ABSTRACT
Eight women bent over their notebooks in a tiny, one-room hut in the steamy countryside of El Salvador. Tightly clutching their pencils, lost in concentration, they each struggled with what they intended to write about the day’s topic. Celia gazed over the heads of her classmates as she silently ordered her thoughts before committing the next sentence to paper. Deonicia reviewed her brief writing, searching for the breaks between “words,” trying to make sure that she had “left spaces.” Chunga wrote steadily, remembering the horrors of the war as her pencil moved across the page. Margarita’s pencil pressed relentlessly into her paper, and her voice could just be heard above the background clamor of farm animals and children playing as she struggled to hear the sounds in her words, trying to match those sounds to newly learned letters.
