Coming out of the darkness

A little over sixty-three years ago my family pioneered the invasion of a mountain in the west of Caracas. The area was difficult to access, with no public services and very poor public transportation.

The nearest school was about twelve kilometers away, not easy to get to, so most of the children in the area did not go to school.

But my mother decided that we would go to school and got us a place for the afternoon shift. Every day we made a short trip to school, leaving two hours before school started and returning home as night was falling. Not a single day we were late.

Between trips, I finished elementary and high school and it was time to decide what I would study at the University. I was inclined to study to become a teacher and I was a little afraid of not knowing if I would really be good at it.

But as soon as I started working as a teacher I realized that I had made the right choice. I felt that with that job I could do a lot to improve people's lives. I understood the importance of helping others to advance in the world of knowledge.

I always worked in public education, with young people of very limited economic resources. Like me, many of them had achieved a much higher level of education than their parents. Each boy we managed to bring out of ignorance was a triumph for him, for our society and for the world.

One of the great satisfactions of my life is to meet people who were my students and are now doctors, lawyers, engineers and other professionals. Like me, they have achieved a better standard of living thanks to education.

By the year two thousand and twenty, the United Nations (UN) estimated that six hundred and seventy million people worldwide were illiterate, a truly worrying figure.

The discovery of writing allowed humanity to take a monumental leap forward in the path of advancement and civilization. Thanks to the possibility of reading and writing, it was possible to transmit accumulated knowledge from generation to generation.

Illiteracy condemns people to a state of obscurity, isolating them from the world around them. Without knowing how to read and write, people remain tied to ignorance, they have little chance of getting good jobs, thus reducing their chances of having a better quality of life.

Sometimes I imagine how difficult my life would have been if my mother had not insisted on taking us to school. Without knowing how to read and write, many paths would have been closed to me. I probably would not have been able to advance economically, nor would I have been able to nourish my spirit by reading the works of the great authors. Through reading I have been able to discover a whole world of possibilities and through writing I can create texts like this one.

In our time, in addition to traditional illiteracy, there is technological and digital illiteracy, and this is much greater.

In poor countries like mine, technological illiteracy is a gigantic problem. Large sectors of the population do not have access to the necessary knowledge to efficiently use the tools of computers and the Internet. This causes these people to fall further and further behind in the queue of progress.

Solving this situation is much more difficult than in the case of traditional illiteracy, because large economic resources are needed. For the poorest people it is unimaginable to buy a computer and pay for internet connection service.

Knowing the technology improves the quality of life. For example, here in the Blockchain there are numerous people from countries such as Nigeria, Venezuela, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, who improve their standard of living because they know the technological tools to be here. Many of their neighbors cannot receive these benefits because they are technologically illiterate.

In my community I have taught many people how to join HIVE, which would offer them a real chance to improve their lives. However, for them it has been difficult because they don't even have a smart phone to connect to the internet, they hope at some point to have the opportunity to be with us...

This is my entry for the initiative convened by the @weekend-experiences community in its 138th edition. Responding to the question: solution to illiteracy. I invite friend Hive account@damarysvibra to participate.

Thanks for your time.