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Tayari's Blog: Educate A Woman, Educate A Family

Posted by TayariJones on November 25, 2009 08:25 AM
Filed under Community Service

About three or four years ago, I gave a reading a presentation at Mercy Learning Center in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Here is a link to the report I posted back in 2005. And here is an excerpt:

I was invited to Mercy because my novel, The Untelling, is set at a literacy center like Mercy. The greatest honor any writer can receive is the appreciation of the people whose lives are depicted in her books. The appreciation of the people who sit on prestigious committees is what gets a person ahead in her career, but the people at Mercy Learning Center are the folks who keep me honest; they are the people who remind me what it as stake.

Imagine, if you will, a woman walking six miles to her ESL classes, pushing a stroller. She can’t read the street signs yet, she just moves from memory. She has never been away from her baby before, but she will entrust the child to the daycare at Mercy so that she can attend her ESL class for five hours a day, five days a week. Imagine another woman who speaks English as her first language but never learned to read it. She goes to Mercy to learn to read well enough to earn her G.E.D., but walks away in a year with a love of literature and the desire to write her own book.

I just got an end-of-year letter from Mercy Learning Center and they need donations to say afloat in these hard times. If you can, send them a little something. My birthday is Monday and if you want to give me something, give something to Mercy and tell me about it.