Forward to the Future

One of the skills learned in ABLE programs and reiterated over and over by participants is the ability to set goals, to plan, to overcome obstacles, to see the future and to make it your own. At the age of 40, 25 years after she found herself motherless, homeless, pregnant and a non-reader, Agnes is looking forward to the future. She still believes “her greatest accomplishment was when I picked up the phone and called the … Literacy Council and made the step to ask for help.” Agnes is now self-sufficient. She is reading beyond 7th grade level, is training for the Ministry and building a career for herself helping unwanted children.

Other participants are following similar pathways. Bruce was a teenage trouble maker and a 9th grade dropout. At 32, when his company closed down, he found himself a displaced food manager with a wife, two children, and property. At the age of 40, after completing a GED, a university degree, and working part time as an adult education instructor, he

heard about a new charter school opening ... I thought they would need teachers, I sent a résumé in, and they gave me one interview and hired me on the spot. All of our students are at risk. They’re students who aren’t working in the public schools and they’re bussed into us. I was an adult student myself, so they thought I would have some success with students and I have been able to establish a good rapport with most of the students.

As a social studies teacher, I wrote a new curriculum this year for job training classes in the high school and we tied it in with social studies so the students could get social studies credit as well as be able to develop a résumé, job skills, basically make them employable. I have speakers from the community and employers come in and talk to the students, give them applications. We’re going to carpenters’ union training school; apprenticeship schools and they are letting them know what’s available as far as a future for the kids. Schools, colleges, are coming in to talk to them.

Asked about his goals for the future, Bruce said:

Maybe becoming a principal. I believe you should set a goal even if it’s unrealistic. If a person sets a goal to be president of the United States and he gets to be a senator, that’s not so bad. I set a goal to become a schoolteacher and I didn’t even have a GED. Unrealistic, probably. I was told that. I was lucky enough to get there.

Vu-lin understands hard work. She was only five when her parents were killed by the Khmer Rouge and she was placed in a children’s camp where she was required to work 12 to 18 hours a day. At 13, she walked across the mine fields to Thailand and in 1979, at the age of 14, arrived in the United States and enrolled in school for the first time. Two months before her 16th birthday, she was forced to marry a man 13 years her senior. For the first four years of her 10-year marriage, she worked 60-hour weeks at a chicken packing plant, eventually receiving a promotion to inspector. She then moved on to a less arduous, better paying job at a sewing factory. Throughout this time, she bore three children and suffered the abuse of a husband who tried to prevent her from attending church or school.