Our current focus on Mongolia would be incomplete without a full mention of poet, writer and librarian extraordinaire, Dashdondog Jamba, who set up Mongolia’s Mobile Children’s Library more than twenty years ago in order to bring books to children even in the remotest parts of the country. We are delighted to be able to bring you a reprint of an article from IBBY’s Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature written by Dashdondog, “With the Mobile Library Through the Seasons“. Do head over to the main PaperTigers website and read it for some fascinating insight into the Mobile Library service, through this detailed description of one of its journeys. Originally the library was transported by oxcart or camel; now there is a van which clocks up thousands of kilometers every year. The library won the 2006 IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award and features in Margriet Ruurs‘ book My Librarian is a Camel: How Books are Brought to Children Around the World.

As well as ensuring that Mongolian children have access to books from all over the world, Dashdondog Jamba (sometimes also written as Jambyn) is himself the author of more than seventy children’s books. Not many are available in English but you can get a tantalising glimpse of some of them here, at the ICDL. A collection of his retellings of Mongolian Folktales was published recently and is currently our Book of the Month. Dashdondog was instrumental in setting up the Mongolian sections of both SCBWI and IBBY.

You can read an article by Dashdondog, “Children’s Literature in Mongolia Needs Renovation” written for ACCU in 2001, and his speech to IBBY’s 30th Congress in Macau in 2006. Indian author Ramendra Kumar recounts his meeting with Dashdondog here, including an unexpected prelude – and some great photos.

Today is Girls’ Day in Japan and many girls will be celebrating it with their families.  I have written a post about the holiday in the past for PT.  This year I’d like to draw your attention to girls in other parts of the world, namely in Canada and Afghanistan.  Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan is an organization started in 2007 by a Canadian girl named Alaina Podmorow in British Columbia.  After hearing a stirring talk by writer and activist  Sally Armstrong about the plight of women in Afghanistan, Alaina started to fundraise by hosting a silent auction which raised enough money to support four teachers’ salaries in Afghanistan.  She then contacted the organization Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan and joined with them under the name she chose for her group and hence was Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan born!   Check out their website for more details.

What would your life be like if you couldn’t read or write? What signposts in the journey of your life would you have missed? Apart from the necessity of reading and writing, it’s hard to imagine what quality of life would be missed by not having books to read, whether for work or for pleasure.

So it is shocking to think that there are 774 million people in the world today who cannot read or write, and many of them are children.

Wednesday 9th March is our chance to come together in support of the World Literacy movement for World Read Aloud Day. Litworld.org is rallying the world to take part in its mammoth read-aloud-athon, aiming for 774 million minutes of children, or indeed adults, being read to. If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to start tallying how many minutes you are spending reading aloud and to how many people – whether at home, in school or at your local library – or on a bus or a train, or in the park – in fact, anywhere! Multiply the number of minutes by the number of people listening – then on March 9th you will be able to log your total on LitWorld’s website – and we will also post the direct link on the day.

For confirmation of the power of reading aloud, watch the video on LitWorld’s homepage - then go get a book and start reading to anyone and everyone you can. You can register here or sign up on Facebook. Follow events on LitWorld’s WRAD blog here or on Twitter, and join in via the Twitter hashtags #litworld and/or #literacy. Take a look at our Books at Bedtime and other reading aloud posts past and future for some great readaloud ideas – and we’d love to hear what you’re reading too, so do drop by and let us know! Now get reading – every minute really does count!

Bata is “child” in Tagalog.  The Bata Project (in conjunction with Synergeia) is a fundraising initiative begun by Winnipegger Glenda Ollero to help underprivileged Filipino children go to school.   For $12, you can fund one child’s education for a year.  Check out their website (and Synergeia’s too) for more information on this children’s educational initiative in the Philippines.   If you’re a Winnipegger, check out their events and consider purchasing one of their colorful pins made by Filipino artisans.  For more on children’s books in the Philippines, check out our past PT issue on the country.

When PaperTigers’ book reviewer Abigail Sawyer mentioned to me that she is going to be hosting a Blog Carnival about bilingualism over at Speaking in Tongues, she got me thinking. Again. I first started mulling over bilingual children’s books here in relation to Tulika Books, a publisher in India that produces bilingual books in many different Indian languages alongside English, and to former IBBY Preisdent and founder of Groundwood Books Patsy Aldana’s comments in an interview with PaperTigers, and I will quote them again here:

I have always been opposed to the use of bilingual books, however given that Spanish-only books hardly sell at all, I have had to accept that books in Spanish can only reach Latinos if they are bilingual. This goes against everything I believe and know to be true about language instruction, the joy of reading in your mother tongue…

I was surprised by Aldana’s dislike of bilingual books because I love them and my children love them, and I have found that they can be a joy for inquisitive children seeking to learn independently – but I do realise that our contexts are different. Aldana’s dislike of them seems to stem from their being a substitute for monolingual Spanish books in an English-biased market, and she has found a pragmatic way of providing books in their mother-tongue to the Latino community in North America.

We love reading bilingual books because, although our main vehicle is the English, having another language running alongside, often enhances the reading experience for us, especially where the setting of the story is culturally appropriate to the language. This is true even when we can’t read the script, because even without being able to understand it, we can sometimes pull out certain consistencies. Seeing the writing always provides a glimpse of that different culture.

One of my favorite books of the last few year’s (more…)

Groundwood Books Publisher Patsy Aldana has been appointed as a member of the Order of Canada, one of Canada’s highest civilian honors given in recognition of a lifetime of outstanding achievement, dedication to community and service to the nation. The announcement was made in Ottawa on December 30, 2010 and Aldana was chosen for her contributions to children’s publishing in Canada and around the world.

Aldana has just completed a term as the President of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) and was also recently named the 2011 recipient of the Ontario Library Association Les Fowlie Intellectual Freedom Award.

This excerpt from the Jan 3, 2011 edition of the Globe and Mail outlines Aldana’s beliefs on the importance of reading:

Adults sometimes forget what reading means to children… Reading is a window into oneself and others. Reading is a bulwark of democracy. And we don’t do enough to nurture our children’s love of reading.

Each child should have access to books that are right for him or her…[Reading] talks to you about who you are, or it tells you something about who the other is… and it’s essential to becoming a free person in a democratic society. If you become a reader, you have a chance to become a critical thinker, to be a person who has some power over your life.

Congratulations, Patsy! It is a well-deserved honor. We hope more and more people will embrace your message of helping children discover the pleasures and experience the power of reading!

LitWorld, a New York-based organization that advocates for Global Literacy, is organizing a holiday book drive in connection with the International Book Bank to send books to children in Liberia and Sierra Leone, where one book is shared among 75 children, on average, and where some children have never seen, much less owned a book in their life.

Click here to find out where books can be dropped-off or sent to, as well as more information about LitWorld, The International Book Bank and the situation in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

We encourage you to support this worthwhile effort to give words wings. You can keep up with LitWorld’s news and book drive updates via Facebook and Twitter.

Geeta Dharmarajan is the Founder and Executive Director of Katha, an Indian non-profit organization working in the areas of formal and non-formal education, publishing and pro-poor activities. Read my interview with her to find out how since 1988 Katha has been helping children grow up to be India’s reader-leaders. The breadth and depth of their work is remarkable and awe-inspiring!

In case you haven’t heard, Katha was nominated by PaperTigers for the 2011 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, in the category “Promoter of Reading”.

Girls living in poverty are uniquely capable of creating a better future. But when a girl reaches adolescence, she comes to a crossroads:

The Girl Effect is about girls. And boys. And moms and dads and villages and towns and countries. And we can help.

It is common knowledge that children who attend school have a better chance of developing into their full potential and bringing about change in their communities. It’s hard to believe that, in this day and age, so many of the world’s children still aren’t given the opportunity of an education.

Dedicated to “all children who dream of going to school”, Going to School in India is a celebration of what school can be and mean to children. It shows and tells about all kinds of kids—from street kids to kids who go to government and community schools—and how they “climb into school buses, sit on each other’s laps in cycle rickshaws, walk along the edges of mountains, cross scorching deserts on rickety bicycles, swing across rivers on dangling swings-just to get to school.” A festive celebration of formal and informal school settings in India—and of the ways children get to them—this book also reminds us that, while millions of children do get to go to school each day, millions of others don’t.

Published by Shakti for Children (now Global Fund for Children Books) in partnership with Charlesbridge, Going to School in India (2005) is written by Lisa Heydlauff, with photos by Nitin Upadhye, and designed by B.M. Kamath. Royalties from the sale of the book support educational initiatives in India. Click here to learn more about author Lisa Heydlauff’s projects and her Going to School non-profit.

On a related note, in her 2009 interview for PaperTigers, Maya Ajmera, founder and president of the Global Fund for Children talked about the “moment of obligation” she experienced, over 20 years ago, when she stepped out onto a bustling train platform in India and came across an open-air classroom where children were being taught how to read and write—a moment that led her to start The Global Fund for Children. This anecdote illustrates what our Pacific Rim Voices executive director, Peter Coughlan, loves to say: “A ripple can become a tidal wave, an acorn an oak tree.” GFC nowadays reaches millions of children and youth around the world, and supports hundreds of educational projects, including mobile boat schools for children in Bangladesh, night classes for women and girls in the red light districts of India, and countless more.

A ripple can indeed turn into a tidal wave of goodness.