SI MONTHLY NEWS DECEMBER 2006 News
From SI Exco News
Dear friends near and far
This past year has been full of adventures though I have not left Bellingham.
The most inspiring one is ahead. STEADI, a non profit was started when I closed my potter’s wheel manufacturing business. STEADI stands for the Social and Technical Environmentally Appropriate Development Institute. It was intended to become a nest egg that could foster Third World community developers, both indigenous and outsiders, who were encouraging struggling rural communities to awaken the best in their own heritage. Too few of the ordinary people understand the dangers of the chemical mechanical systems that are endangering our world until they get swallowed up by it. My search for such programs is a long story. Along the way I did find, however, many who are enlightened and dedicated community developers. (If you would like more details of the destructive effect or misguided community development I witnessed in East Africa let me know. It is no accident that Nairobi is one of the most dangerous cities in Africa. I will have a 5 page report I can email)
Then bone cancer hit me and some felt my life would be cut short. It is amazing how imminent catastrophes can shake one up and cause them to better focus their life. I woke up one morning too weak to stand up. After a day in emergency I was moved to this nursing home. I had heard so many horrendous stories about the poor care in such places I was very worried. Instead it has turned into one of the high spots of my later life. The help work hard without too much pay but they are the most caring people I have ever been among. The food is fairly good, though by no means a cancer healing diet. At any rate I am determined to curb my cancer. Some years ago I successfully dealt with my malignant melanoma without any harsh medical intrusions. In fact I had none.
So here I am four months later having regained all my weight and a good deal of my stamina. I was skin and bones when I arrived here weighing 135. Now I weigh what I should at 168. I went from wheel chair to walker to cane to free walking. My cane now gets in the way. I can almost run.
But that is not the exciting part of the story, though some feel the miraculous healing is. In the process of looking for ways to distribute the funds from my community development fund I have found a new vision. It is a program that will do many of the things I hoped my original fund would do and more.
Half the people on our fertile planet go to bed hungry and many die of starvation or diseases aggravated by mal nutrition. A good portion of these struggling folk are poor partly because they are cut off from modern society because they are illiterate.
The system I developed, Teach Yourself to Read (TYR) should help at least a million people a year to escape from the isolation of illiteracy. Because it is a system that can be very inexpensively printed in millions of copies it can be distributed free to those who need it most. Since anyone can learn from it without a school or teacher it can reach the most isolated corners of the world or into the deepest prisons and refugee camps.
The TYR program does not teach people to read. It gives them material that makes it easy for them to teach themselves. And it gives them much more than literacy – a new self image and self confidence. Anyone who has taught himself a challenging task without help acquires a strong self assurance that can affect all the rest of his or her life.
I had worked out this system about 20 years ago but it was not until I delved deeper into the psychology of education and better understood the manipulation of the student’s minds in our school systems that I realized the potential power of this very simple system.
TYR will have explanations for about forty eight phonemes. As soon as our web page is up and running we will invite home schoolers around the country to do the illustrations--each to do drawings for one phoneme They will then be able to consult the web page for further information. As soon as the illustrations are done we will pull together the Teach Yourself to Read leaflets and refine them by means of a trial run in a few places such as in the West Indies. Finally we will make the courses available free to illiterate people all over the English speaking world. We should get grants and contributions to cover the cost. The cost of one country school equals the cost of thousands of TYR leaflets.
While the English version of TYR is being distributed we will start converting the system into Spanish, then French, then perhaps Swahili and minority languages. Organizing the course in each new language will be progressively easier because we can build on our experience and also draw on the increasing data bank of the accumulated cartoons.
Helping people to read, however, is only the first step. Next we’ll distribute to all the new readers, and old readers who are open, leaflets of short vivacious stories in simple language-- folk yarns that inspire all aspects of community development, improvement about village neighborly life, sanitation and healthful diets. Then stories of cooperative organization will follow, and yarns that begin to unravel for them, the complexities of the global economic system and the damage that is being wreaked on the planet by pesticides and chemical fertilizers. They will also get true stories about villages that were splintering and pulled themselves together. This is what we call the Folk Readers program.
My flat screen monitor is on a shelf. It rotates out over my bed and back out of the way when not wanted. The mouse is also on that shelf. The keyboard is on my lap. In this way I compose and email a good part of the day. I am also regularly on the phone or out to get a little fresh air.
On our web page you will find a much fuller explanation of how the teach-yourself –to-read program works and also some of the long range plans. So you see far from being on my last legs I am at the threshold of my next life. I have taken no chemotherapy or other fierce so called cancer fighters. This full and exciting life is surely part of the reason for my miraculous improvement.
Here’s hoping your coming year is as exciting and blessed as mine but without any cancer scares. Please share with me your thoughts, what you have been doing and are planning.
Bob Luitweiler
email: bob[at]folkreaders.org My phone is 360 714 1043 Postal address: 2726 Alderwood Ave. Bellingham, WA 98225
Because my health is improving I may move from this nursing home to an assisted living place. Check the Folkreaders.org web page before using the above postal address. My phone number will follow me.
uploaded by Amelia
