Biography of an African - Essay Example

These facts, combined with continued political struggles in Ethiopia, make bringing books to children rather difficult, to say the least. Yohannes Gebregeorgis fell in love with books at the age of 19 when someone loaned him a romance novel. While his childhood in Ethiopia was happy, books were rare, and reading a romance novel simply for the pleasure of it sparked his later commitment to sharing that experience with as many of his fellow countrymen as possible (Coeyman, 2002). Gebregeorgis fled his native country and emigrated to the United States in 1982, where he earned a master’s degree in library science.

He found his calling when he joined the San Francisco Public Library’s children’s department. He worked there for more than a decade before a good idea took his life down a different path. A colleague asked Gebregeorgis to make a list of Ethiopian children’s books so the library could add them to the collection. When he found none after months of searching, Gebregeorgis used his disappointment in a positive way by setting up a publishing group and the Ethiopian Books for Children and Educational Foundation in 1998 (Coeyman, 2002; EthiopiaReads.

org, 2008; Reading Today, 2008). As with almost all grass-roots non-profits dedicated to such a specific task, no matter how worthy the endeavor money was hard to raise. Gebregeorgis did what all grass-roots fundraisers do: he didn’t wait for the big donors to come through; he developed a fundraising vehicle of his own. “Kilu Mammo” (“Silly Mammo”) grew out of this dream, for both its literary value and its fundraising appeal. The EBCEF made this simple story its first imprint in 1998 (Reading Today, 2008).

The publishing group has since published books written in Amharic as well as Oromo and Tigrignya (Tigrigna), three of the many languages spoken in Ethiopia, in