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The Workshop
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Article index
What Does a Book Do?
Books Offer Adventure
Getting Ready to Go
The Workshop
Nearing the End
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Trainees
scooched their chairs to form small groups, to talk to each other, to
talk to us. As part of one conversation, I drew a picture to try
to ask a small group of young women whether they got the delight I did
from a particular phrase in one of Ethiopia Reads’s bilingual books: The Beekeeper of Lalibela.
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Alicia won over the skeptics who swore wordless picture books couldn’t
be real books. When our trainees asked us why we hadn’t bought them a
training manual, Laura P leaped in to start creating one.
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In most Ethiopian schools, writing means
that a teacher composes or copies a sentence on a blackboard or some
other surface. Students copy the sentence, patiently waiting
their turn for one of the three classroom pencils.
Alicia showed the trainees how to write their own stories, using the
wordless picture books. Rose, Carolyn, and Chris shared another new
idea: people write about their lives. People want to say this is what
it is like to be me in the world.  |
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Chris in the late 1980's.
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Chris—who had once been a teacher in
a private Ethiopian school—was the only one of us with enough Amharic
to share the books with the group. |
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read aloud from the books in the sets Selam would deliver when we were
done. Thanks to Alicia’s fundraising in and around Hilton, NYwe
were able to deliver books to each of the libraries. One
afternoon, we visited the libraries in some of the schools where our
workshop participants have the assignment to shape some of the very
first elementary library programs. Back at Shola, we talked about
how to evaluate nonfiction. How to care for books so the pages
won’t be destroyed. How to approach a book from the perspective
of multiple intelligences. How to talk about beginning, middle,
and end. Lisa and Pauline, the two librarians, met with 5-10 of
theworkshop participants each afternoon to talk about the realities of
their libraries. In Ethiopia, we learned, if a book disappears
from a library, the librarian has to pay for it. |
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| “Is this useful?” we asked from time to
time. “Do you understand?” and “Where are we
misunderstanding? Where are we missing the boat?” |