It’s hard to keep eager mums from starting a literacy center!
Part of my schedule during my recent Sabah (East Malaysia) trip was to plan the start-up of more literacy centers. Our team had already seen the success of the first two literacy centers and were excited with the prospect of opening 5 more in the next 6 months.
So after the excitement and joy of seeing over 400 kids learning their ABC’s and 123’s in the first 2 villages, I went with a smaller team to survey 3 more potential villages. When we reached the vicinity of the first potential village at the outskirts of the town, we parked our van and walked along a long narrow shaky “path” of planks over swampy ground towards a little shack. We were planning to meet the teacher, Ms K, whom we had trained last December.
However, instead of meeting Ms K, we were greeted with the happy voices of about 40 children shouting “Good morning teachers!” As I peeked into the dark house, I saw Ms K teaching the kids using the plywood wall of her tiny kitchen/dining area as her blackboard. On this plywood wall was scrawled the alphabets. The kids were eagerly taking their turn identifying the alphabets.
“Hey, Ms K, weren’t you supposed to wait for us to come and discuss the setting up of a literacy center in your village?”
Well, the reply was “The mums couldn’t wait!”
Ms K was one of the mums that we had identified as potential teachers at our previous recruitment exercise late last year. Over 20 such mums were selected. They had to have a passion to teach kids and have some high-school education (preferably a high-school diploma). A master-teacher of phonics was tasked to teach them. The course lasted one week.
I left our “district” supervisor, Ms L (herself once an eager village mum) to discuss the future development plans with Ms K for the expansion of this literacy center to accommodate many more kids.
I was just too happy watching and listening to the kids enjoying their first taste of school to bother with the details of administration!