You cannot reference a block in the list with a string. what you can do is make a 2D list.
eg:
list = [['b', 'test1'],['a','test2'],['c','test3']]
this way list[0] = ['b', 'test1'] and list[0][0] = 'b'
not you can sort the list with the unicode values of a,b and c using the ord() function a simple bubble sort... python might even have a sort() function for