“Excuse me, I forgot my glasses, could you tell me what that sign says?” This was one of the ruses commonly used by Juan Gómez, who was too embarrassed to admit that at the age of 77, he had never learned to read or write.

Forced to earn a living from a very young age working long, hard hours in the port of Montevideo, Juan never had time to spare for getting an education. Over the years, he developed a whole repertoire of ways to hide his illiteracy, going so far as to bandage his hands when he knew he would need to write his signature. But after a four-month literacy course targeted specifically at people like him, Juan’s guilty secret is a thing of the past.

Now a retired “old man,” Juan was finally persuaded by his wife to embark on “the adventure of learning to read and write,” as he described it in an interview with IPS. Today he speaks with pride about his victory over the shame and fear provoked by a lifetime of illiteracy.

Juan is one of 5,000 Uruguayan adults who learned to read and write between 2007 and 2009 thanks to a programme called “En el País de Varela: Yo, Sí Puedo” (In the Land of Varela: Yes, I Can), a local adaptation of a Cuban literacy programme that has been successfully implemented in different countries around the globe.

The Uruguayan programme’s name was chosen by the Ministry of Social Development (MIDES) as a tribute to José Pedro Varela, considered the guiding force behind the reform of Uruguayan public education in the late 19th century, which included, among other measures, mandatory school enrolment for all boys and girls.

“In four months I discovered a whole new world,” he said, adding, “I feel really proud” – a statement he repeats numerous times throughout the interview, often with a catch in his voice.

“This was like a window being opened up to me,” Juan declared to his teacher in January, when he and his classmates graduated from the four-month course. In addition to imparting basic reading, writing and arithmetic skills, the course is aimed at broadening the general knowledge and cultural awareness of its participants.

“It’s worth the effort,” “now I want to start going to [formal] school,” “I want to continue studying because I’ve realised how important it is”: these were some of the most frequent comments made by other programme participants interviewed by IPS, all of them with their own unique life stories.

After graduating from the course, they are all now able to read and write short passages, but they have gained something even more valuable: a significant boost to their self-esteem.

A problem of surprising proportions

Over the course of four months, course participants attend four classes a week, each one lasting an hour and a half. In addition to the traditional tools of a blackboard, text books, notebooks and pencils, learning is also facilitated by the audiovisual support of 65 “teleclasses”.

Each class has a maximum of 15 students, in order to ensure personalised attention and speed up the learning process, Yamandú Ferraz, the director of the programme, told IPS. The results have been encouraging, with 81 percent of participants successfully passing the course.

The students are also provided with a small personal “library” funded with the support of a number of state-owned companies and banks and a local publishing house, which collaborated with the printing of this collection of books by Latin American authors.

MIDES, the ministry responsible for the programme, was created through a law passed less than a month after Uruguay’s first leftist government took office in March 2005, led by President Tabaré Vázquez of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front) coalition. The new ministry’s flagship initiative was the National Plan to Address the Social Emergency (PANES).

Literacy training was not initially included among the plan’s objectives. However, after a detailed study of the nearly 90,000 households that had signed up for financial assistance through PANES, the authorities discovered that a significant number of poor Uruguayans over 15 years of age were unable to read or write, or could only do so with extreme difficulty, commented Ferraz.

Official studies revealed that in 2006, 2.4 percent of adult Uruguayans still could not read or write – a surprising figure, given the fact that Uruguay had historically been highly advanced in this regard, thanks to the educational reforms spearheaded by Varela, and had the lowest rate of illiteracy in all of Latin America by the mid-20th century, a mere 10 percent. The goal now is to declare the country an illiteracy-free zone.

Learning with TV, radio, pencil and paper

When the MIDES authorities first set out to achieve this goal, they discovered that barely four or five schools throughout the entire country offered classes specifically for adults.

Ferraz and a team of teachers, along with Social Development Minister Marina Arismendi herself, who is an adult education specialist, began to seek out teaching methods that showed tangible results, but would not require a large financial investment.

Their search led them to the Yo, Sí Puedo (Yes I Can) programme developed by the Latin American and Caribbean Pedagogical Institute (IPLAC), which operates under the auspices of the Ministry of Education of Cuba.

The programme has been used to teach basic literacy skills to more than two million adults in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela and even Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as well as a number of countries in Africa and Asia.

One of the most novel applications of the Cuban literacy training method took place in Haiti, where the programme was implemented through a French-language radio show. Hundreds of Haitians learned to read and write with nothing more than a conventional radio receiver, the course text books, a notebook and a pencil, explained Ferraz.

The results achieved through this radio-based literacy training experience in Haiti led the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to recognise the Cuban government with an Honourable Mention among the 2002 winners of the King Sejong Literacy Prize. (The prize pays tribute to the outstanding contribution made to literacy over 500 years ago by King Sejong of Korea.)

The following year, the Cuban government was awarded an Honourable Mention once again, this time for its international cooperation in literacy training. In addition, a UNESCO Chair in Education Sciences was established at IPLAC in 1994.

The implementation of this teaching methodology using television instead of radio has proven equally successful. In Uruguay, as in other parts of the world, it was first necessary to place the study materials in a local context, particularly the audiovisual component.

To this end, MIDES recruited actors from the Margarita Xirgú Municipal School of Dramatic Arts (EMAD) and the Uruguayan Actors Society (SUA) to participate in the filming of the 65 teleclasses used in the course.

At the same time, however, the Uruguayan experience differed from the approach adopted in other countries in that the classes themselves were taught by actual teachers, rather than facilitators.

Since the programme was initiated in 2007, nearly 300 teachers have participated through an agreement signed between MIDES and the National Public Education Administration (ANEP).

A never-ending mission

In this South American country of 3.3 million people, there are still 184,000 people over the age of 15 who have no higher than a third-grade primary school education, including 30,000 who have never attended school, according to the most recent figures from the National Statistics Institute (INE).

The latest national household survey conducted by INE revealed that 2.2 percent of Uruguayans over the age of 15 do not know how to read and write, 1.6 percent have never attended school, 0.8 percent have completed only the first year of primary school, 1.6 percent completed only the second year, and 3.8 percent only got as far as third grade. “This is the programme’s target population,” said Ferraz.

Women account for 54 percent of this target group. The survey also found that people between the ages of 16 and 54 account for 30 percent of the illiterate population, while older adults aged 55 and over account for 70 percent.

Ferraz explained that there are three types of illiteracy. The first includes individuals who never learned to read or write; the second is known as illiteracy through disuse, which refers to people who have learned basic reading and writing skills but have lost them through lack of practice; and the third is functional illiteracy, found among individuals who are able to read and write but lack the proficiency to cope with the demands of daily life.

“Illiteracy is a major contributing factor to exclusion and a barrier to real social justice,” Ferraz maintained. Learning to read and write at a functional level opens up a huge range of possibilities for people: the ability to read street signs and advertisements; to enjoy a book or subtitled movie; to read instructions for safer use of hazardous products and medications; to help children or grandchildren with their homework; and to gain access to better employment opportunities.

The director of the Uruguayan version of Yo, Sí Puedo emphasised that the programme “has not lowered the illiteracy rate in Uruguay, but has made a fundamental impact by beginning to remedy this situation and by raising the awareness of the public authorities.” But obviously, he added, “a great deal still needs to be done.”

It is estimated that there are 771 million illiterate people in the world today, of whom 34 million live in Latin America, where there are another 110 million people classified as functionally illiterate. All of them, as a result, suffer from some degree of social exclusion, low self-esteem, and limited intellectual and employment opportunities.

The eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agreed by the world’s governments in 2000 include a commitment to ensure that “by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.”

The United Nations, and UNESCO in particular, have also pledged their commitment to halving the world’s illiteracy rates by 2015. According to national reports, however, most countries remain a significant distance from achieving this goal, and progress toward it has reached a clear standstill.

Fabián Rodríguez has two years to go on a long sentence for robbery. After spending time in three overcrowded maximum security prisons in Uruguay, he finally landed in a rehabilitation centre where work and respect are central pillars. Now he runs a bakery which supplies 200 inmates as well as the guards.

Inmate in the CNR carpentry workshop. Credit: Alejandro Arigón/IPS

The National Rehabilitation Centre (CNR), which operates in an old psychiatric hospital, is a model prison practically without bars that has an extremely low recidivism rate among its former inmates.

Rodríguez spent time in the prison named Libertad – which paradoxically means “Freedom” – located 50 km from Montevideo, where the 1973-1985 military dictatorship kept hundreds of political prisoners. He was also held in the Santiago Vázquez Penitentiary Complex, the country’s largest prison, and in La Tablada, both of which are located on the outskirts of the Uruguayan capital.

The poor conditions in Uruguay’s prisons have come under scrutiny from international human rights organisations.

In La Tablada, nevertheless, Rodríguez was able to learn professional baking skills – “by watching and earning my stripes” – and he later formed part of a group of prisoners who founded a baking cooperative, the Cooperativa Panificadora de Apoyo Social.

After he made it to the CNR, he and his fellow inmates established a new branch of the La Tablada cooperative, which opened in late July. But they hope to eventually have their own independent cooperative.

In this small South American country of 3.3 million people sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil, the prison population has grown nearly threefold since 1995, largely due to the stiffening of sentences for minor crimes, as well as a rise in drug abuse.

The latest report by the congressional commissioner for the penitentiary system, Álvaro Garcé, says the number of prisoners climbed from 2,791 in 1990 to 8,100 in March 2008 – one of the highest rates in Latin America in proportion to the population.

Garcé underscored that Uruguay’s prisons do not prepare inmates – who have high rates of drug and alcohol abuse and low levels of schooling – for reinsertion in society.

Prisoners are held in overcrowded conditions, with 8,100 inmates housed in facilities built to hold 6,164, and nearly 100 new intakes a month.

After a short-lived respite provided by the early release of 800 prisoners under a special “prison emergency” law passed by the governing left-wing Broad Front coalition shortly after it took office in 2005, the system is once again overwhelmed, to the point that it earned a sharp rebuke this year from Manfred Nowak, United Nations special rapporteur on torture.

To ease pressure on the penitentiary system, the administration of socialist President Tabaré Vázquez designed a series of measures, including legal reforms, to expand prisons and open new facilities, in a process still in its early stages.

The recidivism rate in Uruguay is around 60 percent, which makes the CNR a kind of island, with only 10 to 12 percent of former inmates becoming repeat offenders since 2002, the assistant director of the institution, police commissioner Enrique Mesa, told IPS.

He explained that in Uruguay the recidivism rate is measured by the proportion of inmates who are arrested again within five years of release.

True rehabilitation

“We found the bakery project very interesting from the moment it was proposed,” police inspector Gustavo Belarra, director of the CNR, told IPS in an interview.

“It’s really important for the prisoners, most of whom have children, to be able to take training courses and work alongside their fellow inmates, because it not only prepares them for better reinsertion in the labour market, but tremendously strengthens the bonds among them and between them and society and their families, while boosting their self-esteem,” he said.

The CNR opened on Jul. 31, 2002 in what used to be the Musto psychiatric hospital in the north of the province of Montevideo, close to the border with the neighbouring province of Canelones.

“The centre is like a halfway house in which inmates are gradually integrated into society, as they acquire different skills to facilitate social inclusion when they leave the prison system,” said Belarra, who has worked in different positions in the CNR since it began to function.

There are currently 192 inmates, seven of whom have daytime study release privileges.

The only rooms with bars are the ones assigned to the new intakes. The newcomers are later moved to the second floor, where they share rooms with other inmates and are subject to few security measures and have greater independence and the chance to continue their primary or secondary school studies where they had left off.

The centre has classrooms and teachers thanks to an agreement with the National Administration of Public Education.

The centre also has a cybercafé donated by the state telecoms company and run by the inmates themselves.

From football to work

During the tour of the installation by IPS, in the company of just a few inmates, the climate of respect and civility stood out.

“There is no punishment or beatings here. It’s clear and simple: you have to study, work or be involved in some activity, and in your free time you can do whatever you like,” says one of the inmates, pointing to a tidy gym where several young men are working out, lifting weights and punching boxing bags.

The basic rules in the CNR are: no drugs or alcohol, take care of the facility, and no fighting.

Some of the inmates are playing football, while a few metres away others are working the soil with a hoe and shovel, and filling up wheelbarrows. They are first-time offenders, in for minor drug-related crimes. (See sidebar.)

After walking around the place for a while, it’s easy to forget you are in a prison, surrounded by people who have committed crimes, including violent ones. The only reminder is the occasional uniformed police officer.

The entire building, inside and out, is painted a shiny white, the smells coming from the kitchen are enticing, and the bathrooms are in excellent shape. “That’s what public bathrooms in bars and restaurants and schools should look like,” a passing police officer remarks.

Besides the bakery, there is a carpentry workshop and a smithy, where benches and desks are repaired and furniture is made for public schools in the area – “a good way to improve ties with the community,” said Belarra.

The workshops have made, for example, the post office’s letter trays, as well as more than 100 basketball hoops specially produced for a drug rehabilitation programme launched by the president’s office, which were set up in public sports facilities around the country.

Several inmates are also studying to become plumbers, electricians, mechanics, gardeners and brick-layers, at the Universidad del Trabajo del Uruguay, the country’s main technical vocational institute.

In addition, the CNR has work agreements with Catholic Church institutions, private companies, and public enterprises like the Ancap state-owned oil company, the water utility, the Montevideo port service, public hospitals and Congress.

Fabián Rodríguez knows that the temptation to go back to his old ways will always be there, and he still has a couple years to go in the CNR, although he may be granted day leave or be released on parole before that, depending on what the judge decides.

But this time, he says, instead of holding a gun to get his hands on some dough, he will keep his hands on the real dough – making bread for a living, to stay out of prison for good.