Alexander Lukashenka believes "you can't say something great in Belarusian". These people think differently. CC BY 2.0: Marco Fieber / Flickr. Some rights reserved.Tatyana Borisevich (name changed) is a researcher at the History Institute of the National Academy of Sciences. Belarusian being the language spoken by her family at home, Tatyana wanted to send her daughter to a Belarusian-language kindergarten, only to find that none existed in the surrounding area. Borisevich was advised to reach out to other parents in the same position with a view to organising a children's group.
“I thought our efforts would be enough to ensure Belarusian-language schooling for my daughter. The education department of the administration of Minsk’s Moscovsky District, where we live, were supportive and very friendly. And there was a particular cynicism in that. The official politely explained that there were no Belarusian-speaking groups near our home. They suggested that I either take my daughter to a kindergarten that’s far away from us, or else that I find other local parents keen for their kids to receive Belarusian-language schooling. But I couldn’t find any,” Tatyana complains.
The same thing happened when Tatyana’s daughter started school. Tatyana was presented with a similar choice: she could either ferry her little girl to a Belarusian school halfway across town, or she could send her to the Russian-language school down the road. Tatyana and her family are convinced that their right to choose their child’s language of instruction has been infringed: “We settled for Russian-language schooling because it would’ve been very difficult, physically speaking, to ferry her across town — we don’t have any nannies or grandmas to lend a helping hand.”
