In France, 1.4 million people cannot read or write.
This illiteracy is often seen as a shame by the adults who suffer from it.
Mario, who decided to return to school at the age of 43, spoke this weekend in the TF1 magazine “Reportages Découverte”.
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Write a check, read a story to your child, send a letter… Actions that seem simple, but which cause great difficulty for people suffering from illiteracy. Not knowing how to read and write is a handicap in daily life today. However, many adults refuse this inevitability, believing that it is never too late to learn, as shown in the video from the TF1 magazine “Reportages Découverte” at the top of this article.
Among them, Mario. At 43, he runs his own pruning business near Château-Gontier, in Mayenne. However, he never learned to read and write: “I know the trees, but on paper, I don’t know them”he admits. It can take up to an hour to read a simple A4 sheet, always afraid of making a mistake. Comfortable on construction sites, he is much less comfortable when invoicing. He gets help from his 23-year-old son, who works alongside him: “I don’t even know how he managed it because in terms of paperwork, I’m the one who manages everything”explains the young man.
But today, this father of five children is determined to make up for his shortcomings and start from scratch: “I'm fed up. At first, I was ashamed. I know there are people in my situation who don't dare, but you have to dare.” What clicked it? A business trip where he made a mistake on his GPS. While he wanted to go to Lourdes (Hautes-Pyrénées), he found himself… in Haute-Loire, 500 km further north.
As a child, he hardly went to school
In a caravan that serves as his office, Mario spends several hours on Sunday, his only weekly day off, studying French. Stéphane, a friend who teaches economics, gives him lessons on a voluntary basis. Together, they review the sounds of the letters and gradually learn to decipher syllables, then sentences. If Mario has so many difficulties, it is because he went to school very little as a child: “I was raised by my stepfather but I always had to take care of my brothers and sisters, do the cleaning, eat… In one year, I went to class maybe two or three times. Today 'Today, I'm mad at my mom'he confides in front of the TF1 camera.
During the report, Stéphane opens, thanks to donations, a school specializing in the fight against illiteracy. For Mario, returning to school is a real revenge on life. But although he has made progress in reading, writing still remains a very delicate stage. Accompanied by his teachers, Mario is more motivated than ever to overcome his “handicap” who ruined his life for so many years.
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The pruner is not the only one to have started this apprenticeship. In this report, Aline, a 62-year-old from Toulouse, also tells her story. After learning to read and write at age 50, she published an autobiographical book which she will now talk about in schools.
