“A literate world will bring us closer to a peaceful world.” Those were the words of Rotary Club of Peachtree City Literacy Chair Brenda Erickson on the SounsAfrica project conceived and sponsored by the Rotary organization and the Interact Club it sponsors at Counterpane Montessori School in Fayetteville.

Half a world away, South Africa’s Knysna Education Trust coordinator Annette Nelson sits in a classroom for disadvantaged toddlers at the Eyethu Pre-school. She opens a bag and begins pulling out letters of the English alphabet one at a time. Nelson first shows the children an “O” and makes the sound of an “O.” She passes other Os to the young children as they begin to respond to the sound.

Nelson follows in kind with the letters M, S, T, P, E and I as she makes the sounds. Though their ages range from six months to two years, Nelson said the young children quickly picked up the idea of forming the sounds associated with the letters they can touch as they hold them in their hands. The tactile component simply reinforces the language component, Nelson explained.

This is SounsAfrica, the educational concept that starts very young children on the road to literacy.

Peachtree City Rotary and Counterpane Montessori have been joined by rotary clubs in Newnan, Cairo, Henry County and Bainbridge to continue and expand the SounsAfrica literacy program. One of those efforts is the annual Counterpane Golf Classic at Whitewater Country Club in Peachtree City.

Norman Hough, a teacher at Counterpane who is originally from South Africa recently delivered a set of Souns materials to the children at one of the pre-schools near Knysna. She said the current efforts have impacted the lives of 1,000 children this year.

“These very disadvantaged children from townships in South Africa have little hope without the help of benevolent-minded people, groups and organizations like Rotary,” Erickson said in a recent letter. “The impact of the Souns program on these children has been so positive that as many as 38 pre-schools under the guardianship of the Knysna Education Trust are now interested in the Sons program. These schools are small and survive only by the assistance of organizations such as Rotary. South Africa has 11 official languages, but the common denominator of these languages is the print symbol. Although there are variations, the majority of the letters have the same or very similar sound in the different languages. A literate world will bring us closer to a peaceful world.”

Erickson will be making another trip to South Africa in coming months. With SounsAfrica building steam, Erickson said Rotary International is interested in introducing and expanding the program to the countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

Nelson in a letter last year thanked Erickson and Rotary for their initiative and their gifts of the Souns materials.

“With sincerest thanks for your Souns brainchild, we have the opportunity to change the future generations, for at present we as a nation are spending funds and many hours on adult literacy classes. Rotary, both local and international, has understood the continual drive for literacy and I can think of no project more worthy than investing in Souns,” Nelson said. “At the rapid rate at which children of a young age hunger for stimulation and knowledge, we will have language skills and literacy at a whole new level in a space of time that no one would have ever conceived possible.”

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