International Adult Learners Week
in Europe

Network of Learning festivals

Dusica Kunaver - A broken bone heals stronger: Participant at the International Adult Learners Forum in October 2004 and in the International Adult Learners' Study Tour in May 2005

Learning accompanies me in all walks of life. Sometimes it is even a refuge. When my husband died in a helicopter accident twenty years ago, learning was my solution. I couldn't “afford” to mourn. I couldn't burden three children with my sadness. Apart from my regular job, I took a series of part-time jobs, and if I had any spare time I'd spend it in the National Library, among the ethnography books. I still wasn't thinking of ever writing a book. I started to produce notes and extracts in great quantities. This was a sort of logical continuation of the life I had with my husband. We were always typing something, writing articles, particularly about our Himalaya expeditions. He led six Slovenian mountaineering expeditions to the most difficult Himalayan rock faces.

Learning is a basic component of my life, leading to a career, a place in life, satisfaction, self- confidence, a good self-image and much else besides. I'm driven by a primary curiosity, but there have been many obstacles in the way; hardly anything can wither an old oak tree, while a sapling bends and breaks in the slightest wind. My youth was not an easy time – the war and its aftermath. When I began my studies, I wanted to study ethnography, but in a family with three children, it was inconceivable that our parents could educate all three of us. I got a job in an export company and began studying part-time – English, which I needed for my work. But I wanted to become a teacher – it's just something I was born for. I'm happy at the desk. Even today, after almost forty years, I still love teaching, although I haven’t reached this profession easily. I studied part-time all the way through.

Learning is a lifelong necessity, involving not just learning materials, but also human connections. The latter is even more important for teachers than for other professions. Once, when my pupils hurt me so much that I stormed out of the class, slamming the door behind me, I swallowed my tears and experienced one of those bitter moments that no teacher escapes. “Come back to class, Miss,” I heard a voice saying behind me, “I’ve calmed them down already!”

Robi was one of the naughtiest boys in the class. His voice was patronising but also gently friendly, something I'd never noticed in him before. I followed him quietly back to the class. He opened the door and held it for me – as I had taught them at one of our classes. When I entered the classroom, all the pupils were standing quietly, without a word. I turned towards the blackboard, on which there was written in large letters: LOVE US.

“But I do love you, my pupils!” I burst out. We said the magic words, each in our own way. There were no winners and no losers, but in a classroom that had just suffered a wild storm, warm sunshine had returned. How much I have to learn from children! I had the best job in the world.

The third age of life brings new challenges. Two areas come to the fore: in addition to education, patriotism. Whenever I give a talk in a retirement home, I often encounter the following situation: when I arrive, they sit down unwillingly and wearily. I usually begin by talking about what some wedding celebration, such as those in Gorenjska, was like. I already see how their eyes begin to light up, how they raise their heads, and start to explain what weddings were like in their village ... we sing folk songs, and suddenly songs reverberate around the room, and when I forget the words, someone knows a tenth verse, another the eleventh ... and then suddenly we have a little piece of folk treasure. All of this must be published, written down, preserved ... We only have five, maybe ten years left, and this generation will die. We will lose the last generation that have lived the life of the old Slovenian village.

The more I work, the more I'm able to do. The more I learn, the more I'm able to teach. I've become so used to this that I can't live any other way. At the moment it would be very difficult to stop this engine. As long as I'm healthy, as long as I can meet all my obligations, I don't want to stop it either. Work strengthens and maintains health, and drives out ill feelings. Retirement is far from being the end of everything; rather it is the start of something new. This period opens up new horizons. When you retire, things see the light of day that for various reasons you couldn't achieve before. I now give talks all over the place, I write ethnographical and educational books, publishing them myself. So far, this has led to more than sixty independent literary units. Self-publishing is also learning how to realise your own plans despite the obstacles. Of all my plans, I would most like to make a film about the Himalayan expeditions led by my husband Ale‰. It's about the right to grow – but someone has to enable it. Some pensioners feel like experienced masters who want to teach young people how to do various things. Others feel that they must withdraw, since their flowers have stopped blooming. Older people should have the right to guide, which means that they could openly pass on their experience to younger people. We continually learn from one another. As older people, we also have much to learn from the young. Particularly today, in the electronic age, grandchildren often teach their grandparents. Without my children or grandchildren, I'm sometimes completely lost in front of my computer.

Marino Kacic

Marino was blinded in an accident at 23. Later,he studied social work, receiving the highest award of the faculty for his diploma. He completed 7 years of training in psychotherapy, became a yoga trainer and a healer. He is in the management team of a society helping children with behavioural and learning difficulties. He works with and develops programmes to rehabilitate people who become blind later in life. He occasionally works as an outside expert at the faculty, where he tries to enable students to experience and understand handicaps. He plans to enrol for a master's degree. He’s living on his own.

A fraction of a second before the accident, that day in May, I realized what would happen in the next few moments. I knew that one of the mines we'd just placed to blast the rocky Karst terrain and make an excavation would explode. I knew that something terrible would happen to us. I heard a deafening explosion, and at the same time I was thrown far back, injuring my arm, face and eyes. While this was happening memories were flashing by: the vegetable soup I'd eaten a few hours earlier; how scared I was when I was cross-country skiing; how despite being ill, I went to take my graduation exam and was delighted by my success; how I tortured myself in sixth year learning English; how enthusiastic I had been about a black and white checked cap I got for my third birthday. And so on back, experience by experience, all the way to my birth. Later, as I lay in the clinic in a twelve-day struggle for survival, the same thing happened, ending with what is termed clinical death. Life literally ran out. Since then, I've been driven by curiosity and a desire to learn. On the other hand, it was the need to survive, since I was socially and occupationally incapable of living. A feeling of joy for being alive, and a feeling of suffering because I couldn't live the way I used to. Something whispered inside me: Just keep going, keep going, keep going. As soon I was allowed to stand up in the hospital, drip bottle in hand I groped my way to the end of my bed and back. A real achievement. An hour's rest later, I set out on another adventure, this time across the passage to my neighbour's bed. A marathon effort. After a short break, and encouraged by my previous achievements, I extended my journey to the door, then later to the corridor and after that to the stairway. I had a clear goal – the payphone on the ground floor. I made it the next day. All I had to discover was how to insert a token and to type a telephone number. A new horizon opened up to me, driving me to new learning. I had enough strength in my hands to push a wheelchair carrying my room-mate with a broken pelvis. He lent me his eyes, steering me as I pushed the wheelchair, while I contributed my arms and legs. We went to the hospital park and even to the canteen. We joked: “Two of us flat out, just enough for one normal person.”

My helpless circumstances forced me to learn everything anew: from movement, basic perception and communication skills and a new profession to how to find my own place among people, in social environments. I suspected that if I didn't succeed, I'd be doomed to vegetating and marginalisation. And on top of all that, the accident destroyed my view of the world. I had dozens of unanswered questions, and I wanted to know what had happened to me, where the limits of life are, how people live, what is spirituality? I had to seek, seek, seek… In books, among healers, Yogis, scientists…I encountered the special (sub)culture of the blind and partially sighted, where at first in my own way I ruffled some feathers with my alternative views, searching and ideas. I enrolled to study social
work, although I never imagined I would ever do such work. I come from a technically-minded family on my father's side. The men in our family were innovators. On my mother's side, the door was always open to the homeless and hungry, and those in need of understanding. I was faced with a new, unknown life. I had to learn from day to day. It's not easy to go to school until you learn to see by sound and touch. A professor at the faculty invited me to be a student volunteer at a summer camp for children and young people with learning, behavioural and other mental problems. At the first camp, I managed to establish good contacts with three or four. Over the course of the year, and with great effort, I developed a way to remember greater numbers of people. I gradually became a group leader for children, colleagues, self help groups ... The unimaginable happened. I'm now finishing my ECP psychotherapy studies (European Certificate for Psychotherapy). In recent years, I've been working as a trained therapist with individuals, families and people with disabilities. Learning has become fuel for my soul, like food is for my body. Nature gave me my life back. I'm gradually, albeit with difficulty, becoming more established in official circles. And sight isn't the only barrier, handicap is just as difficult an obstacle. Handicap is a barrier in relations, arising from doubts, fear and prejudice. I recognised that patience is one of the best responses to such barriers. I try to give myself and other people enough time so that we can recognise each other's potentials and qualities. Although I can't see, I do just about everything I need for a normal life. You become “normal” when a seeing person forgets that you don’t see. Sometimes people say to me: “When things were tough, when I felt I couldn’t go on, I thought of you. I said to myself: if Marino can do it, it’s only right that I should try too!”