Lao Youth Learn to Read and Write for the First Time!
Now We Can Read and Write! For this blog post, we offer an account from our partner, World Concern, in Laos. This post was written by Anne Thomas, director of the Lao Literacy Project. 2009 Imagine you are Laotian. Everyone in your village is busy from dawn to dusk, farming the steep mountain slopes. Women and girls twirl cotton spindles as they hike to distant fields, making homespun cotton thread as they go. There are no books in your house, and no books in your village. Even if there were, no one could read them. Only a handful of men in your village can write their own names. 2010 The Lao Literacy Project comes to your village. The village chief signs people up for th e new evening classes. Teenage girls are reluctant at first, afraid it will be too difficult. But the new book teaches literacy step by step, with one new word and one picture per lesson. Slowly, people in your village learn to read. 2011 Students gather to show their skills, their faces glowing with excitement: “We c...