Seven Days of Giving: Clive

We are halfway to our goal of $10,000. Thank you to all who have donated! For the last seven days of the Giving Season, I’ll be posting stories about the work we do teaching adults to read.

Today, meet Clive.

Clive was brought into my GED tutoring program by an administrator who stage-whispered to me, “I don’t know what to do with him!”

He was a Black man in his 60’s in a workman’s uniform. He looked so tired; I remember wanting to give him a seat. Because I didn’t know how difficult it would be, I said, “Sure, let’s try!”  And thus Clive became our first literacy student. Even as we floundered to figure out how to teach him, he came every night after work and patiently waited for us to figure out how to teach him to read.

As we got to know each other Clive told his story. His father was dying of cancer. His grown daughter had a possibly terminal disease.  Both were looking to him for help.

Talking to his boss one day at work, he broke down and cried over how helpless he felt and how it all went back to this one thing: “this damn reading”. He sobbed to his boss over this lifetime of frustration and helplessness. I heard Clive tell this story many times. He would pantomime his boss’ arms hugging him and patting him on the back. And then his boss took him outside, hailed a taxi, and brought him to the literacy program where I worked.

None of us knew how hard it would be to teach Clive how to read. Like most adult education programs in the U.S., we weren’t set up for low-skilled readers. There were no materials, no curriculum, no methods for effectively teaching adults to read. We had to start from scratch.

Clive was one of the people who helped us create what became the Volunteer Literacy Project. He was there night after night for our mistakes, our false starts, and finally our wins. He later told me that the first year of tutoring gave him agonizing headaches. But he kept coming. Even at age 60, it was worth excruciating pain to learn how to read.

Will you donate to our project so that hardworking adults like Clive can get the help they are looking for?