Adult literacy, popular education and peace-building in Timor-Leste*

Associate Professor Bob Boughton
University of New England, NSW, Australia.

Abstract

In Timor-Leste, a national adult literacy campaign, supported by a small
team of Cuban advisers, was launched in 2007, in the wake of a political
crisis which threatened to de-stabilise the world’s newest independent
country. Two years later, over 26,000 people have completed a thirteen week
basic literacy course, and the campaign looks set to have a major impact on
the country’s 50% illiteracy rate. This paper, drawing on findings from
in-country fieldwork funded by an ARC Linkage grant, outlines the
achievements of the campaign, and assesses the contribution which adult
literacy makes to post-conflict peacebuilding and the achievement of
post-colonial independence. This unusual and innovative experiment in mass
popular adult education, undertaken with high levels of local involvement
and minimal donor support, presents a stark contrast with the more dominant
neo-liberal models of education and training for state-building, favoured by
international agencies such as the World Bank.


Introduction

August 30th, 2009, marked the tenth anniversary of the historic
UN-supervised referendum in Timor-Leste, in which 97% of the population
voted, and an overwhelming majority (78.5%) rejected the offer of becoming
an autonomous province within the Republic of Indonesia. In the weeks that
followed, the Indonesian army withdrew, but not before they had laid waste
the entire territory and co-ordinated a murderous pre-planned rampage by
local pro-Indonesian militias in which over one thousand people died. In a
report commissioned by the UN High Commission for Refugees, Geoffrey
Robinson wrote:
The worst of the violence followed the announcement of that vote on
September 4. Over the next few weeks, Indonesian soldiers and police joined
armed pro-Indonesian militiamen in a campaign of violence so sustained and
so brutal that it shocked even those who had predicted a backlash. Before a
UN-sanctioned military force arrived to restore order in late September,
hundreds of people had been killed and an estimated 400,000 people – more
than half the population – had been forced to flee
their homes. (Robinson 2003).
On October 25th, the UN become the official interim governing authority, a
role it played until independence was formally granted in May 2002. The UN
Transitional Authority (UNTAET) inaugurated a massive program of
international aid and development to assist the processes of post-conflict
reconstruction, an effort that continues to this day. 

In the week in which this paper is being written, the Australian media is
once again full of stories about Timor-Leste, because a new feature film,
Balibo, has been released, telling the story of the first days of the
Indonesian invasion in 1975. The film is named after a tiny town in the
westernmost district of Bobonaro, perched high on the plateau above the
northern coast of the island of Timor, a few kilometres from the border with
Indonesia. For over three decade, Balibo has been the focus of debate and
recrimination, arising from the murder of five young journalists there in
October 1975, by forces led by the Indonesian army, illegally invading what
was then the sovereign territory of Portuguese Timor (Jolliffe 2009). Last
October, I was fortunate to spend several hours there, talking with a group
of adult literacy workers and their Cuban adviser, Barbara Massilanq, about
the government’s national literacy campaign. The campaign had been launched
in the capital Dili in March 2007, and classes began in July of that year in
Balibo and the five sucos (towns/administrative areas) surrounding it -
namely Cova, Leohitu, Batugede, Leolima, Sanirin. Balibo, small as it is, is
the sub-district ‘capital’, part of the larger district of Bobonaro.
Speaking through interpreters, we communicated in Portuguese with the Cuban
adviser, and in Portuguese and Tetum with the local Timorese staff, which
included all the monitors, five men and one woman; as well as the campaign
coordinator for the Balibo sub-district, and the sub-district administrator,
the senior civil servant in the area. Each village based monitor, we were
told, was teaching two classes of twelve students. Classes ran for thirteen
weeks, and already they were up to their third intake.

We met in the council building, across the road from the ‘Australian’ house,
where the journalists had originally sheltered in October 1975, recently
restored as a museum and community learning centre. On the hill above the
town square sits the old Portuguese fort where the fighters of FALANTIL, the
army of the East Timorese independence movement FRETILIN, had resisted the
Indonesian invasion before retreating back into the jungle. From the fort
you can see all the way to the coast,  from where Indonesian frigates moored
just offshore shelled the town on that morning thirty three years earlier.
The historical resonances were palpable. In the face of this illegal
invasion, FRETILIN had, on 28th November declared the independence of their
country, and called for international support. Within days, Cuba had given
them that recognition, something the western world, including Australia,
refused to do for another twenty five years. Here we were, over three
decades later, witnessing Cuban solidarity in its new form, providing
doctors and literacy advisers in every subdistrict to help deal with the
massive health and education problems which are the direct legacy of
colonialism and war. This paper is about this extraordinary story of
international solidarity and struggle, and how the ties that formed between
the people of these two fiercely independent island states from opposite
sides of the globe have produced one of the most compelling and moving
examples of international education in the twenty-first century. 

Origins of the Campaign

During the period of direct UN rule, just prior to the granting of formal
independence in May 2002, countrywide consultations were undertaken to
inform the production of the National Development Plan (NDP). In those
consultations, which reached over 35000 people, “70% of the population
prioritised education as one of the three most important sectors to be
developed for the countries future.” (East Timor Planning Commission
2002:143). In response, the NDP Vision 2020, which had the support of all
sectors and political groupings, included this statement:
For the next generation, in the year 2020, people will be literate,
knowledgeable and skilled. They will be healthy and live a long productive
life. They will actively participate in economic, social and political
development, promoting social equality and national unity (ibid:xvii)
The NDP went on to nominate three priority areas of education : basic school
education, vocational education, and adult literacy. Noting the high adult
illiteracy rate and the high proportion of adults who had never attended
school, the NDP called for “the design and implementation of literacy
manuals and the implementation of campaigns to address the low literacy
level within the population.” (ibid: 144). 
Already, in 2000, well before the NDP consultations had begun, young
Timorese activists from the Student Solidarity Council (SSC), which had
formed the last years of Indonesian occupation, had begun to attack the
problem of adult illiteracy. A group of SSC women went into the districts in
March 2000 to organise literacy classes, at the same time as others among
their colleagues were re-opening schools. With support from some
international NGOs, most notably Oxfam Great Britain, these young women and
their colleagues in other ex-Resistance organizations agitated for the
government to undertake a national adult literacy campaign. They drew their
inspiration from the work of the first generation of FRETILIN independence
activists, who had initiated a mass literacy campaign based on the methods
of Paulo Freire in January 1975, prior to the Indonesian invasion (Durnan
2005; Da Silva 2008).

Around the same time, in 2000, the UN-controlled Ministry of Education also
began work on literacy, with support from donor countries, most especially
Brazil. However, the Ministry included many officials whose experience of
educational administration had been gained in Indonesian times, and their
view of literacy was very different from that of the young student activists
and the veterans of the 1975 campaign who had inspired them. The Ministry
officials were also strongly influenced by the international institutions
advising them, in particular UNICEF and the World Bank, and the powerful
donor countries of the west who were funding the international assistance
program. Moreover, while the reference to manuals and campaigns in the NDP
resonated with the earlier FRETILIN campaign, whose manual Timor is Our
Country was filled with anti-colonial images and text (Anon 1975), the
overall language of the NDP was more in tune with the de-politicised,
technical discourse of human capital theory and poverty reduction, which is
the preferred ‘genre’ of the World Bank and the international donor
community (Boughton 2009).

These differences surfaced in 2003, in two national education conferences,
the first a civil society conference, and the second a government one. What
was at stake were two fundamentally different approaches to the role of
adult education in national development. On the one hand, the students
advocated a popular education model, one in which education would be a key
element in the ongoing struggle for national liberation that had begun in
the 1970s. “We have freed the land,” they said. “Now we must free the
people,” adapting an oft-quoted slogan from the Resistance. On the other
hand, the international donor community and most of the senior officials of
the Ministry saw education in terms of human capital development, part of
the process of overcoming poverty through the gradual incorporation of
Timor-Leste into the global economic system.

FRETILIN and Cuba

The first constitutional government, which took office in May 2002, was led
by Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri, one of the 1970s independence activists who
had founded FRETILIN. While Alkatiri and many members of his Council of
Ministers were sympathetic to the students demands, they were also engaged
in a realpolitick which required them to balance the competing interests
within their own support base and the interests of the international donors
who at that stage were vital to the country’s reconstruction (Alkatiri
2005). Alkatiri’s first Minister of Education, Amindo Maia, was not a member
of FRETILIN, and in the first two years of the new government, the donor
emphasis on basic school education and the rebuilding of school
infrastructure dominated all other issues in his Ministry (Interview, Amindo
Maia, Dili, 18 September 2004). Nevertheless, in September 2004, largely as
a result of the patient campaigning by Oxfam with its local NGO partners who
had formed a popular education network, known as Dai Popular, the Ministry,
UNESCO and UNICEF agreed to partner with Oxfam the First National Adult
Literacy Conference (Gutteres 2004). The Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri, who
opened the Conference, set the tone:
Learning to read and write is to liberate… Literacy is a national priority,
because Timor Leste needs all the population to understand the process of
development, to consolidate democracy and to have the capacity to intervene
in their own life (Fieldnotes 15/9/04).
The final resolutions from the Conference gave overwhelming support to the
need for a government-led national literacy campaign, based on the examples
of Kerala and Cuba, and on the experiences of the 1975 FRETILIN campaign.
Unfortunately, however, the Ministry’s follow-up work from this Conference,
funded by UNICEF and UNDP, focused on developing thematic guidelines for new
literacy teaching materials for the pre-existing literacy program which the
Ministry was already running (Boon 2006). In the process, the idea of a
national mass literacy campaign led and coordinated by government, of the
kind which had been discussed at the Conference, receded once again into the
background.

Towards the end of 2005, Alkatiri visited Cuba, to negotiate an expansion of
Cuba’s comprehensive medical aid program (Anderson 2006). Under this
program, Cuba provided doctors for every administrative unit in the country
(called sucos); while at the same time it also provided scholarships for
young Timorese to study medicine in Cuba. While in Cuba, Alkatiri raised the
issue of illiteracy, and was offered further assistance, in the form of a
team of advisers trained in the Cuban adult literacy method known as Yo! Si
Puedo. (This method is described in more detail below). Alkatiri seized the
opportunity to address the country’s massive illiteracy with this new
approach that was already being deployed in many other countries of the
South, and in January 2006, the first group of eleven Cuban literacy
advisers arrived in the capital Dili. They were welcomed warmly by the young
activists of the popular education network and the FRETILIN political
leaders, but their reception within the Ministry of Education and among the
international adviser community was considerably cooler. They also quickly
became the targets of anti-communist propaganda emanating form the socially
conservative Catholic Church, already at loggerheads with Alkatiri over his
government’s refusal to continue the Indonesian practice of making religious
instruction a compulsory examinable subject in schools. Nevertheless, they
based themselves within the Ministry’s Non-Formal Education Centre and in
February they began trialling the materials they had brought with them, at
sites in Dili and the nearby districts of Baucau and Liquica (Interviews,
Cuban Literacy Coordinator, Dili, 21 & 25 September 2006).

The Crisis and Its Aftermath

Within a month of the Cubans beginning their work, the country was engulfed
in a major political crisis, brought on by a mutiny within the army and
sections of the national police force, which grew into a violent movement to
overthrow the elected FRETILIN government. In April 2006, demonstrators
attacked the main government offices in the centre of Dili, and were
repelled by loyalist troops. Rebel police and soldiers mounted armed attacks
on the main army base and on other targets around Dili, and large
demonstrations called for the PM’s resignation. The President, ex-resistance
commander Xanana Gusmao, gave tacit support to the rebels, and, when an
Australian media report alleged Alkatiri and his Interior Minister had
illegally distributed weapons to civilian FRETILIN militants to resist the
coup, Gusmao insisted on his resignation. A new government was formed under
the leadership of Gusmao’s nominee, the ex-Foreign Minister, Jose Ramos
Horta; but FRETILIN retained control of all the Ministries other than
Defence and the Interior. The new Education Minister and her two Vice
Ministers were all FRETILIN. The Vice Minister, Ildha de Concecao, had
herself been a member of the student brigades which had taught literacy in
the rural areas in 1975, before going on to join the guerrillas in the
mountains (Interview Ildha Da Concecao 3 October 2006). Recognising the role
that mass illiteracy was playing in the crisis, especially among the youth,
the new leadership in the Ministry immediately set about giving much higher
priority to the national literacy campaign, in the lead up to the
Presidential elections, scheduled for February 2007, and the parliamentary
elections which would follow.

In late 2006, the Minister, Rosaria Corte-Real, invited me to come to
Timor-Leste to work full-time on assisting the development of a strategic
plan for the national adult education system, and with the preparatory work
of the national literacy campaign. Since this coincided with the Australian
Research Council project, on which the Ministry was a partner, I was able to
comply, and between November 2006 and July 2007, I spent most of my time
in-country, working in the Non-Formal Education Centre (Boughton 2008).
Following the advice of the Cuban team, the government in January 2007 set
up a National Commission chaired by the Education Minister to lead the
campaign, and a Campaign Secretariat, which included two of the ex-student
activists from the popular education network, namely the Coordinator of the
Institute for Popular Education, a local NGO; and the Co-ordinator of the
Centre for Community Development and Peace at the National University
(UNTL). The government allocated substantial funding from its own budget,
over $700,000, to fund the campaign, which meant that the only international
contribution was the time of the Cuban advisers, who received a small
subsidy out of the Campaign budget to cover their living expenses. Over the
next six months, literacy ‘monitors’ were recruited in every suco, and given
a basic two-three day training program by the Cuban advisers, assisted by
staff from the Ministry’s Non-Formal Education Directorate and a group of
university students recruited to help in the Campaign Secretariat. The
massive logistical exercise of purchasing and distributing the materials and
equipment was also undertaken. The whole time, the clock was ticking, in
that the preparations for the elections were also underway, and there was no
guarantee that a new government would agree to continue the literacy
campaign if it failed to start before the June 30th deadline.

By the time the elections were held, classes had begun in two thirds of the
country’s sucos, and the campaign was underway. FRETILIN, however, although
it won more votes in the election than any of the other parties, lost
government. The new Prime Minister, Xanana Gusmao, formed a government based
on an alliance of a number of smaller parties, while FRETILIN went into
opposition. Meanwhile, the campaign’s momentum which, while it slowed in
subsequent months (Boughton 2008), proved impossible to stop; and the Cubans
were successful in negotiating a new agreement with the new Minister of
Education, Joao Cancio. However, he has dispensed with the Campaign
Secretariat, and the overall control of the campaign and its budget is now
firmly back in the hands of the Ministry officials. During the second half
of 2007, and in 2008 and 2009, I have retuned to Timor-Leste on several
occasions, to conduct fieldwork and complete my evaluation of the campaign.
The evaluation reports are provided direct to the new Minister, who agreed
to honour the agreement I had made with the previous Minister. The trip to
Balibo last October was part of this ongoing evaluation work. On this same
trip, we also met with campaign workers and observed classes in Maliana, the
capital of the district of Bobonaro; in Manatuto and Venilale on the eastern
side of the island; and in Dili itself. 
 
The local experience in Bobonaro District

The Timorese campaign workers in Balibo with whom we spoke last October told
us that so far, the classes were enrolling more women than men, because the
men had to work in the fields. They said people enrolled because they wanted
to be able to write their names, and also to learn about health issues
(Cuban doctors visit the classes regularly). Sometimes people missed
classes, but they attended more than they missed. Classes were held in
homes, and sometimes out in the open. The main difficulty was not having
fuel for the generators which provided the power to run the TV and DVD on
which the audiovisual lessons are shown; and when the generators break down,
they have to be sent to Dili to be serviced. Every fortnight, the local
staff all met with the Cuban adviser for training. Aniceto, the oldest of
the monitors, was nearly sixty-two years old. The youngest, a young woman,
was in her twenties. They told us that one hundred and thirty five students
had graduated in a ceremony presided over by the Chefe do Suco (the
equivalent of a Mayor) and the District Campaign Coordinator. According to
the records kept by the Cuban mission coordinator, by September 2008, over
1500 previously illiterate people in the district of Bobonaro had graduated
from the classes. Another 900 adults were currently enrolled, at various
stages of the 13 week course. Of the fifty sucos in this district, classes
had not yet started in five, because they had not yet received their
materials and equipment, due to lack of available transport.

A few hours drive away, in the village of Kulunu, in the ‘suburb’ of Raifun
on the rural fringe of the district capital, Maliana, we watched an actual
literacy class in progress. The monitor was Victor Sanches, a thirty-year
old man who also worked part-time for the local community radio station. He
was assisted by the subdistrict coordinator, Fancisco (‘Chico’) Pereira and
the Cuban adviser, Isnoel Fernandes. In Victor’s class that day, which
started around 3pm, there were 14 ‘official students, two more than the
‘quota’ of twelve. There were six men, and eight women. There were also
another five or six school age children with exercise books and pens who
were writing everything down and joining in the lesson. The classroom was a
shade area with a dirt floor, built onto the house of a friend of Victor’s.
Perhaps because of the international visitors, the class was watched by a
large ‘audience’, mainly children, who stood around the edge of the teaching
area, behind the plastic chairs on which the adults sat.

The National Campaign

Bobonaro, the district in which Balibo and Malliana are located, is one of
thirteen districts in Timor-Leste. Balibo, and the suco of Raifun in
Malliana are two of the four hundred ‘towns’ in which classes have been
running as part of the national literacy campaign. Every three months,
another group of twenty or more people ‘graduate’ in each suco where classes
are held. Graduates pass a test, in which they must write their own name and
a simple sentence about their life in Tetum (usually) or Portuguese, the two
official languages of the country. Here, as elsewhere, the campaign moves
through several phases. Firstly, there is the ‘socialisation’ period, during
which the Cuban advisers work with the in Ministry of Education counterparts
to mobilise the local leadership to support the campaign, and to choose the
local monitor who is provided initial training. Ideally, a local
sub-commission is established, including local officials, elected leaders,
representatives of women, youth, the Church, and the local police. This
local group then supervises the recruitment of the first group of students,
and helps the campaign workers and their Cuban adviser deal with any
problems that arise as the campaign proceeds. The second cycle begins when
the class is officially launched with a local ceremony. Students then attend
five classes per week, of one – two hours duration, over thirteen weeks. At
each class, the participants sit on plastic chairs around a large TV screen,
usually in the monitors house or the local school or community centre,
watching a DVD ‘episode’ which shows a class like themselves learning from a
literacy teacher. Both Tetum and Portuguese versions of the DVD are
available, the later having been made for a similar campaign in Brazil. The
local monitor stops and starts the DVD at pre-arranged points, to allow the
class to practice the same oral and written exercises which the class on the
DVD is viewing. Each student has a work book, which contains the exercises.
The monitor checks and corrects this work, sometimes with the assistance of
the Cuban adviser or the local campaign co-ordinator, each of whom visit
every class in the sub-district on a regular schedule to observe and record
progress. At the end of the thirteen weeks, students are tested, and those
who pass the test take part in a graduation ceremony, attended by local
leaders and notaries, at which they are given certificates, and the next
group of participants are welcomed into the class. The third stage of the
campaign, which was part of the original plan but has so far not eventuated,
is for the graduates of the class to join other post-literacy activities to
consolidate and extend their learning.

Prior to the visit to the districts, I met with the Cuban Ambassador and the
Literacy Coordinator, who told me that already 9800 people had graduated
from the campaign, and that this figure was set to rise to 12000 by the end
of December. As a result of this success, discussions had begun with the
President, the Prime Minister and Minister of Education to accelerate the
campaign in selected districts, by opening classes in every ‘aldeia’. A
pilot program to test whether this is feasible has since begun in the
District of Oecusse, and in the subdistrict of Atauro, a small island off
the coast from the capital Dili. The ambassador spoke about the need to see
the campaign in ‘humanitarian’ terms, to keep it “out of politics”, because
there were interests in the country, both local and international, who
wanted to politicise Cuba’s involvement, and it was important for Cuba not
to get involved in these internal political disputes. “We have no strategic
interests in this country”, he said, “only humanitarian interests.”
(Interview notes, 25 October 2008).

The International Significance of Cuba’s Educational Aid in Timor-Leste
Timor-Leste’s national literacy campaign is of international significance,
as one of very few examples of a ‘south-south’ international aid program.
Cuba’s assistance to Timor-Leste is particularly noteworthy, because it
allows for some comparisons to be made between the Cuban aid model and the
development assistance provided by wealthy donor countries and international
agencies, such as UNICEF and the World Bank.

Cuban aid programs in the areas of health and education are by no means a
new phenomenon, but they have attracted little academic attention.
Hickling-Hudson (2004) provides an examination of Cuba’s educational aid to
Jamaica and Namibia, which also briefly summarises the history of Cuba’s
educational aid work, including its scholarships for overseas students to
study in Cuba, and its export of many thousands of school teachers to work
in overseas countries. As she points out, Cuba’s ability to do this is due
in part to its own excellent education system, which produces many more
qualified teachers than it needs itself. However, it is also an important
part of Cuba’s socialist internationalism, and part of its current foreign
policy:
A central belief of Cuba’s foreign policy is that countries of the ‘South’
should try to reduce their dependence on the wealthy bloc of countries of
the ‘North’, and that this can be achieved if they assist each other.
(Hickling Hudson 2004)
Of particular relevance to Timor-Leste is that a major focus of Cuba’s
assistance programs in Africa has been the ex-Portuguese colonies of Angola,
Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. In fact, the historical roots of the
solidarity links between Cuba and Timor-Leste lie in the relationships that
the original independence leaders in Timor developed and still maintain with
their counterparts in the anti-colonial movements of those countries.
Similarly, Lind et al’s (2006) evaluation for UNESCO of Cuba’s literacy aid
program and the Yo! Si Puedo method noted that, although the program was
running on over a dozen countries,  theirs was the first independent study
of this work. Like Hickling-Hudson, they identified international solidarity
as part of the explicit motivation behind the development of the program.

In Timor-Leste, as in many other countries that have been the recipients,
the programs grew partly out of pre-existing relationships of solidarity
forged during the period of the independence struggle. One of the most
striking things is the scale of this assistance. For example, the health
assistance program includes 305 Cuban health workers in Timor-Leste,
including 230 doctors, 25 nurses and 50 health technicians; while 600
Timorese medical and allied health students are being trained in Cuba on
full scholarships, with the first due to return this year, and a further 105
are being trained through a new medical program established by the Cubans at
the national university, UNTL. (Anderson 2008; Leach 2009). 

While the literacy collaboration is not on the same scale, the initial group
of eleven advisers was expanded in 2007 to thirty-five, enough to place one
adviser in every two sub-districts. Like the doctors, the literacy advisers
live on a relatively frugal allowance. In Timor-Leste, most internationals
working for UN agencies, international NGOs, or as international advisers in
government Ministries earn between US$5000 and US$15000 per month, in
salaries and living allowances. Internationals also often enjoy generous
leave arrangements, spending time out-of-country every few months. The vast
majority also live and work in the capital, Dili. Each Cuban, by contrast,
receives a basic living allowance, paid by the government of Timor-Leste
from its education budget. Initially, it was US $170 per month, subsequently
raised to $250 per month when some of Timor’s oil revenue began to flow into
its state budget. Three advisers are based in Dili, while the rest are
posted to the rural towns and districts, where infrastructure is almost
always limited and conditions are harsh. Their accommodation is usually a
house or part of a house rented to them by a local. They receive a rental
subsidy, up to $250 per month per house (sometimes shared with another
adviser or a Cuban doctor), and assistance with furnishing their houses, and
paying for gas, electricity and mobile phonecards. Only the Co-ordinator has
access to a car, a second-hand 4WD Pajero owned by the Ministry of
Education. The others travel around their districts and back and forth to
Dili on local public buses and microlets, or on the back of the motorcycles
which have been issued by the government to each of the district and
sub-district literacy campaign co-ordinators. The Cubans thus have a
lifestyle much closer to the locals than most international advisers, a fact
recognised and commented on favourably by many Timorese we have interviewed.
All told, each of the team costs approximately $750- $1000 per month, or
$12000 per year, less than many international advisers earn in one month.
The Timor-Leste government also pays their return tickets from Cuba, at
$6000 per adviser per two years. The net cost to the Ministry of Education
budget in a full year is therefore only a little over $400,000, most of
which is immediately recycled back into the local economy. 

Just as distinctive as the conditions and remuneration is the ‘culture’ and
experience of the advisers. For example, Jose Manuel ‘Llera’ Garcia, the
leader of the first team. was himself a veteran of Cuba’s own literacy
campaign in 1961, when, as a twelve year old schoolboy, he went to the
countryside with many other high school students, to help the Cuban peasants
learn to read. He also fought in Angola in the 1970s with the Cubans sent
there to reinforce the independence army of the MPLA (Movimento Popular de
Libertação de Angola), who were fighting to eject their Portuguese rulers.
Now sixty years old and a senior administrator in a regional education
department in Cuba, he took two years leave from his job to work in
Timor-Leste, and then extended his stay for a further year to help settle in
the next group which arrived. His assistant Co-ordinator during the first
two years, Rafael Ferrer Ortega, somewhat younger, had also been in Angola
during the 1980s and 1990s, working on a literacy campaign there which was
run via radio. Together with nine others, all of whom were school or
university teachers in Cuba, they formed the first technical adviser team.
In February 2009, all but Llera finished their tour of duty and returned to
Cuba, to be replaced by a new larger group of thirty-five, who arrived in
April 2008. In March 2009, just before Llera left, there were 36 advisers,
24 men and 12 women. The oldest (Llera) is 60, the youngest 37; and their
average age is 51, making them an experienced team of educators. Just as
importantly, all but the youngest are ‘children of the revolution’, people
who were born before 1959, or soon after, and who grew up in the first
decades of Castro’s rule. 

In the pantheon of national literacy campaigns, Cuba’s 1961 literacy crusade
holds a special place. In that year, Fidel Castro’s new revolutionary
government sent thousands of young high school students to the country side,
to teach the peasants to read and write (Leiner 1986). Cuba’s experience
with this campaign, which reduced illiteracy from 24% to 4%, as well as its
long tradition of supporting pre- and post- independence adult education in
developing countries has aroused significant interest around the world
(Hickling-Hudson et al 2006). Responding to this interest, especially from
other Latin American countries, the Cuban government established an agency
in September 2000 to support the dissemination of its work, a Research
Department for Youth and Adult Literacy and Education within the Pedagogical
Institute for Latin America and the Caribbean (IPLAC) in Havana.  Building
on experience in a radio-based literacy campaign in Haiti in 1999, the IPLAC
researchers developed Yo! Si Puedo, a unique method of teaching literacy via
audiovisual lessons. The method is in some ways fairly traditional,
according to current international adult literacy thinking, in that it is
based on learning the letters of the alphabet, followed by words, followed
by sentences. However, the Cuban’s have introduced their own innovation,
which they call alphanumeric. This involves the learners in first
associating each letter of the alphabet with a specific numeral. The
rationale for this is that many non-literate people do in fact have basic
numeracy, and will thus learn their letters more easily by this associative
method. By December 2005, when Alkatiri visited Cuba, the IPLAC program had
been adopted in fifteen countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Dominican Republic,
Ecuador, El Salvador, Guinéa Bissau, Haïti, Honduras, Mexico, Mozambique,
New Zealand, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela (Torres 2005; Lind et
al 2006). The number of countries employing the method has now almost
doubled, to twenty-eight (Pers.com, Cuban Consulate Australia, 10/4/08).

Adult literacy and peacebuilding

Finally, the specific circumstances of Timor-Leste, a highly volatile
post-conflict society, mean that there is an opportunity to consider the
role of the national literacy campaign in the process of peacebuilding and
reconstruction. One of the most confronting aspects of the recent history of
Timor-Leste is the way that it illustrates how much damage is done to a
pre-existing society by a violent colonial occupation. Until 1999, the
people of Timor-Leste had lived for more than two hundred years under not
one, but three fascist colonial regimes, Portugal, Japan and Indonesia. None
of these regimes had shown any respect whatsoever for their basic human
rights; and had responded to any local attempts to challenge their rule with
extreme and arbitrary violence. In the space of just ten short years, the
population have been asked to transform themselves and their communities
into active participants in a process of building an independent nation
based on the principles of democracy and the rule of law. The miracle is
that they have achieved as much as they have; but one should not be
surprised at all that the process is still only now just beginning. The
three biggest challenges today remain the establishment of national unity,
overcoming the divisions inherited from the past; the creation of social and
political institutions and practices which sustain democracy and the rule of
law; and the creation of an independent and sustainable economic base,
capable of feeding the population and moving it out of extreme poverty. Each
of the three challenges, inter-related in practice, are part of the process
which the United Nations calls peacebuilding (Durnan 2005).

However, while peacebuilding as a term in international development practice
and theory is relatively new, the processes it describes are not. During the
twentieth century, many societies emerged out of long periods of brutal
colonial rule, often only after protracted wars of national liberation to
expel their occupiers. Others, which had enjoyed formal independence but
which had been ruled by comprador elites beholden to metropolitan powers,
likewise fought wars of national liberation, before achieving genuine
independence. In fact, it was the inspiration of such movements in the
Portuguese colonies of Africa that first inspired the young students who
formed FRETILIN in 1974, and their anti-colonial ideas and organising
techniques owed much the literature of those movements (Hill 2002). They
also drew heavily on the much longer tradition of socialist thinking and
revolutionary practice which had developed from the popular democratic
struggles in Europe in the mid nineteenth century, and inspired
anti-capitalist revolutions in Russia, China and large areas of eastern
Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. As documented in Arnove
and Gaff’s historic collection (Arnove & Graff 1987), national literacy
campaigns have a long history which connects strongly to these socialist and
anti-colonialist traditions. However, it is only recently that writers in
the field of education have begun to make the link between literacy and the
practices of post-conflict peacebuilding (McCaffery 2005).

The situation the Timorese people faced following the August 1999 ballot and
the violence which pre-ceded and followed it is hard to convey to people who
did not witness it. On my first visit in May 2000, Dili looked as if it had
been bombed into rubble, but the destruction was in fact more targeted and
systematic than a simple bombardment. Every public building, including every
government office, school and health clinic had been de-roofed, and its
internal plumbing and wiring removed. Most had then been burned as well.
Whole suburbs had been laid waste, underground water pips and stormwater
drains destroyed, and even the wire removed from every power pole. However,
this physical destruction was not nearly as serious as the human
destruction. Every family had lost someone during the war, with over a third
of the original population having died violently or as a result of famine.
Almost every person had been re-located from their home district, and Dili
itself was home to thousands of displaced people. To cap it all, most of the
senior positions in the public service, including in education, had been
filled by Indonesian ‘transmigrasi’ who had fled with the Indonesian army.

To rebuild a country which has suffered like this would be difficult even if
the population was already well-educated, and had an ample supply of skilled
tradespeople, professionals, and public servants to undertake the work, and
a functioning administration. In Timor-lese, the situation as the opposite.
At least 50% of the population was illiterate, and over 80% eked out an
existence in subsistence agriculture in the rural areas, suffering from
chronic food insecurity. The health situation was likewise appalling, with
almost no public health infrastructure, extremely high rates of maternal and
infant mortality, and, on top of his, many thousands of people suffering
physical and mental injuries from the treatment they had received at the
hands of the occupiers and their local allies. Moreover, there were no
democratic institutions, since the country had been under military rule for
the last twenty five years; and under a civilian dictatorship in which few
local people had rights prior to that.

It is against this background that the campaign to reduce and hopefully
eradicate adult illiteracy can be seen for its true value. It is impossible
to imagine how else a country of only one million people, even despite its
significant oil wealth, can build a functioning democracy and an independent
economy while such a large proportion of its people remain illiterate. No
amount of international advisers can make up for the huge gap between the
human resources which are needed for this task, and the resources which are
currently available. The literacy campaign has the potential to mobilise
many thousands of people as agents of their own development, not just in an
economic sense, but also in a political and a cultural sense. Moreover, by
bringing people into this process across the country, in every single
district, sub-district and suco, it creates a form of national unity, a
common experience from which everyone can begin to see themselves as ‘an
imagined community’. For those who have more education and take part in the
campaign, it also connects them directly with the experience of the
majority, hopefully ensuring that, as with the first literacy campaign, this
will help form a new generation of nationalist leaders committed to
improving the conditions of the majority of people.

Already, the campaign has proved its ability to mobilise women, who form the
majority joining the classes. This is a key factor in the ability of a
society to move beyond conflict and its aftermath, which almost always makes
women the prime targets (Mentjes et al 2001; Mojab & Dobson 2008). In
becoming literate, women will be more able to participate in the political
life of their community and the nation, and carry through on the
implementation of the rights which they have won in the new independence
Constitution (Durnan 2005). We know also from follow-up studies on the
Nicaraguan literacy crusade that women who participate in these classes are
much more likely to have healthier children and lower rates of infant
mortality (Sandiford et al 1995). We also know, and women participants are
already reporting this, that they will feel more able to assist their
children in school. This suggests that the acquisition of literacy by
parents in Timor-Leste will help overcome the intergenerational transmission
of educational inequality, as it has in other countries (Lind 2008).

In summary, then, the national adult literacy campaign is an essential
component in the strategy to rebuild peace in Timor-Leste, for at least four
reasons:
1)	Education is a basic human right and literacy is the first step in
every educational pathway.  As a basic human right it is part of what must
be achieved to overcome inequality.  It is also the means to achieving other
rights;
2)	Literacy allows the mass of the population to join the development
debate on a more equal basis;
3)	The campaign model is a campaign for national unity as it brings the
whole  population together over a shared goal and connects each other,
across regional and political divides and with the State, the government,
the President and the Parliament all share a part;
4)	It creates bonds between the less and more educated, encouraging the
better educated to share their skills with the least educated in their
villages; and
5)	It directly addresses the status of women, especially in the rural
districts.

Conclusion

By July 2009, the national literacy campaign in Timor-Leste had classes
running in 486 sites, and over 26000 people had successfully by completed
the initial 65-leson course. Such an achievement in the space of two short
years is remarkable. It remains to be seen whether, in the next period, the
necessary follow-up post-literacy programs will be established, and whether
this momentum can be maintained.  If so, this campaign will form a solid
foundation on which to build a genuine movement for lifelong education, a
learning society, a society in which ‘education for all’ is not an empty
slogan, but an achievable goal.  On the other hand, a successful campaign
national literacy campaign, as the international evidence shows, is a
complex and costly task, one requiring above all a very high level of
political commitment, and a capacity for managing and coordinating united
action across all sectors of government, and in society as a whole. It can
only work with such united action, and if it is not sustained, then results
will fall short of expectations, and those who succeed initially will revert
back to illiteracy in a short time. 

The national literacy campaign which is underway in Timor-Leste is therefore
a highly significant experiment in international education. Its significance
arises from a number of features, including
•	It is the first national adult literacy campaign in the Pacific
region
•	It is occurring outside the normal international aid and development
structures, as an expression of south-south cooperation and solidarity
•	It is a test of the value of the innovative adult literacy method
invented by Cuba, known as Yo! Si Puedo
•	It is occurring against a background of extreme poverty and
devastation, and the effects of three decades of war and violence, and so
provides an object lesson in the contribution of literacy to post conflict
reconstruction and peacebuilding
•	It has the potential to provide the basis for the development in the
longer term of a sustainable national system of adult education to support
the country’s national development goals
For all these reasons, this campaign will no doubt attract more attention
from scholars of international and comparative education in coming years. 


References
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Deborah Durnan
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Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:52:11 +1100
Subject: [TimorLesteStudies] Paper: Adult literacy, popular education and
peace-building in Timor-Leste
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