"And the other thing you can do, although this is more political by nature, is give them some tools to use as they take charge of their own life. That is what really got me involved in literacy - searching for a way to assist some of my neighbours with a realistic tool they could use as they worked toward having full charge of their own destiny."

I thought of all the different settings I had seen where people come to learn to read -libraries, church basements, a kitchen and classrooms - but I realized as Lorna spoke that a "storm haven" doesn't necessarily mean a physical space.

"Every tutor who ever works with a literacy student," Lema continued, "has to be able to provide a storm haven. If they don't provide the student with that positive reinforcement, that loving care that says to the student that no matter how bloody scared they are or how defensive they are or how convinced they are that they can't learn, it won't work. The tutor has to, one way or another, convince the student that, 'When you're with me, you're OK and you can learn'."

Initially all the tutors in the literacy program were volunteers. Lorna fought hard for the volunteers to become paid tutors. "Most literacy volunteers, especially in urban programs, are from upper middle class families. When you think about it," Lorna explained, "volunteerism is the privilege of the middle class. Poor people can't volunteer. They're too desperately busy seeking out a sufficient living to meet their daily needs. We realized that if we wanted people from the same community as the students to act as tutors we would have to find a way to reimburse them for their expenses at least."

"Now I laugh and tell people that our paid tutors are 'subsidized volunteers' because they really don't get paid very much for all that they do. To me, a tutor gets paid $8.00 an hour, does $80.00 an hour worth of work and gets $800.00 an hour worth of satisfaction for their work!"

In Ft. Vermilion, as in High Level and LaCrete, most of the tutors work in a classroom setting with small groups of students. Lorna found that with the group approach the students often created the necessary "sense of safety" for their learning faster than the tutors themselves could.

When I asked Lorna if she felt that the classroom setting is the best way to work with literacy students she said, "I would guess that 80% of literacy students would benefit most from a classroom setting. Some will still need the one to one learning but for most, learning really begins to happen when the students own the program, when they know that there's an equality between the tutors and the students and where the students know that they are in charge. In that kind of environment the students really help each other. It's amazing to watch them. You still have to have the tutors to guide them through what they're learning but in the end, the work that's done in the classroom, has to be done by the students themselves."

We talked more about the pros and cons of in-home tutoring, verses the classroom. "The difficulty with in-home, one-ta-one tutoring," Lorna said, "is that it takes so long to get the job done. Just as an example, we had a student who came into the classroom recently who was 'school phobic'. She dropped out of school at age 14, was really defensive and very upset and angry. On the second day of class she went storming our saying, 'What a stupid, boring day this has been.'