Hanging Libraries
Literacy is more than just a personal ability or motivation. Literacy is a culture that encourages or discourages literacy. It is an expectation about the way society works and the way people are expected to learn. An oral society passes down their knowledge through activity and communal story-telling. A literate culture passes down their history by writing it down for later generations to have even after all the story-tellers are gone. Even if a society has very few literate people, if the most knowledgable people in society are expected to be literate and if they write down their histories in that medium, they have a culture of literacy. The only thing stopping them is either expectations of elitism, only certain people are literate, or the means to effectively educate the whole population. For a literacy culture, means are the only obstacle, while an oral culture requires a change in culture to bring about literacy.
A culture of literacy?
Changing culture
The Pamosu people have a primarily oral culture. That isn’t to say they don’t see value in literacy, but rather the culture by-in-large has not adopted the practices, assumptions, and expectations of a literacy culture. An immediately obvious example of this when you come to the remote mountains of Madang is that you will not see written language anywhere. One of the distinctive aspects of a literate culture is that there are words all over the place. They are written on walls, signs, and even in some cases the sky! The Pamosu speakers also have an outlook about literacy that only certain people are qualified to teach people to read and write. The initial stages of a healthy literacy always begins with parents reading to their children. However, because of expectations, Pamosu speakers do not do this even though there are indeed people that can read and write.
Pamosu obstacles
Solving the problem
To overcome this obstacle, we must help the Pamosu to adopt new practices and expectations. A hanging library is our first attempt at doing this. It always starts small, but having a few books available to read is a necessary and crucial first step to building a culture of literacy. As people see the books and start to see others reading, the desire to read will also grow. As that happens, even the desire to write down their family’s history, their farming methods, their hopes, dreams, fears, everything will also grow. It can become a cascading effect just by meticulously and consistently providing reading materials. Eventually, as that desire grows, there will be reliable people that will rise up that can take this model and spread it, providing these materials to their communities independent of an outside source. That is the goal of hanging libraries.
