From “In My Nicaraguan High School: Giving Excluded Women and Men a Second Chance,” Radical Teacher (2017):
Rosa Elena, solemn, laconic, and impressively earnest, wanted me to translate the [literacy] proposal into English and look for funding in the States. I had never written a proposal for anything but a crossover nonfiction book of my own, . . . I didn’t have the slightest idea whether there were philanthropic resources in the States for Third-World basic education for adult women. But their projected program made sense to me, as the daughter of a first-grade teacher and a former college teacher myself who was beginning to know something about the conditions of poor women’s lives in the barrios and in the campo, as well as the slightly more substantial levels of the teachers in town. The project was based, of course, on the world-famous literacy program of the Cubans after their revolution in 1959. This was adopted by the Sandinista government immediately after the triumph of their revolution in 1979. The Sandinista program, which sent young people from the cities into the countryside, was also successful in some ways, but it lasted only six months, which is not actually long enough for literacy to take hold. In any case, that renowned initiative had taken place decades before, and it had missed many people, especially rural women. Rosa Elena’s project had serious outreach, a feminist curriculum, teacher-training, and monitoring.
Read More“The Contagion of Euphoria” (2009)
In 1989, with the Contra war still being fought, I went to Nicaragua, to a small, impoverished town on the Pacific coast. There I started on a long road, which leads from capitalist alienation and bourgeois appropriation through the various forms of “tourism” to the discovery of the collective and wholehearted identification with vulnerable others. I became a social activist. The contrast between my two states, geopolitical and psychic–my formerly passive self-absorbed North American state of mind and my new Nicaraguan-grown selfhood–could not have been more extreme than it felt then. My husband and I went to San Juan del Sur for three months and it changed our lives. It was amazing that this could happen to me when it did. . .
Read More“Florcita La Suerte” (2000)
The [first-year literacy] workbook appeals to women’s knowledge of their real lives: a story about marital rape, a cartoon showing how “men work from sun to sun, but women’s work is never done,” and syllable lessons that feature “pe-ne” (penis) as well as “pe-na” (pain). Paulo Freire for Women. The vanguard theory behind literacy–endorsed by United Nations conferences on development in Cairo, Stockholm, Vienna, and Beijing–is that if you empower women you go a long way to solving many other problems, all interrelated: spousal abuse, unwanted babies or abortion, child abuse, malnutrition, preventable illnesses, illiteracy in the next generation. I translated this remarkable proposal, hustled funding; won enough for the first year, and then for the second, and started questing for the indispensable third. It takes three years for a woman to earn the government certificate, three years to get familiar enough with reading not to lose the learning afterward.
Down there, they found 230 women who wanted to read, selected thirty-three of the best educated health workers to receive training in how to teach reading to adults, bought the blackboards. The program began in July 1998: the learners sat down with the feminist workbooks in their laps, looked up eagerly and anxiously at the teacher, and started the journey that begins with A.
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