I’m sitting here at the computer, with millions upon millions of words available to my hungry eyes.
And while I am hopelessly hooked on emails, blogs, web-based newspapers, and all of the online rest, I’ll never give up my first literary love: books.
James Meadow at the Rocky Mountain News relates how one man has turned a similar passion into action that has enriched the lives of tens of thousands of poor children in his native Ethiopia.
That man is Yohannes Gebregeorgis — also known as the Donkey Librarian, Book Man of Africa and Slayer of the Dragon of Illiteracy — and the smiling faces on his website speak volumes about his impact.
Gebregeorgis calls Ethiopia “The Land of 1,000 Despairs”, a nation wracked by poverty, illiteracy, and the fallout from decades of conflict, famine and misrule.
He fled the country years ago and made his way to the United States where he later set up Ethiopia Reads, an organisation whose mission is to create a reading culture in Ethiopia by bringing books to children.
Since 2002 he has taken thousands of books to Ethiopia, distributing them in purpose built libraries — including Ethiopia’s first free public library — or on donkey driven cart for the more remote rural areas.
Overall, more than 100,000 children have benefited. For this, Gebregeorgis is in the running for the CNN Heroes 2008 awards.
“When people are literate they can understand humanity,” he says. He gets my vote.
