A Dream of Books
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Gebregeorgis Yohannes's Dream of Books for Ethiopia
Note: Jane Kurtz participated in the Celebrate America's Authors
event held on January 19, 2001, in conjunction with President George W.
Bush's Inaugural events. Laura Bush was the host of the event at
Constitution Hall. Throughout Jane's trip she made many connections to
people. The following story of Gebregeorgis Yohannes and his efforts to
bring books to his home country is one that Jane was able to share with
Mentwab Mengesha, an Ethiopian woman she met at Washington's National Airport.
This is one of the strange ironies of my Washington
experience: The United States has many wonderful new books published
every year and no easy way for most of those books to find readers.
Ethiopia, on the other hand, has a rich and ancient tradition of
story-telling, readers hungry for books, and not even one children's
picture book. Thanks to lots of the contact between Ethiopian and
American cultures in the last twenty years, that's about to change.
Gebregeorgis Yohannes, a young man who was born in
Negelel Borena in southern Ethiopia, is determined to produce
Ethiopia's first full-color picture book. In the 1980s, Yohannes joined
a huge number of people fleeing hunger and war and ended up in the
United States where he worked for eight years at Methodist Hospital in
Houston and then earned a BA degree at University of Buffalo-New York
and later an MLIS degree from University of Texas-Austin. Now, he is a
senior librarian with the San Francisco Public Library.
As Yohannes says, now his life "abounds with books," but
he never held a book in his hands (outside of school) until he was 19.
He has a vision of being able to reach some of the millions of
Ethiopian kids who have never read a book. (In Ethiopia around 65% of
the population can't read and write. For women, the rate is even
higher, around 75%. A recent UNESCO-UNICEF report noted that 90% of the
schools in Ethiopia have no electricity.)
Yohannes first formed a small publishing company in the
United States, African Sun. One of his most successful books was The
ABGD Ethiopian Alphabet: Amharic-English for Beginners. Then he formed
a non-profit organization, Ethiopian Books for Children and Educational
Foundation (EBCEF), gathered about 5000 donated books, and looked for
ways to raise money to start a book and education center in Addis
Ababa. Recently, he took a leave of absence from his job to go to
Ethiopia and see what he could get started.
My brother, Christopher, who teaches English as a Second
Language (ESL) in Portland, and I are both on the Board of Directors
for EBCEF. Through the efforts of First Presbyterian Church in Grand
Forks and some friends who have lived in or had other connections with
Ethiopia, I helped raise $5000.00 this fall toward Yohannes's book
dream. Yohannes, now in Addis Ababa, has been talking with an Ethiopian
artist and is close to having the first full-color picture book in
Amarinya and English underway. Unfortunately, printing costs have risen
since he was last in Ethiopia, so we're back to trying to figure out
the money end of things, once again.
Shipping books to Ethiopia is difficult and expensive,
but at some point we may be ready for more book donations. In the
meantime, if anyone would like to help financially, go to www.ethiopiareads.org where one can make a donation electronically.
Yemiyanebu Yabebu...
those who read, bloom. |