Article index
What Does a Book Do?
Books Offer Adventure
Getting Ready to Go
The Workshop
Nearing the End
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Books
offered adventure, solace, hope. Books helped me practice what it
was like to be grief-stricken and survive. To be wounded—and
survive. To be smashed to smithereens…and survive.
I knew the children watching their goats and watching us as we ran up
and down the path to the waterfalls had no books. The girls who came
to play had no books. The boys I heard chanting the fidel as I ran by
the school with its mud walls and straw roof had no books. But then I
had no tools to build a bridge between my world and theirs.
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Now, thanks to Ethiopia Reads, I do.
So it was that my brother and I decided to take a group of educators to
Ethiopia one summer to share the basic things almost every American
teacher or librarian does with a book. Hold it open wide so
children can see the pictures. Stop the story to ask, “What do
you think will happen?” Say, “Maybe something like that has
happened to you. Write a letter of advice to a struggling character who
doesn’t know what you know."
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Maria Gentle, a
librarian in Washington DC who works to make sure mothers in prison can
and will read aloud to their children, gave me the mantra that sat
above my computer: A person can’t share what he or she hasn’t
experienced.
In 2006 and 2007 I talked about the teacher-to-teacher project as I did
author visits in schools and spoke at conferences. People said those
four magic words: I want to go. We asked educators to apply, to
tell us about their international experiences, to explain their
approach to literacy. Ethiopia Reads staff and volunteers
selected twelve—from North Dakota, Washington DC, Kansas, Oregon,
California, New York, Washington, the Netherlands. We all started to
raise money for our expenses.
My brother and I decided it was time to seek advice from our older
sister, who sometimes leads groups of people who to see for themselves
what Ethiopian Christians are doing in their communities and
churches. “What was it like,” we asked, “to have twelve people in
your last group? Would you take that many again?”
She laughed. “I don’t know if my mistake was taking twelve people or the twelve people I took.”
“Twelve is too many,” Chris told me.
But I coveted what those twelve teachers and librarians knew. I
wanted the adults running the new Ethiopia Reads libraries (places
where many children were holding a book in their hands for the very
first time) to know how to do what teachers and librarians in the U.S.
know how to do. Since few Ethiopian elementary schools have any
books, I knew we’d be mostly training people who’d had no libraries or
classroom reading groups, themselves.
Spring 2007 arrived. Teachers continued to raise money and make
arrangements. Problems arose. Health problems. Family
problems. Money-raising problems. The group shrank to ten.
“Ten teachers and librarians? Still too many,” Chris said.
I was stubborn.
In the end, this was our group. Lisa, Alicia, Laura P, Rose,
Chris, Carolyn, Kristina, LeAnn, Pauline -- Jane (me), Laura B. , Audrey, and Catie. Thirteen in all. I would
try to provide guidance and glue. Laura B and Audrey would be
observers and go-fer girls. Catie would handle logistics.
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