The data could not be more reliable. They have just been revealed by the solvent IBGE, the Brazilian research institute, carried out door to door throughout the country and offering an in-depth x-ray of society. According to this X-ray, at this time there are still 9.3 million total illiterates in Brazil, something that, as stated in an editorial in the newspaper Or Globeshould “shame” the country.
It is true that these millions of total illiterates are more of adults, which reveals the educational gap of years past when only the children of wealthy families went to school. The rest had to work alongside their parents to survive. But what to do then with those nearly ten million total illiterate people who are not even able to read a sign on the street? As the editorial points out, “it is no longer just about education. “It’s about dignity.”
When Lula became president for the third time, he stated that he came to create a new Brazil, more united, more just, less angry and more luminous after the four years of obscurantism, threats of a military coup and incitement to a civil war by the ultra Bolsonaro.
I don't know if the Lula Government's educational program will consider those more than 9 million total illiterates, even of working age. Lula suffered in his childhood, due to family poverty, from not being able to study and he must know, better than the rest of the politicians, the ordeal of those millions of totally illiterate adults. Will they continue to be abandoned to their fate, hidden in their shame, suffering in silence their lack of human dignity?
The IBGE data that has revealed the existence of nearly ten million total illiterates has brought to mind the first time I was able to visit the Brazilian Amazon supported by a Spanish NGO. On one of the visits to a very poor village I met two twin sisters, 70 years old, who had never left the village. They were illiterate. Talking with them, they told me that they had never studied and that they realized this gap when they received a written notice from the city that they could not read. “We realized, suddenly, that we were blind.”
The two sisters reacted and decided to go to school “to learn letters.” To do this they had to walk through the jungle on foot ten kilometers round trip every day. And they also had no notebooks or pencils. An anecdote? No! A world of injustice and an example of improvement.
Those sisters at 70 years old, who with their wrinkled hands began to write the first letters that would cure them of their cultural blindness, are a symbol of the social injustice that still reigns in a rich country, where politicians squander money, who think in their personal and family interests and perhaps they did not even know that there are still more than nine million who, like those two indigenous people from the Amazon, discover that they are “blind” because they are illiterate.
Material poverty in a country exuberant with natural wealth is harsh and unfair. And when it is said that hunger has decreased, and politicians celebrate it, they forget that it is indecent to have even a single child or adult with an empty plate of food. And along with material hunger, which affects us all closely and even more so when it bites children, we should also be stung by that mass of culture-hungry people, those illiterate people, who are actually excluded from society and who still have a lot of life ahead of them. .
“It is never too late if happiness is good” says a popular saying that can be applied to those millions of illiterate Brazilians. Even more so in a world where people live more and more. They are condemned to die blind, to have to humiliate themselves by having their grandchildren read a paper to them that they do not understand. They are, perhaps because deep down in our conscience it hurts us and they judge us in silence, the new proletarians of the digital age, in which being illiterate means being blind not once but twice. They are the new outcasts, those condemned to oblivion, those who will continue to be invisible to us. Until when Lula? As a semi-literate aunt of mine said, during the hard times of the Franco dictatorship in Spain, “God cannot forgive that.”
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