India- Saksharta Niketan, or Literacy House, which she founded, has become the means of fulfilling Gandhi’s commission. First established at Allahabad in 1953, its permanent headquarters were moved four years later to Lucknow.
- Since 1958 some 3,000 elected village councilmen and voluntary leaders have been instructed in the responsibilities of their new offices. Two continuous programs teach women to become community development workers.
- She was 72 years old when memory of Gandhi’s insistent plea encouraged her to work with the Allahabad Agricultural Institute in making technical knowledge understandable in the villages.
- The RMAF Board of Trustees recognizes her unstinting personal commitment to the cause of literacy in India and other Asian countries whose teachers have sought her guidance.
WELTHY FISHER, now 84, still is responding vitally to the plea of her late friend, Mohandas K. Gandhi: “Go to the villages and help them. India is the villages.”
Saksharta Niketan, or Literacy House, which she founded, has become the means of fulfilling Gandhi’s commission. First established at Allahabad in 1953, its permanent headquarters were moved four years later to Lucknow. Over the past 11 years, it has trained nearly 7,000 literacy teachers. These men and women have taught simple reading and writing to an estimated one and one-half million villagers and city laborers, for whom learning to write their own names made the difference between “being nobody and becoming someone.”
Once villagers achieve functional literacy using carefully prepared primers, they are given simple readers on hygiene, local government, farming and other subjects of immediate concern in day-to-day living. The 55 books especially written and published by Literacy House for new readers circulate through mobile Tin Trunk Libraries, often carried on the rear of bicycles. A weekly newspaper in Hindi, Ujala, keeps new literates abreast of events. For writers encouraged to develop these constructive, popular materials, a quarterly, Lekhak, provides a forum of intellectual exchange. Among other techniques for mass communication now in use, the ancient art of puppetry is proving highly effective in imparting ideas.
Located on a grassy plain near the capital of Uttar Pradesh, one of the largest states of North India, Literacy House increasingly is called upon by national and state governments and semi-government agencies for social education. Since 1958 some 3,000 elected village councilmen and voluntary leaders have been instructed in the responsibilities of their new offices. Two continuous programs teach women to become community development workers. Adding an international dimension — other than financing from Canada, India and the United States — have been teacher-trainees from Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines, Sarawak and the Tibetan refugee community.
In keeping with its founder’s concept, “in a surrounding close to nature life flows with dignity and grace” on the campus of Literacy House. The modest red-brick buildings, including hostels for 100, were designed for function and unostentatious comfort. Welcoming everyone is a central House of Prayer for All Peoples, respecting diverse beliefs and acknowledging one God.
WELTHY FISHER, who mobilized talents and resources and led in this effort, first came to Asia in 1906. As the young American headmistress of a mission school in Nanchang, deep in Central China, she helped educate a new type of modern Chinese woman in a time of turbulent transition from Manchu Empire to Republic. World War I brought her to France in service with the YWCA to do welfare work among Chinese laborers in munition factories. Married in 1924 to the Right Reverend Frederick Bohn Fisher, Methodist Bishop of India and Burma, she shared joyously in his extraordinary mission and close friendship with India’s spiritual leaders.
Loss of her husband in 1938 led Mrs. FISHER to fourteen years of travel, writing and lecturing about educational systems she studied in South America, the Middle East and Asia. She was 72 years old when memory of Gandhi’s insistent plea encouraged her to work with the Allahabad Agricultural Institute in making technical knowledge understandable in the villages. From this beginning grew her vision of a house to help in some measure India’s 320 million illiterates. For this work she found expression in the lines of a mystic Oriental poet: “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”
In electing WELTHY HONSINGER FISHER to receive the 1964 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding, the Board of Trustees recognizes her unstinting personal commitment to the cause of literacy in India and other Asian countries whose teachers have sought her guidance.
In accepting this award this afternoon, I should like to title the few words I have to say as “Dedication to Man.”
Reflection on the thoughts and life work of a great man brings us to a solemn moment. Such a moment is this. We are here to remember — to remember the dedication of life of your late great president Ramon Magsaysay and its world-resounding emphasis on man.
A half century ago an American seer, Edwin Markham, wrote words that were indelibly graven in the life of the man we honor today:
We are all blind until we see
That in the human plan,
Nothing is worth the making
That doesn’t make the man.
Why build these cities glorious
If man unbuilded goes.
In vain we build the work
Unless the builder also grows.
To accept such a sensitive award as this is to accept the challenge of a life lived for the uplift of man—not only for the citizens of the Republic of the Philippines but for man everywhere on the globe.
In this era of a world, not “shrunken” but of an ever-enlarging world of communication—a whispering gallery, if you will the challenge takes on a world-wide aspect—the aspect of man. Since I come from Lincoln’s country, I may use his words to say:
It is. . . for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us . . . that we here highly resolve . . . that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
Such a dedication was also that of your great president who now, after a short 57 years, belongs to the ages.
It was my privilege in the early years of service in China to know the great Chinese liberator, Sun Yat-sen, who lived many a year with a heavy price on his head because he was dedicated to man — to man’s freedom and his inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In later years I have sat on the floor with the great Gandhi, sometimes meditating with him on his Monday day of silence, at other times hearing him tell, laughingly, humanly, of the vast undertaking of the liberation of hundreds of millions in India. He always differentiated between the sinner and the sin — forgiving the sinner but hating the sin of those who refused justice and freedom to men.
In this sparse line of those dedicated to the service of man — man beyond their racial, religious and national borders — stands your late stalwart president.
I accept this award with the humility of one who has tried to light a candle for physical, mental and spiritual enlightening in some of the far corners of the earth, for I have discovered that illiteracy is darkness. There are stairs of literacy that must be built. It has been my striving to build some of these stairs of literacy here and there. The stairs are crude and difficult, as the late Olive Schreiner said hers were, but others will come after me and they will climb — and on my stairs. And soon a world — a world half in the darkness of illiteracy — will begin to climb, to make better stairs and finally reach the top step in individual freedom and development. Man, the child of God, will come into his own. I have long believed with the oriental wise man, that “it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.”