without me.
When Rose returned to Kinshasa in April, she submitted the registration forms for provincial classes that missed registration in December. In theory, the government will pay literacy teachers a modest stipend. Rose continues to follow up on the registration process for all our provincial classes with the government office for adult education. Meanwhile some of our teachers have been staging protests over the time it is taking, and we, in the region, have been trying to “put out the fires”.
Rose and some of our Kinshasa supervisors have written a proposal for the post-literacy activities* mandated by the UN-orchestrated literacy campaign. The L.I.F.E. program formally opened in Congo this February. Our literacy teachers have been lobbying the National Assembly for its full implementation.
For years we have felt that “functional literacy” is a proper goal of any good literacy program. But it is also one of those aspects that we have considered ‘way beyond our reach’ except in a most abbreviated way. Now with the new UN program, it’s required of all “players” in this national literacy campaign.
What this means practically is that in the second level of our classes we must introduce participants to all sorts of literature that is relevant for their lives: biblical, medical, agricultural, legal, bureaucratic, culinary and mechanical. And then we must teach them how to use it. Never mind that simple, relevant literature is often not readily available, however sorely needed. So we’re scrambling for material, writing a lot of it ourselves, so that our teachers who have limited knowledge themselves have something to work with.
Here in Africa in particular, the mandate of functional literacy is especially to learn/teach knowledge and skills that will move students out of poverty. So we’re looking especially for things that could provide a livelihood. Everything has to be tried out in class. Teachers must learn as well as their students. Teaching some of these skills require equipment: for example, scissors, needles and sewing machines to teach sewing skills. All require materials. And all this requires a lot more money than we have to operate with. Hence the political dimension that has entered our work in the past year.
Rose is also pushing UNESCO to start the second phase of the literacy campaign with the Twa Pygmies of Central Congo. Last July UNESCO sent Rose and her group to promote literacy classes among the Twa in Inongo, a provincial town by Lake Mai-Ndombe. The Twa warmly welcomed the initiative. Now they are eagerly waiting for the promised literacy teacher training so that they can launch classes -- it has been almost a year. Failure to follow through on the promise would be fatal to the fragile confidence that was built in that visit.
You can see that we are faced with enormous challenges and perhaps enormous opportunities. It is a lot more than I dreamed of, anyway, when I responded to the appeal of CBCO urban women for literacy classes in 1995. Keep us in your prayers, and think of what you could contribute for a better life for your sisters (and brothers) in Congo.
* After analyzing past literacy campaigns in many environments, the international community has concluded that merely teaching someone from a non-literate background the mechanics of reading, writing and calculating is not enough. Too few people move independently from the simple deciphering of single words and basic sentences to being able to exploit the power of literacy. The UN literacy campaign focuses on the “post-literacy” phase of “functional literacy”.
Functional literacy means being able to read and calculate well enough to read anything that crosses your path in order to be able to use what’s relevant to you in your daily life. Similarly, a person has to be able to write well enough for the needs of their environment. It means being able to exploit the wealth of ideas and information encoded in print in order to improve your life.
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