Literacy

Our work in Guyana has funded the construction and ongoing support of the Yupukari Public Library and classroom libraries.

The focus on libraries has been an attempt to support village development without specifying what that should look like. Our aim was to give support and scope to local choice, curiosity and creativity.

Villagers credit the Yupukari Public Library and its outreach activities with the consistent rise in the pass rate from Primary to Secondary school, from near zero when we started in 2005 to 86% in 2019.

The Caiman House guesthouse was built in 2007 to serve as a sustainable funding source for the Library — our first social enterprise.

Library staff includes a full-time librarian and several volunteers, with laptops, Internet connection, about 5000+ hand-picked English language books, as well as videos, puzzles, toys, maps and globes, art and classroom supplies, all aimed at developing stronger foundation skills for education.

During the pandemic, and thanks to generous support from the EMG Memorial Fund, the Library was able to provide 266 homeschooling kits for every child in the Yupukari schools, continually updating them via a pickup and delivery service of worksheets, art supplies and reading books at the Library’s outdoor reading room/park, and to inaugurate our first “branch library,” in Fly Hill Village.

Beyond Yupukari, our dream is to support other Rupununi communities with similar resources. Wabbani.com, our craft venture, was created to increase the funding available for libraries and other avenues Rupununians may choose to steer their own self-development.

Reading Rodeo

In 2005 we saw that the home/school connection was undeveloped. Teachers were not collaborating. Reading was not generally regarded as a source of fun. Even after we built the public library, villager contact with our resources remained uneven. Reading Rodeo was an all-day event held on December 6, 2006 with the goal of involving the whole village in enjoyable reading activities, presented by the whole Yupukari teaching staff working together as a team. Every teacher and both Yupukari Public Library librarians hosted a different activity in a different village building, so that villagers could move from one to the next, getting their "passport" stamped along the way. 

Now Reading Rodeo is an annual event.

First Language Literacy

Thus far, "literacy" has meant English language literacy, since English is the official language of Guyana, and is the language of instruction. Macushi, the language of the indigenous majority in the Rupununi (about 9000 people), has been a written language for only a generation. A significant obstacle for Yupukari schoolchildren is that when they learn to read, they must learn how to read in a second language, English. A curriculum that includes instruction in Macushi as a written language prior to or alongside English is needed in the earliest grades. One of the goals of the public library is to serve as a repository of local knowledge across the spectrum of subject areas, and as a means of gathering, preserving and disseminating the knowledge productions of local inhabitants.