June 27, 2005

I usually try not to write anything too specific about my job, but because my work excites me today I will make an exception. This summer I’m doing marketing and public relations for Laubach Literacy Ontario (LLO), a non-profit, charitable organization dedicated to increasing literacy levels in the province.

There’s certainly a need for LLO — 42% of Canadian adults need help with their reading and writing and LLO is there to provide individualized instructions. The organization is kept alive by wonderful volunteers who do a lot of incredible things, like going into prisons to assist inmates. For a small and underfunded organization, LLO accomplishes a lot.

When I started working for the LLO this June the literacy statistics surprised me — I’ve been immersed in a postsecondary environment for too long and I forgot that there’s an entire world of suffering out there. It took a trip to Windsor and a literacy conference to change all that.

I arrived in Windsor on a cloudy Friday afternoon; my job was to take pictures of LLO’s literacy conference. I packed two cameras, three pairs of underwear, and a bagful of preconceptions about literacy students. Before Windsor I haven’t met any adults who couldn’t read, and even though I knew the statistics I assumed that illiterate people were mostly lazy, stupid, or crazy.

All of that changed in a moment. I was outside eating lunch by myself when one of the literacy students came outside for a smoke and we started to talk. She told me about her struggles to read and I was impressed by her intelligence, humanity, and perseverance. It’s not easy going through life without making sense of words, and it’s even harder to suddenly decide to start reading. She helped me realize that it’s not people who are stupid, but the system which tries to teach everyone in the same way even though it doesn’t work.

The students and volunteers I met during the conference were funny and amazing. I spent the entire weekend zooming from one seminar to another on my scooter and taking a lot of intense pictures. I was too busy to even stop by a strip club. Gary, who until two years ago couldn’t read, gave me a new nickname — Tudor the Scooter.

And after all that, my work feels incredibly satisfying — in a small way I’m helping to sustain a wonderful thing; I’m also creating glossy brochures, powerpoint presentations, and mastering the might of mail merge. Literacy is awesome!

Update: I uploaded some of the photos taken at the conference to my online portfolio.