ABSTRACT
Valerie Miller's passionate account of the Nicaraguan literacy crusade makes exhilarating reading. She was one of the overseas volunteer-expert-sympathiser-co-celebrators to join the leaders of the successful liberation movement which had toppled Somoza in 1979. The contrast with the Kenyan and Indian – also national, centrally planned, governmental – campaigns is dramatic. The Nicaraguan crusade was announced fifteen days after liberation and ran, after seven and a half months of planning, from late March to mid-August 1980. Nicaragua's story resembles other classic literacy-out-of-liberation experiences of newly liberated societies – the Soviet Union and China, Tanzania, Cuba and Vietnam. Resources were very limited, since the civil war had left the country virtually bankrupt, and almost isolated in an economically, ideologically and militarily hostile region – a predicament which continues to threaten the existence of revolutionary Nicaragua. The previous Indian account is perhaps more pertinent, with more object-lessons, for most countries facing extremes of poverty and educational disadvantage, than is the Nicaraguan.
