By
Annie Slemrod
BURJ
AL-BARAJNEH, Lebanon: Ten mothers are gathered around a table, following and
sometimes speaking along with a woman at the head of the table who is reading
aloud from a children’s book. Several laps are filled with toddlers, who, in
the midst of the lively atmosphere, are calm. Some of the children even seem to
be ignoring the animated tale.
Instead,
although too young to read themselves, they are quietly inspecting the pages of
pint-size books.This get-together inside Burj al-Barajneh, Beirut’s most
populous Palestinian refugee camp, is part of a literacy program called “Mamaa
Tiqraa” (Mother Reading). With adult illiteracy rates higher in Lebanon’s camps
than in the rest of the country, this is hardly the only literacy campaign
around. But Mamaa Tiqraa is different: It’s a literacy program that doesn’t
teach anyone how to read.
Wafa
Khalil, one of Mamaa Tiqraa’s two literacy trainers, describes it in simple
terms. “It’s about how to sit with our children. How to come together and read,
and not just about how to read alone.”
It’s
all about the concept of “family literacy,” which aims to help kids enjoy
reading with their parents, to foster conversation between generations, to
jump-start imaginations, and to familiarize kids with the idea that letters
correspond with sounds.
The
10 participating moms, make that 12 – the two literacy trainers are moms, too –
gathered over the weekend to evaluate their progress. This is the program’s
sixth week, and was meant to be its last, but due to popular demand four more
meetings have been added.
Raghida,
who prefers that her last name not be published, has been reading with her
3-year-old son Mohammad. “My son loves the [program’s] books,” she says,
“because they use pictures and he can begin to identify them. He’s young, so I
read to him.” An avid reader herself, Raghida adds that now “my son loves books
like me. He often comes to me with his books, asking me to read stories to
him.”
Khalil
says the results have spilled over into her own family. She has three children,
and she’s been testing the family literacy approach on her youngest, age 7.
“We
are closer now,” she says. “He is thinking aloud, telling me everything he
feels and sees. I even think he loves me more,” she speculates. “I feel it.”
Mamaa
Tiqraa is the brainchild of Nick Boke, an English teacher at the American
Community School in Beirut. Having been involved in pioneering family literacy
programs in the 1980s U.S., he long wanted to do the same here but was faced
with a bit of an obstacle – he couldn’t find the right books.
“I
went around looking for books,” he says. “I went to bookstores, I went to
publishers, I went to Arabic teachers ... but the books were all in fusha
[classical Arabic] and they were much too complicated.”
Then
he met Hanadi Dayyeh, this weekend’s reader, also an Arabic teacher,
coordinator of the Arabic program at ACS, and a writer. Seeing a gap in the
market for step-by-step Arabic language learning books, she had written the
“Silsalaat Iqra Balarabiya” (Arabic Reading Series), which was published around
a year ago.
The
little books are small enough for a child to handle, and brightly illustrated.
They aren’t quite written in colloquial Arabic, but she says that “if you look
at a continuum between amiya [colloquial] and classical Arabic, we would be on
the next step after amiya.” The books “use simple sentences so if a child is
reading, he would think somebody is speaking to him.”
The
books jived with Boke’s idea, and Mamaa Tiqraa’s relatively small budget of
$1,000 was funded by Lebanon’s Welfare Organization. At this weekend’s
stock-taking session, Dayyeh was on hand to read from one of her more complex
books, accompanied by one of her daughters – upping the mother quotient to 13.
After
Dayyeh’s story and a bit of discussion, Noura, who is working with her
3-year-old daughter Rawan, discussed some unexpected benefits the program has
brought to her family. She loves telling stories, she says, but “I don’t know
how to read or write well. This is unbelievably good for me. I used to read to
my daughter, but now she reads stories to me.” With only a few hours of electricity
a day in Burj al-Barajneh, Nour says that now, as soon as the lights go off,
the flashlights and candles come out and her daughter wants to read together.
Mamaa
Tiqraa is a pilot, but Boke says if the funding can be found he’s game to
expand it to Lebanon’s other camps. And the current group is already gearing up
for a second session, which he says will include bookmaking – handmade books
will make a modest addition to the libraries of the children.
One
more thing the program has fostered is an increased demand for books. The moms
have been meeting at Burj al-Barajneh’s Women’s Program Association, and Mariam
al-Shaar, the association’s director, says there is only one library in the
camp and it is run by a popular committee, making it effectively inaccessible
to many residents.
Before the program, says
trainer Khalil, many of the women “did not have books in their houses. But now
they are looking for them everywhere.”
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Local-News/2011/Dec-21/157491-learning-to-love-reading-but-not-to-read-in-burj-al-barajneh.ashx#axzz1k6wYgero
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