Reading between the lines

The following is a recent article written about the adult literacy class I work with in Liberia:

As the rain pours down outside, Grace B. Solo carefully writes the letter ‘s’ between painted white lines on a blackboard. The students in her adult literacy class practice drawing the shape in the air, raising their voices above loud rumbles of thunder to speak out the letter’s sound.

Grace is a participant in the Mercy Ships Adult Basic Education (ABE) program that provides training for those teaching adults to read and write. UNESCO estimates that only 38.3% Liberians aged over 15 are literate, a fact Grace believes contributed significantly to the country’s recent conflict.

“It is because of illiteracy that people continue to plunge into war,” she explains. “When you are not educated, your way of thinking is very narrow. An uneducated person is very easily fooled into doing the wrong thing.”

The ABE program supports nine local literacy facilitators selected and sent by three church organizations in Monrovia. During eleven days of workshops, ABE staff provides training in participatory learning methods using a unique curriculum combining ActionAid’s REFLECT method with a phonetic literary approach. ABE staff then model the new teaching techniques in three classes and support the literacy facilitators as they begin to put their training into practice.

“The churches have a vision to train literacy facilitators and send them upcountry to rural areas in Liberia,” said Veronique Biville, ABE coordinator. “They plan to translate the church liturgy and song books into local languages and teach people to read and write at the same time. The program is open to the whole community and we have found that people in Liberia are very eager to learn.”

In advancing the skills of adult literacy teachers, ABE not only helps to improve opportunities for individuals, but also contributes to a growing stability in Liberia. The country is preparing for elections in October, which will bring a new president to power at a crucial time in the nation’s recovery from years of war.

“There are a lot of presidential candidates – everybody wants to be president,” says Grace. “But if I’m not educated, I won’t know whether this man is the right man to be a president. But if I am educated, I will be able to know whether he is educated and knows politics to be able to rule me. So what Mercy Ships is doing is very important.”


To view more photos on the training of literacy teachers and of the literacy class click here.