Everyday People Changing the World--Irene

by Irene
I read an article' Everyday People Changing the World' but I don't know who is the author. Gebregeorgis from love Kitten to child literacy. He is Ethiopia--At19, and borrowed a novel entitled love Kitten that changed his life forever. He is born in rural Ethiopia, his father was an illiterate cattle merchant who insisted that his son have an education. So Gebregeorgis had seen a few books in school. But having a book of his own sparked a lifelong commitment.
Today, he is establishing libraries and literacy programs to connect Ethiopian  children with books. He tells us most Ethiopian children only have ability to use textbooks in the classroom. If books children read outside, those would be the spices of education.
Until he became a children's librarian, he didn't realize what the children of his native home were missing. He tells us that he arrived in the Unite States in 1981, and he finally put himself through college, get a graduate degree in Children's Library in 1985. He realized the impact children's books could make on a child's sense of wonder and a plan for the future. Reading gives them hope. It gives them pleasure. It gives them everything that they cannot otherwise get in regular textbooks.
But Gebregeorgis found that there were no children's books in Amharic, the important language of Ethiopia, and none representing the places and characters of Ethiopian traditional stories and beliefs. He tells us when the library assign $1,200 for the purchase of Ethiopian books, he was unable to find any, so he wrote one: Silly Mammo was the first bilingual Amharic-English children's book, and its publication led he to establish the nonprofit organization Ethiopia Reads in 1988.
In 2002, he retured to Ethiopia with 15,000 books donated by the San Francisco Children's Library. He                 opened the Shola Children's Library in his Ethiopia home. He says he just wanted to come back to Ethiopia and help children have a future, have hope. In addition to the original library, Ethiopia Reads established the Awassa Reading Center and Ethiopia's first Donkey Mobile Library He reads storybooks to children who have no access to television or computers and believes that literacy and education will be to free someone from something his impoverished land. In conclusion, he said "with literate children there is no limit...to how much we can do."
Q:skills for success 4