Since the beginning of 2011, we’ve started another 5 new literacy centers in Sabah.
Considering that we took 2 years to start our first 7 centers, starting 5 centers in 2 months is quite an acceleration!
This prompted us to dream of having 100 centers in the northern part of Sabah as a very do-able dream. When our teachers (mostly mums in the respective villages) gathered for their regular Friday meeting last week, we threw this challenge to them and they embraced it with hearty agreement.
The major reason why we have managed to speed up our expansion is because communities are now embracing Goducate Literacy Centers as THEIR projects, rather than look at them as Goducate’s.
Community leaders and parents who have seen our centers have “spontaneously” started centers in their kampongs by offering their living-rooms as classrooms or even building school-houses. They are the ones pushing us to train them to teach their own children.
In the past, we had to think of which village to start our next project, we had to talk to the community, we had to look for suitable people in that village to train, we sometimes had to convince the men to build class-rooms, etc. This took time and resources and slowed the process.
In these photos we see center #11, started by Ali. Ali built the school house on his own, The only thing that Goducate provided was the black-board. His daughter and a teenage neighbor have been trained to be the first teachers there. A supervisor from our first school (who was in the first batch of teachers we trained) travels there each afternoon to supervise the work. The school has functioned for 2 weeks and has 60 students.
There are hundreds of such villages with no schools for these undocumented aliens.
Therefore, the dream of a 100 Goducate Literacy Centers must be a reality!