Help Spread The Power Of Language

 

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free,

it has also the power to bind, imprison, and destroy.

– Ralph Ellison –

 

Someone once said that language is the skin of a culture, drawing together all its component parts so that each may take its place and become accessible and understood in relation to the whole. As anyone who has found himself in a foreign land trying to decipher an unfamiliar language knows, words are essential to getting through the day.

There is a growing number of people living in our area for whom language is not just a temporary inconvenience on a business trip or vacation, but a barrier they must face every day. The Literacy Volunteers of America – Danbury, Inc., announced this week that it is facing an extreme shortage of volunteer tutors. More than 100 foreign-born applicants are waiting for someone to help them learn to read, write, and speak English. While they wait, they are learning about the power of words – not the power to set free their talents and creativity, but as Ralph Ellison says, the power of words to “to bind, imprison, and destroy.” Until English words come to them easily and freely and they can speak their own ideas and opinions, they are restricted in their social interactions, they are often barred from the workplace, and they become trapped in their own dependency on English speakers to represent their interests.

Fortunately, there is an opportunity right around the corner to address this problem. Starting on Monday, June 12, and continuing on Mondays and Thursdays through June 29, Literacy Volunteers will offer volunteer tutors training in teaching English as a second language and in teaching basic reading skills. The training sessions run from 7 to 9:30 pm. One of the instructors, Ellen Parrella, is well known to many Newtowners. More information about the Literacy Volunteers program and the tutor training sessions is available on the Web at www.danbury.org/literacy or by calling 792-8260.

We urge everyone who has the time and the inclination to take up the cause of literacy in this way. Not only will we be improving the prospects of more than 100 people, we will be enriching our own culture by giving voice to new ideas and opinions that may one day help us bridge the divisions that so quickly weaken a society. As Eleanor Roosevelt observed 40 years, ago, “We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together, and if we are going to live together, we are going to have to talk.”