Af­ter on­ly one term I feel more com­mit­ted to Al­ta than ever. My faith in hu­man na­ture has been re­newed.

Week af­ter week I wit­ness the courage and ded­i­ca­tion of peo­ple who have dis­cov­ered the pow­er with­in them­selves to make a dif­fer­ence in their own lives and in those around them.

Some stu­dents have not missed a sin­gle ses­sion. Most come af­ter a long day at work, jug­gling com­mit­ments and giv­ing up rest time. Their mere pres­ence is tes­ta­ment of their will­ing­ness to make learn­ing a pri­or­i­ty. If they could put so much ef­fort in­to im­prov­ing them­selves then I feel a huge re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to be a part of that, to be a part of a move­ment that is so em­pow­er­ing and life giv­ing.

So from last Sep­tem­ber I start­ed putting my train­ing to the test. As things un­fold­ed cer­tain truths about the pro­gramme struck me. Al­ta's lessons are very well thought out. The ma­te­r­i­al is ap­pro­pri­ate and rel­e­vant to every­day life. The top­ics range from healthy lifestyles, and good lis­ten­ing skills to re­la­tion­ships and so much more to which the stu­dents can read­i­ly re­late.

Most, if not all the ma­te­r­i­al is lo­cal in con­tent and this im­pacts on the stu­dents. When lo­cal food, fes­ti­vals and even our na­tive lan­guage is val­i­dat­ed, peo­ple are af­firmed and their con­fi­dence is en­hanced. They come to have a pos­i­tive view of things lo­cal and more so about them­selves.

I re­call the joy on the face of one stu­dent who beamed with pride when he saw his own recipe of smoked her­ring pelau in print. An­oth­er one open­ly ad­mit­ted it was be­cause of Al­ta that he had stopped smok­ing for more than two years. He as­sured us that if he didn't know be­fore, he was sure now that he had to will pow­er to quit per­ma­nent­ly. There is so much learn­ing tak­ing place on dif­fer­ent lev­els in an Al­ta class­room, some of it un­con­scious­ly and some in­di­rect­ly.

The jour­ney is dif­fer­ent for each per­son. Some need a lit­tle more at­ten­tion and the op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­alise their po­ten­tial, oth­ers sim­ply need some­one to be­lieve in them. But there is one thing com­mon to all of which I am cer­tain, every­one ben­e­fits from the class­es, stu­dents and tu­tors. Noth­ing can beat the thrill when a stu­dent is able to read new words or spell new words cor­rect­ly be­cause they have ap­plied a skill pre­vi­ous­ly taught. Any lit­tle im­prove­ment brings about a deep sense of ful­fil­ment.

Al­ta is very well or­gan­ised and there is a lot of sup­port. I am still learn­ing and re­fin­ing my tu­tor­ing skills, al­ways look­ing for more ef­fec­tive ways to reach the stu­dents, but I feel con­fi­dent know­ing there are more ex­pe­ri­enced tu­tors who are al­ways ready to jump in if ever there is any dif­fi­cul­ty. There is an abun­dance of re­source ma­te­r­i­al, books and games which are read­i­ly avail­able to re­in­force skills. AL­TA al­so caters to dif­fer­ing needs. There were a cou­ple of stu­dents who on­ly need­ed help with spelling so they were re­ferred to a pro­gramme de­signed spe­cial­ly for that. Oth­ers have been en­cour­aged to join the Read­ing Cir­cle.

The first term whizzed by. We end­ed with a won­der­ful Christ­mas par­ty with de­li­cious food pre­pared by the stu­dents. It was so touch­ing when some stu­dents shared what AL­TA meant to them. It was clear they had re­alised some­thing of great im­por­tance, that they had the will to con­quer set backs and the pow­er to trans­form their own lives. I had al­so ben­e­fit­ted tremen­dous­ly. The most valu­able les­son be­ing, it is en­rich­ing the lives of oth­ers and my own life is en­riched.

(Writ­ten by Rose­marie Ol­liv­erre)

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