Have you ever known someone who couldn’t read or write?

I don’t mean a young child. I’m talking about a grown adult. Someone who could be your mom or grandma.

I’d never met anyone who couldn’t read or write. I grew up in suburbia central Florida in a Grade A school district. I’d only heard about people not being able to read in history books when someone had to make a mark on a ticket in order to vote.

I’d never even used the word “illiterate” in a regular conversation. Perhaps, only when joking with friends and making fun of each other.

And now, here I was, on a short-term mission trip to Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua, filling out people’s information for a community health clinic. Many names were so foreign to me that I had no hope of spelling them correctly. Instead, I would hand them paper and a pencil to write it so I could copy the name onto the official form.

Then, it happened. Someone with an impossible name – to my culturally-insensitive ears – sat down at my station. Just hearing them say it sounded like mumbling. Asking them to repeat it made it worse. Finally, I slid the paper and pencil over to them and asked them to write it down.

“I can’t.”

This concept did not register to a kid with a 3.8 GPA and Honors English classes. I stared blankly at her and said the most culturally-insensitive thing I could, given the situation.

“Huh?”

She cast her eyes downward and repeated herself. I immediately felt the heat of embarrassment, partly from her and partly from myself. I took the paper back and got someone more qualified to handle the job.

During the course of our lives, we pick up definitions of ourselves. We have words that describe us. They are part of who and what we are. They create expectations of us, a sort of box in which we live.

In that moment, her box had a big label: illiteracy.

One of LifeLink International’s largest ministries is an educational facility on the same property as the aforementioned clinic. We teach children to read as young as five years old. It’s a core part of the curriculum.

We never want one of our students to live in the box of illiteracy.