On Monday, July 20, a dozen international volunteers were received by the Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs to welcome the CISPES’s third summer Literacy Brigade in El Salvador. The diverse delegation is comprised of university students and educators from across the United States and Canada, many of Salvadoran origins. As in the past, the group has traveled to El Salvador to learn about, support and accompany El Salvador’s transformative and inspiring National Literacy Program that was launched under the new leftist government of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and, since 2009, has certified over 200,000 Salvadorans in reading, writing and basic arithmetic, with 29 territories now declared officially free of adult illiteracy nationwide.

The reception and press conference drew significant attention in the Salvadoran media. In the press, CISPES volunteers received coverage in a report and video from La Prensa Gráfica and an article in El Diario CoLatino. In digital media, the group was profiled on the official website of the Presidency and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in the online publications Verdad Digital, Contra Punto and Periódico Equilibruim. The Brigade was also featured on Radio 102 Nueve, along with television appearances in various Salvadoran television channels, including this video from Gentevé, available on Youtube.

“This brigade has come to support the issue of literacy, to work with the literacy facilitators in this country. We thank you very much for your cooperation,” announced Minister of Education Carlos Canjura. The Vice Minister for Salvadorans in the Exterior, Liduvina Margarín, stated: “You all have come to contribute to one of the three principals that this administration has established, which is education. As you know, the others are the economy and security. But this issue that you have come to support is truly fundamental, because it is a matter of people’s abilities to take off and live self-sufficiently.”

CISPES Program Director Laura Embree-Lowry told the media: “What we want to do is support [the Literacy Program] however we can, but also take away lessons from this effort, because this an example for the whole world of how a country with very little resources can support its people.” CISPES delegate Ana Fisher, herself a long-time educator, affirmed that, “being able to read and write is important, because it’s not the same to be in the darkness and to emerge from the darkness; reading and writing is a human right.”