As promised!

Yes, indeed, today is International Literacy Day! Makes my little literacy heart go pitter-patter to think that around the world today, people are gathering together and extolling the virtues of literacy! Ok, that sounds a bit sarcastic, but really, it's true. Literacy is something that's rather close to my heart - seeing people enjoy the freedom that comes from being able to write their name, to read the newspaper, to understand the directions on their packet of oral rehydration salts... it's rather exciting. And rather important in the world today. Since there are, according to UNESCO, about 800 million adults (that would be about 1 in 5 of the world's total adults) are illiterate. That's a heck of a lot of people who are not able to take information from the written word and make choices based on that information.

And even in countries like this where the literacy rate is estimated to be somewhere between 15 and 20%, so much information is conveyed via the written word. And obviously, the vast majority of people have no access to it, simply because they have missed the chance to go to school and learn a skill that most of us take completely for granted. Want to read more about literacy around the world? Here's a few of my favorite websites:
UNESCO's Education page
SIL's Literacy page
British Association for Literacy page
Multilingual Matters journals (you can download back issues for FREE!)

Oh, sorry, I got sucked into the free journal articles online on othat last website...

Anyways, there's lots of great stuff to look at online about literacy and the state of the world today. Take a look... and then go teach someone to read!

And now, as promised, as well, here are some photos from the celebration here today. Like I said, it was supposed to start at 8am. I got there about 10, and they were still setting up the sound system! Ah, life in Africa. We stayed until about 2:30, when it started to get really super hot and I just couldn't stand it anymore! But it was really neat to see the parades of all the literacy classes and schools in town:

Here are some of the school children walking down the main street behind the stadium.
This is the marching band that played while the classes marched through the football field in the stadium, waving their flags and banners.
Of course, no celebration would be complete without every participant (and there were at least 500 people there!) receiving a bottle of water, a can of soda and a little plate of biscuits, popcorn, dates and wrapped candy. I don't even want to think about the amount of money that is spent on water and soda for such occasions. Really, I just don't want to think about how many textbooks all that money could pay for... but at the same time, when I'm sitting in the sun for 4 and half hours, it sure is nice to have a Coke and a bottle of water in my hand...
Most of the day was spent listing to speeches. This is His Excellency, the Minister of Education, making a speech in which he at least mentioned the fact that all this literacy stuff should actually take place first in the language that the learners speak. In the previous 4 hours, people were making speeches, assuming that all this literacy stuff was happening in English. Meanwhile, whenever they made announcements or said anything really important, the speakers and master of ceremony would switch into the local dialect of Arabic to make sure that he was understood!

So I was glad that the Minister took this opportunity to put a little advocacy in there for the languages. That was the main reason I went today, was to make sure something, anything, was said about literacy in the mother tongue first! Anyways, hopefully by then, people were still listening...

Since I sat out in the sun for way too many hours today, I'm actually feeling quite tired tonight! Somehow, I got a bit of a sunburn from sitting in the shade all day. Silly me, forgot to put the sunscreen on before going to sit in the shade...