A short drive past Neo’s Pub on the dusty roads of Soshanguve is where Mavis Monyai and her six-year-old daughter, Eugenia, live. Their shack is small and houses a bed, TV, small table and an old rickety bench.
Inside their home the Monyais, Francina Laka and her daughter, Amogelang, wait for their local “reading champion”, Maria Matli, so that the class can begin. All four sit on the bed ready to learn.
Matli is part of Run Home to Read (RHR), a long-running project of the adult education NGO, Project Literacy. When she arrives she encourages the girls to sing and clap as they recite rhymes about bees, frogs and the colours of the robot.
Matli asks the children to take a book from the reading pack. They choose Thusa!, a popular reader. The book is about a grandmother’s house that is burning down while she screams for help.
There are few words and the emphasis is on the illustrations. “It encourages creativity,” Matli says.
Later Eugenia and Amogelang sit together and fill in pictures in a colouring-in book, perfectly within the lines. Eugenia, with Matli’s help, traces around her hand with a brown crayon.
Matli says the emphasis is on support, because parents are the most influential teachers for their children. Together the girls count to 10 as their mothers count along.
Matli was introduced to the RHR project as a parent. “It helped my child a lot,” she says. “It gave him a chance to be creative and I really wanted to be involved.”
It was then that Matli was trained by Project Literacy as a reading champion — a tutor — and began to recruit new families into the programme. “I like being a reading champion,” Matli says. “I feel I am helping my community and people really appreciate what I am doing.”
RHR serves 25 communities in rural Limpopo and five communities in the more recent Soshanguve branch. Project Literacy was started in 1973 and its chief focus is adult basic education and training. But RHR is innovative in bringing children and adults into the same project. On the one hand, it aims to get children “school ready” before they start primary education. Families are selected to take part in a three-month course, which helps to improve the child’s pre-literacy skills. Thereafter, families are taught how to make full use of their local libraries to continue learning.
RHR also upgrades the skills of adults. When reading champions are recruited, they attend workshops where they are acquainted with the RHR project. “They work through the manual and learn how to work in the community, to work with caregivers and with different children,” says Winnie Kganyago, a Project Literacy fieldworker.
At quarterly meetings the reading champions discuss their experiences with the RHR families. “They discuss the differences between reading to a two-year-old and a four-year-old. They also talk about how to help illiterate caregivers read to their children,” Kganyago says. Workshops throughout the year enable the reading champions to extend their skills.
Once qualified, the recruits are paid a small stipend for 20 hours of work a week. Each reading champion selects 10 families in their own community who could most benefit from the three-month course.
After acquiring the skills and experience, those working in Soshanguve will often move on to secure higher-level jobs.
“Adult education has to solve life problems for adult learners right now,” says Pat Dean, the director of the adult education NGO, Operation Upgrade, based in KwaZulu-Natal.
“In this country we tend to think of Abet [adult basic education and training] as a replacement for schooling,” she says.
But international thinking on adult education stresses solutions to immediate problems, often poverty related, that adults with little or no formal schooling face daily.
“Adult needs are not specifically learning how to read and write — that always comes second,” Dean says. Far more important than being literate is “being able to make a living, to be a good parent and to function as part of a community”.
After the three-month programme, RHR, in partnership with local libraries, arranges orientation in library practice and families are encouraged to borrow books.
If the libraries are far away, reading champions often go on behalf of families and Project Literacy supplies the taxi fare.
Social scientist Yvonne Eskell-Klagsbrun, Project Literacy’s fundraising and communications manager, says RHR’s implementation differs depending on location. “It’s the same model,” she says, “but the dynamics are different and expectations differ.”
Rural Limpopo is slower paced and often caregivers are grandparents or unemployed. Reading champions will work in the area for long periods of time, if not indefinitely.
But the project delivers results wherever it has been implemented. ‘Principals write to us and tell us the difference they see in the children,” Eskell-Klagsbrun says.
Small differences make RHR children stand apart from their classmates: “They can read their own names in their jerseys because they have been taught to recognise them.”
In common with all NGOs in adult education, funding is a constant challenge. “The credit crunch has unfortunately adversely affected donations made to our organisation and over the past two years, in particular, we have found it increasingly difficult to secure funding,” Eskell-Klagsbrun says.
“Our current funding sources have in many instances cut their funding to us and in some instances have been unable to support us at all because of the economic climate. This has made it difficult for us to plan for the future of our projects and give our volunteers and field staff the assurance that their jobs are stable.”