Extension project B

For my literary sponsorship interview I asked one of my friends at western to tell me about anything that influenced her literacy. After thinking about the question for a few minutes she told me that her biggest literary sponsor is also the most influential person in her life. Throughout most of her childhood her father had cancer, so a great deal of time was spent in the hospital. She says “After surgeries and while receiving treatment he would spend hours and hours in the hospital bed, he would read to me the whole time I was there” during the period of time when her father was not in the hospital he would read to her at home. Her father taught her how to read, since she spent so much time with him she said “just from him guiding his finger over the words while I was looking at the page I learned how read on my own before the first grade”. At one point her father’s cancer went away, but sadly it returned shortly after and this time it was much worse. He died when she was nine years old and in the last few days up until his death he continued to read to her. While he was sick “he wrote me a letter to open on my sixteenth birthday, it’s not very long but it means a lot to me” this influenced her in a literary was because through his writing she could in a sense communicate with her father again. She went on to say that “Even if he was still alive I can’t think of another person who has had a bigger impact on my life. It’s been 12 years since he passed but when I read that letter I can’t help but think about how I used to listen to him read books to me for hours when I was little” when she tells me all of this it makes me kind of sad and that I take the things that have influenced me for granted, I can’t imagine how she feels having all of those memories come back to her. Having something like this happen at a young age is very difficult, seeing how it impacted her only makes me see how lucky most people are; not that their sponsors now seem less significant, but that most people don’t have a literacy sponsor that made them develop in such a traumatic way.