Such a literacy movement could not exist without flexibility and more than a nod to reality. Many women with families cannot leave for classes five days a week. Consequently, literacy classes are offered both in the centers and in the homes of the learners. Predictably not all of the men in the households (though the majority of families are without men) are in favour of these programs, and organize often find themselves in the position of having to raise the consciousness of men in the community in order to do productive literacy work.

This is less of a contradiction in Nicaragua than it is in North America. Becoming literate is perceived as just part of a larger process of education and empowerment If the reading material supplied by the state appears at first to focus as much on revolutionary history and radical vocabulary as it does on the letters of the alphabet, this is because here literacy is, by definition, politicization. Literacy teaches people who causes the war, who carries the guns. Literacy reminds people of what their struggle has been and where their strength could take them. The Nicaraguans know what we pretend not to; that education is always ideologically based. So for women, empowerment comes not only from knowing how to read and write, but from reading about and discussing their own situations as women. Dialogue is a major part of each lesson and is crucial to the process.

The changes are slow in a post-revolutionary country halted by the American economic blockade and the war with the Contras. Nicaragua is frustrated in its efforts to progress in education and health care by lack or resources. It's too easy to glance at literacy in the small Latin American country and see only the surface details of a large number of small community based literacy programs. But the Crusade itself and the strength of the movement nine years after the Revolution are almost too radical to believe. Can it be true that 80-90% of adults in Nicaragua are participating in the programs? Can we quite grasp the notion that literacy is a priority and a national mandate of the Sandinista government? In a country that has fought bloody wars and lost many children in the quest for autonomy, literacy is a tool being offered to the people to achieve this end.

For women in Nicaragua, ‘alfabetization’ means change. Mothers express the wish that their daughters have opportunities that weren't available to them, that they not find, themselves poor and illiterate and mothers themselves before they finish their schooling. But these mothers themselves see a new future in their own lives, and access to schooling is a concrete manifestation of their own hopes and dreams.

References

Sheryl Hieshon, And Also Teach Them to Read. Wesport, CT: Lawrence Hill &Co., 1983.

Jo Lampert teaches English at Seneca College in Toronto. She is one of 16 people who went to Nicaragua this past summer with the Canadian Light Brigade.