Making literacy a family affair

Four evenings a week, 13 women from Long Island City - Queensbridge and Ravenswood Housing Developments - gather in their local library with their kids and grandchildren to learn English and practical information like how to start bank accounts and begin building financial credit.
More than half of the women are from the Dominican Republic and the rest are from Mexico. Some have been in the country for less than two weeks, while others have lived in New York for years but have never mastered the English language.
Only Rosa Cepeda, 38, who serves as the class' assistant, speaks English well enough to translate for the other women. She has been in this country since 1986 and wants to help the other women improve and work on her own conversation skills.
&#8220I'm involved because it's families and children learning together,” she said. &#8220Sometimes the kids don't have time to share with the parents.”
Their teachers are two women from the library - Elaine Roberts and Dulcilene Dalcin, who handles childhood instruction. Once a week, children meet with Dalcin separately to read books and study for state tests, but three-days-a-week the class, entitled the Family Literacy Program, meets all together so that the children can help the women learn.
Cepeda said that besides learning words and phrases to go grocery shopping and to get medical help during an emergency, the women desperately want to save money to buy homes and move out of public housing.
&#8220I would like to have my parents living with me,” she said, describing her dream home with enough room for her three children, nieces and nephews, guests and grandkids. Her dream, she said, is a long way off because she barely scrapes by now and cannot imagine how she can save up enough to buy a house. Cepeda, like many of the women, saves money in a &#8220solciedad,” a cooperative system with neighborhoods where one person collects money each month then gives it out to the investors in turn - without any interest. Still, Cepeda hopes that by the time her grandchildren are born she will have realized the dream - her oldest child is 15 so that could be a long way off.
During class, Cepeda and the other students built model homes - from wood, cardboard, glue, Popsicle sticks, and fabric. The families decorated the town of &#8220dream” houses, now on display at the main branch of the Queens Public Library in Flushing, intricately - some have Christmas trees, others pools, some sparking with glitter, and one with a tiny corrugated roof.
Sol Delarosa and her husband Ramone made a flourishing flower garden from sticks and tissue paper, and Ruth O'Neil and her two daughters, Genesis, 10, and Pamela, 5, drew an itty-bitty picture of their three-person family to hang within their home.
When asked how she plans to own a house one day, O'Neil said, &#8220I think the first [step] is to get a good job and save money.”
O'Neil had been a librarian in the Dominican Republic, and during the classes, she always learns about the Dewey Decimal system as well as phrases she can use in laundromats and restaurants. Once a new library opens in Long Island City - the planned Queens West branch - O'Neil's teachers will help her apply for a job there.
For most of the women, finding work in America is difficult they said because they speak little or no English.
For Juana Gomez, the new words and phrases come in handy as she preps to become a home health aide in February. For the home project, Juana and her 10-year-old grandson Jeremy Taveras made a beach house covered in windows - like ones in the rich neighborhoods of the Dominican Republic. Taveras said that their model is a tropical house with two bedrooms for six people - him, his grandmother, his mom Maria, and his three brothers and sisters.
All but one of Juana's nine children still lives in the Dominican Republic, and the whole family would love to return there one day, Cepeda translated for Juana. However, in America, there is more work and better pay.
&#8220She [Juana] says everybody wants to come to America because they say, ‘Maybe it's better over here than in our country,'” Cepeda translated.
Anyone interested in joining the free Family Literacy Program, should go to the Queensbridge Library, located at 10-43 41st Avenue between 5:30 and 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays.