For me, one of the most exciting events of our stay in Zanzibar has been the visit on Saturday to a little school in the countryside, where a colleague of mine will be running a family literacy project, funded by his successful grant proposal to the International Reading Association.
The project is designed to give kids a solid start toward lifelong literacy by encouraging them and their families to read for fun. That’s challenge enough in the United States, where there are plenty of books and most adults can read well. Here, where there are so few books and where fewer parents can read, it’s a daunting task, indeed.
But the project is terrific. It will provide books to kids and it will help teachers and parents to develop low- and no-cost learning opportunities (things like making books out of cardboard and writing down stories—the kinds of things my kids have been playing with since we’ve been in Zanzibar). And low-cost is definitely important; the kids who showed up to school for the information meeting (on a Saturday, no less) were interested and excited, but neither they nor the school had writing utensils for them to fill out paperwork. So we scraped together pens from purses and bags and managed to get the job done.
I was pleasantly surprised pleased to see my tax dollars at work there, as well. Although the school was by no means luxurious, the well-tended teaching aids in the resource room at the school were funded by USAID (notice the beautiful hand-made supply checkout list on the blackboard behind the USAID-stamped chair).
I had a fantastic time—not least of which because I was able to talk and listen successfully in Kiswahili for almost 5 hours. I’m so excited about participating in this project, in whatever way I can, and I hope to write more soon about my work there and about my own developing research on adult basic literacy.
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