"A LIMBU LITERACY PROGRAMME IN NEPAL"

LEARNING IN OUR OWN LANGUAGE: KIRAT YAKTHUNG CHUMLUNG DEVELOP

by Sirjana Subba and Dilendra Subba - Limbu Literature Development Association (LiLDA).

Reading and writing in our mother tongue is something many people take for granted. But, as this case study from Nepal reveals, introducing mother tongue literacy can entail a long struggle against both political and practical hurdles. Although the right for children to learn in their mother tongue had been acknowledged for the first time in Nepal’s 1990 constitution, lack of political commitment and financial support made it very difficult for groups like the Limbus of Eastern Nepal to make this a reality.
The Kirat Yakthung Chumlung (KYC), a non governmental organisation, have however been working to raise awareness amongst Limbu communities around their right to mother tongue education, as well as providing the support to run adult literacy programmes. This study focuses on the experiences of a Limbu community in a village called Rajghat, and documents the difficult process of starting up a mother tongue literacy programme. Rather than starting from scratch, KYC decided to adapt the Government’s mainstream adult literacy course to their own context. As we discover, the challenges lay not just in adapting Nepali language textbooks to include appropriate illustrations and names, but also around reviving the Kirat Sirijonga script-–which even many educated Limbus had not encountered. The case study demonstrates the importance of taking a holistic approach to adult education through promoting Limbu language publications, as well as advocating for mother tongue classes in primary schools. Only when the whole community began to value their mother tongue, would it be possible to provide the environment where adults could practise their newly gained Limbu literacy skills. In the Rajghat literacy classes, college graduates sat together with adults who had never been to school, to learn to read and write in Kirat Sirijonga script.
The reflections of the Limbu literacy class participants point to the wider implications of running a mother tongue adult education programme. Parents began to give Limbu names to their new born babies, Limbu language magazines started to prosper and the community became active in trying to reclaim their land rights through the traditional system known as ‘kipat’. Above all, the adult education programme provided the impetus for local Limbu communities to begin to challenge the gap between political rhetoric and reality-–around legal provision for indigenous people’s rights and language discrimination in mainstream education. This case study teaches us the importance of building on existing adult education provision, so as to maximise limited financial and institutional resources. However, the success of the KYC’s programme did not lie simply in more effective language or literacy teaching. It lay also in the fact that they approached the educational inputs from an ideological perspective, listening to people’s views on many aspects of their lives. KYC has acknowledged here that for many indigenous people, education is only one part of their difficult struggle for equality-–but a very important starting point.

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portal.unesco.org/educati on/es/file_download.php/5 8657734c2feab2351bf6cdb05 4b43fdIEP+-+Nepal+Case+St udy.pdf