"I did feel though that I had done a good job as a literacy coordinator in encouraging students to believe in themselves. I really felt that they needed to believe that they could learn before any learning would happen."

"When I went back to school, I discovered that was really true for me, too. I started to think that maybe the work I had done as a literacy coordinator was more important and useful than I had thought. I often think about the students I worked with when I'm at school. They taught me so much. I figured, 'If they could do it, I could do it, too'."

"You're late!" MARSHA SCRIBNER said with a smile. "What happened? Did you get stuck behind a swather?" She had guessed right. It was a lovely fall day and living in a rural farming community, she knew the fields and roads on the way to Wainwright would be full of harvest activity.

Marsha is a monitor with the Lakeland College LEARN Program in Wainwright. She was in particularly high spirits the morning I came to visit as this was the day her book about Camp Wainwright was due to arrive from the printers. (Wainwright is the home of the second largest military training camp in Western Canada. Marsha had been commissioned to write the history of Camp Wainwright in celebration of the Camp's 50th anniversary.) I knew we wouldn't accomplish much in an interview right away, so we got in the car and drove out to the Camp to see if we could find a copy of Marsha's book.

After passing through the security gates, stopping at the Camp Headquarters and the office of the Camp Commander, we finally found what we were looking for. We pulled up by the back door of the Recreation Hall and found a young fellow leaning against the wall, looking through a beautifully leather bound copy of Fiftieth Anniversary - Camp Wainwright. Marsha was thrilled. "Writing this book was my own special World Literacy Year project," she told me, "and now it's really finished." Marsha put the book in her lap, sneaking a peak at it every few minutes as we drove back to town, mission accomplished.

All through the morning I was struck by how many people Marsha knew, at the College and the Camp and as we walked down the main street of town. Many of the people we stopped and talked to were connected with the LEARN Program in one way or another. Marsha was relaxed and warm with everyone and they with her.

Over lunch I commented to Marsha about how comfortable she seemed to be with the people in her program. "I try really hard not to be intimidating," she responded. "Most of the time I feel like 'one of the guys'. I'm one of the tutors because I am a tutor and I feel like one of the students because I'm learning all the time with this job."

Marsha admitted that she prefers to stick close to home, much more comfortable with her own program and her own community than with big cities and the larger provincial literacy organizations. Driving into the city of Edmonton to attend the meeting was a truly frightening experience for Marsha, one which she later wrote about:

"I felt extremely inadequate, uninformed, unacceptable and disoriented. The village idiot makes her way to the big city, frightened, near to tears, and positive of only one thing...the fact she was sure to make a fool of herself. It may be at the reservation desk because of no credit card and very little cash or at the banquet because of her lack of knowledge about protocol and pastries, or the inevitable 'trip over a string on the carpet' trick that seemed her 'downfall' in situations like this."