Languages of Hope
The ITHUBA Project
One day, a fifth-grade teacher in Soweto, South Africa gave a lesson about the dangers of HIV/AIDS. One of her students, a young girl who had recently lost both parents to this merciless disease, listened intently. Then the girl wrote a note to the teacher about her family—how she had become the sole caretaker of two younger sisters and how they struggled for food. She slipped the note into the classroom message box, but did not sign her name. Instead, she signed the note with the number 1.
The teacher was sad to read about her student’s struggle. So, she picked up a pen and wrote her reply. It began, “Dear 1 ....”
Dear 1 is not only a true story, it’s one of more than a hundred story-based supplemental reading books created through a unique international literacy partnership based at UTSA. The project is called Ithuba, an acronym for “Innovative Texts in Home Languages Uniquely Based in Africa.” The word ithuba also means opportunity in isiZulu, one of South Africa’s nine indigenous or home languages.
Directed by UTSA education associate professor Misty Sailors, the Ithuba Writing Project is part of the Textbooks and Learning Materials component of the $600 million Africa Education Initiative initiated by President George W. Bush to increase access to education in more than 40 sub-Saharan African nations.
Books of all kinds are rare in South Africa’s schools, Sailors says. On one of her first trips to that country, she witnessed a ritual that dramatized both the value and the vulnerability of this scarce resource. A young boy was carrying a stack of books. As he was walking, “there were about 10 kids around him, who kind of looked like bodyguards,” says Sailors. When she asked what the children were doing, she was told that those were the only books the school owned, and that they had to be locked up at night or they likely would be stolen and burned for cooking fires.
In a part of the world where too many resources are scarce—food, medicine, money—Sailors was overwhelmed that schoolchildren and teachers went to such lengths to protect books, a symbol of opportunity. When the request for proposals to participate in the textbook component of the Africa Education Initiative came through UTSA’s Office of Sponsored Programs in 2004, Sailors jumped at the chance to get back to South Africa and put her experience to work.
To read the full story, go to http://www.utsa.edu/sombrilla/feat1.html.