Cuba, 1961: Thousands of teenage girls join the National Campaign for Literacy to help teach their country to read and write. Traveling to remote mountain regions, often against the will of their parents, they lived with their students for up to one year, teaching at night and on weekends. Over 700,000 illiterate adults learned to read & write that year. And the young teachers lives would never be the same...—Anonymous
In September of 1960 Cuba announced to the world that it would eradicate illiteracy within one year through a massive call for volunteer teachers. One quarter of a million people volunteered, many leaving their homes and families to spend months in the mountains and valleys across the nation.
Half of those volunteer teachers were under 18 years old and over half of them were women. They taught more than 700,000 people to read and write in one year, many of their students learning to write the alphabet - or their names - for the first time.
Neither teachers nor students would ever be the same.
