How it Began
In 2001 social worker Alice Layton Taylor, her husband Peter Taylor, a tropical ecologist contemplating field study of the black caiman, and their four year old son Rafe were passengers in the back of a roofless Land Rover, bumping through a patch of forest on Karanambu Ranch. As low trees were briefly snagged in the vehicle, Rafe plucked leaves from the branches and began to play with them. One became a hat, another a mustache, a third a pirate's eyepatch. Another passenger in the vehicle, headmaster of a nearby village school, tapped Alice on the shoulder. "That is something your children have that ours do not," he shouted over the engine noise, gesturing at Rafe. "What is that?" she asked. "Creativity," he replied.
For many months afterward Alice was haunted by that comment and its implications. How can children achieve academically when even their teachers believe they are incapable of intellectual excellence?
Process as a Goal
So the germ of the idea was to foster certain open-ended processes as goals in themselves, processes identified as "creativity," "education" and "choice," under the common heading of "learning" — hence the name of the foundation Alice went on to create. She returned to the United States with the question: "How can I, as an outsider, a temporary village resident, put my skills and resources to the best use?
Alice opened a conversation, via mail and further visits, with Yupukari headmaster Bryan Li and his teaching staff. The answer she eventually arrived at was to build libraries: resources for the exercise of choice, the support of education, the stimulation of creativity. She returned to graduate school for a second Masters degree, in information science and learning technologies.
Village Participation
The village built the public library and field station, dubbed "Caiman House Field Station" after Peter's research, which is also based in Yupukari, and they renovated the school buildings with mayu (community service) labor, to install the classroom libraries that would bring books as close to the eyes and hands of learners as possible.
There are now four libraries in Yupukari, three of them are classroom libraries: one each in the nursery school and the two primary school buildings — there is no high school. The fourth is the public library, staffed by three full-time librarian-trainees, with six Internet-enabled laptops and a book collection for all ages.
Altogether there are about 6500 hand-picked English language books in Yupukari, as well as films, puzzles, toys, maps and globes, art and classroom supplies, all aimed at developing stronger foundation skills for education.
Sustainability and Expansion
Now that the hard assets and the training are in place, the focus shifts to sustainability and eventual expansion, as other villages have expressed interest in libraries.
First Language Literacy
Thus far, "literacy" has meant English language literacy, since English is the official language of Guyana, and is the language of instruction. Makushi, the language of the indigenous majority in the Rupununi (about 9000 people), has been a written language for only a generation.
Few Makushi-speakers can read or write their language, but grow up speaking a fairly limited vocabulary of both Makushi and English (or Portuguese; 15,000 Makushi speakers live in neighboring Brazil).
A significant obstacle for Yupukari schoolchildren is that when they learn to read, they must learn how to read in a foreign language, English. A curriculum that includes instruction in Makushi as a written language prior to or alongside English is needed in the earliest grades. RLF would like to support the development of such a curriculum, similar to the work already underway among the Wapishana people of the South Rupununi.
The Makushi knowledge bank -- largely unavailable in English, and as endangered by changing times as the local wildlife -- includes the information and skills that have enabled them to survive in an inhospitable environment. One of the goals of the public library is to serve as a repository of local knowledge across the spectrum of subject areas, and as a means of gathering, preserving and disseminating the knowledge productions of local inhabitants.