The Lebanese Center for Human Rights (CLDH) is a local non-profit, non-partisan Lebanese human rights organization in Beirut that was established by the Franco-Lebanese Movement SOLIDA (Support for Lebanese Detained Arbitrarily) in 2006. SOLIDA has been active since 1996 in the struggle against arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance and the impunity of those perpetrating gross human violations.

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December 21, 2011

The Daily Star - Learning to love reading, but not to read, in Burj al-Barajneh, December 21st 2011


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Raghida, who prefers that her last name not be published, has been reading with her 3-year-old son Mohammad.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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