Reading – A Truly Powerful Impact

Since my youngest has gone back to school, I have started back into the working world after being a stay-at-home mom for over a decade. This transition was made possible by working through AmeriCorps as a reading tutor in local elementary schools. It has been an eye-opening experience in multiple ways. Probably the most impactful is to consider how these kiddos are at a major pivotal point for their futures. These few years of learning to read will pave the way for their livelihoods, confidence, ease of learning, and their futures in general. 

I work primarily with children who are just below grade level in their reading abilities. It brings to mind the experiences I had 20 years ago as a missionary in the Amazon. As a budding Portuguese speaker, I walked through the grocery store not able to read the labels or find what I was looking for or needed. In that context, I couldn’t read! There was a sense of feeling lost, a sense of powerlessness. I felt like so much of my autonomy was taken away. I was mildly incapable of taking care of myself effectively. Those first few weeks, I would wander the aisles looking at pictures, smelling the packaging, and hoping that what I purchased was what I actually wanted. For the things that mattered most, I did have a dictionary that I could whip out to translate, but that was because I could read those words… but what about the people in the world who’s brains can’t get by with a dictionary?!

During those years in Brazil, I did meet people who had no reading ability of any kind. Specifically, I remember an older man, Sergio. He and his wife were raising their two young grandchildren because their daughter left the children and never came back. He was stooped over with a shuffling gait, yet he would arise around 3 AM to go into the jungle and harvest fresh acai berries. He would then process the berries and sell the puree to the morning workers for breakfast. The funds from the morning sale would go directly to purchase what they needed for the next day… Quite literally living paycheck to paycheck. 

When I met their family, his wife, Auria, was so kind and humble, and apologized that all she had to offer us was ice cold water. She was very proud of their nice chest freezer (kept in the living room of their wooden shack), one of the few in their entire neighborhood. It was also part of their livelihood because if Sergio was ever hurt, she had some processed acai in the freezer to hold them over for a few days until he could get back to work. 

Harvesting fruit in the jungle was his only option because, you see, Sergio could not read. He knew the names of a few letters, but nothing beyond that. Auria was the one who did all the reading, paid the bills, kept the books, and read the Bible. When we left them some scriptures to read, Auria would read them to Sergio. I could see his dependence on her, and her love in offering that service to him. It was painfully beautiful. I could not imagine the years he passed, in a world developing all around him, and he, not even having the choice to keep up. 

Every single day, we walk through life not even realizing the absolute magic that we have in the skill of reading. We read our phones, the street signs, and the screen on the car. We enter the pages of our favorite books that transport us to individualized lands of enjoyment, learning and wonder. We read the grocery store labels, the medical information pages, the prices of our favorite yoga pants. We read the textbooks or articles that inform us of the world we live in, of the history we need to learn from, of the future we are heading toward. We read the text messages, the GPS system, and this article!  

But what if there was a massive ‘delete’ button and all of this kind of existence was transformed into nonsensical gobbledygook that our mind’s translation system could do absolutely nothing with? Can you imagine?! Our world would utterly turn upside down.

So when I go to work each day and sit down to help a child learn to read, I feel the weight of what I’m doing. I feel an urgency to help them feel the confidence of reading, the empowerment and openness of their futures. Because reading, such a simple thing, truly carries an often unappreciated, but massively powerful impact. 

Lead photo credit: Aaron Burden via Unsplash