Though everyone might agree that literacy is a good thing in theory, Nicaragua still has its share of machismo. Women who become educated are a threat to domestic and traditional life, especially if they appear to be learning more quickly than their husbands or if the school takes them from their chores and families. Without question, though, the women who participated found their worlds opening up. Not only could they now do practical things like read the newspapers and the labels on medicine for their children (for instance, the national campaign to promote breast feeding and to inform on what to do in extreme cases of infant diarrhea required a certain level of literacy), but they began to gain knowledge of their own world's transformation. students learn words necessary in their own lives, they read about their own revolutionary history and are encouraged to take a look at their own situations and conditions and actively make change. Through the literacy campaign as both learners and brigadistas, women became empowered and were perceived nationally as essential to the post-Somoza liberation of the State.

Since the Crusade in 1980, the news has been less optimistic. The American supported Contras have consistently made schools and teachers a target for terrorist action. A trip to the Literacy Museum in Managua makes this devastating apparent. The gallery of heroes and martyrs here displays rows and rows of photographs of young brigadistas who have lost their lives while teaching. These are pictures of young smiling women who believed strongly enough that education would make a difference that they put their own lives on hold to live in the difficult conditions of the remotest regions of the country. Their clothes and few belongings are displayed under glass, and we are given details of their death: shot while walking along a road in Muy Muy, killed in an ambush in Zelaya on the Atlantic Coast. These deaths have nothing to do with education, nothing to do with Nicaragua's attempt to attain autonomy, but they have an obvious effect on both.

These tragedies are the events that mobilize women and that have made their response powerful. An example of their response is the movement Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs. In Esteli, a town near the Honduran-Nicaraguan border, the movement has a building from which women disseminate information about the atrocities the war has inflicted on them. This movement has united women who have lost their children to death, who have seen their children raped and tortured, or whose children have been kidnapped by the Contras.

Also present in the country is AMNLAE, the strong and vocal women's organization. They originally saw their objective as allowing women an active role in overthrowing Somoza. in the years leading up to the Revolution, AMNLAE organized safe houses, sent women to carry messages through the war zones, and coordinated hunger strikes, amongst other things. Now they are beginning to deal with issues more closely related to women's rights. Women are still second class citizens and have a higher illiteracy rate than men. There are just starting to be laws created that demand responsibility on the part of fathers who have abandoned their children. Recently an amendment has been passed to allow unilateral divorce, and only in the last year have women who are family heads been allowed to buy a home. The issue of equal salary for equal work is just being raised, AMNLAE sees education as a key part of their work.

By some estimates the illiteracy rate in Nicaragua is now up to 25% again. The economic and military realities of a country at war makes it difficult for Nicaragua to keep up the momentum of the literacy campaign. Most children are still not getting past Grade Six (their efforts are often needed in the fields) and this is seen as a major problem in the battle against illiteracy. But teachers are receiving better training now, and the Ministry of Education is optimistic that the situation will improve. The dream is that in three years Nicaragua will have reached total literacy. The Ministry of Education gives a Grade Four national literacy level as its goal, suggesting that when people have securely reached this level they are unlikely to forget what they have learned if classes must be interrupted.

It is reasonable to suggest that women have been strongly affected by the Nicaraguan literacy movement. Because many men work long shifts, or are serving their time in the Military, it is often women who participate most regularly in literacy programs. In Managua, where each barrio has a CDS (Comite Defensa Sandinista), which approves and organizes a neighborhood literacy program, often as many as 80% of the participants are women. Most of the volunteer popular teachers are women too (though, predictably, many of the paid administrators are men). So, in essence, these programs model a situation of women helping oilier women.

The commitment asked of these learners is remarkable to a North American eye. Groups of nine to ten meet as often as five days a week, two hours a day, to work on fairly formal lessons, prepared by the Ministry of Education. Students do exercises and practice writing. Often they attend these classes in less than ideal conditions. In a building in the very poor barrio of Ciudad Sandino, torrents of rain pour through the doors and windows. Most schools don't have enough chairs, and the blackboards haven't been in useful condition for years. Books are supplied to every program, but there are certainly no extras. Something is bringing people out to these programs, some personal satisfaction or knowledge that studying brings them closer to power for themselves and for the whole community. This notion is unfamiliar to us, but it seems natural to a people whose struggle has been a collective one.