Yoam’s Story: Illiteracy is like a life sentence
Yoam’s Story: Illiteracy is like a life sentence
44-year old mother-of-two Ken Yoam is one of ISF’s community library users and a recent beneficiary of our Adult Literacy Course. Yoam moved from the countryside to Cambodia’s capital city Phnom Penh 22 years ago to work as a garment factory worker. Life for Yoam and her family in Phnom Penh has not been easy, and like many in the urban poor settlement where she resides, she lives under the poverty line, struggling to provide enough for her family.
In Cambodia, the literacy rate (those over the age of 15 who can read and write) stands at approximately 77% with women having a lower average than men[1]. A lack of literacy skills as an adult puts individuals at a severe disadvantage and often keeps them trapped in a cycle of poverty. Without reading skills, women like Yoam can’t read or sign a contract or form, get a loan, read a newspaper, a medical prescription or her own mail, look up a phone number, use a computer or even help her children with their homework.
Many of our students in ISF are raised in households where parents are either low-skilled or illiterate, or both. While we know that these children are receiving a quality education in our classrooms, we also want to address the households they are coming from and foster an appreciation of learning at home as well as offer development projects that support entire communities. In this way our Education Centres don’t exist in a vacuum but serve to lift up the wider community to offer ways out of extreme poverty and exclusion caused by poverty.
Under our Education Programme, we offer our students’ families monthly food parcels and access to vocational training and courses. We have also established a number of community libraries in poor urban settlements around Stung Meanchey and Chbar Ampov which have been well received by community members. The libraries not only offer children a safe space to learn and play but also provide books to those that simply could not afford to buy a book otherwise.
Growing up, Yoam only received three years of education which failed to teach her literacy skills. Like many of the beneficiaries of our Adult Literacy Course, Yoam compares illiteracy to a life sentence of dependency and where fear and anxiety become part of daily life and social situations. “I always had to ask my neighbours for help – I couldn’t read my own mail” she says. “I felt I couldn’t teach my kids anything, I have no knowledge – you need an education to be able to share knowledge and express your thoughts” she adds.
Today, after successfully completing ISF’s course, Yoam can read and write in Khmer as well read and write numbers. She works from home now, sewing school uniforms for local NGOs and spending any free time she has, practicing her newfound literacy skills. She joined a small group in her community – made up of friends and neighbours from the course – and together they are borrowing books from the library and discussing them as well as doing read aloud sessions. Yoam is also learning from her youngest child’s school books and is encouraging him to study and focus on doing well in school. Yoam wants her son to have a better and easier life than her and dreams of him becoming a doctor. No matter what job he chooses, she believes that his education will stand to him and offer him a bright future.
