Literature Circle for Girls
Solange Impanoyimana has a dream that would have been impossible back when she was a girl in rural Rwanda: She wants to start Literature Circles for girls, all across one Africa's tiniest, most beautiful countries.
I'm her friend Jina, and I'm helping her organize this Go Fund Me campaign to raise money for to pilot her terrific idea and help it grow.
In the video, Solange tells how she discovered reading for fun. I've been humbled as our friendship has grown to realize that I had been lucky to grow in America, where we don't even think about the things that so inspired Solange: Reading can open your mind to worlds you've never seen, teach you things you'd never dare to make up, and connect you with people and ideas you'd never imagined.
I remember the moment Solange saw what a "good reading habit" can mean. After a decade of friendship, Solange came to the US and met my grandmother, a librarian whose house had literally thousands of books.
"These are all — yours?" she asked, her mouth open in surprise. "You've read them?" Solange spent the next hour pulling books of shelves and wondering about the places and ideas they talked about — a pocket history of Laos, the geology of New Hampshire, the architecture of the Paris, the crafts of Native American peoples...
From that moment on, Solange has always had her head in a book. She started the Kigali Reading Club, the first adult book club started by and for native Rwandans that we know of, and she and her friends read hungrily, sharing a single copy of a book between them.
They all loved reading — and they all regretted that they had grown up at a time when reading wasn't something you did for fun. They felt determined to make it a habit for their own kids.
That's where Solange's idea for the Literature Circles comes from. She's spent the last year, on the prestigious Dallaire Scholarship at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, studying literacy education, consulting with experts, and laying the theoretical foundation to go back to Rwanda and build a literature curriculum that teaches girls the joys of reading, engages them as serious partners in discussions about serious topics, and helps them bring reading habits back to their homes.
Solange has educational partners in place, and she's spent the last year gaining expert knowledge. The funds from this campaign will help her write a curriculum for the girls and training materials for their teachers, buy books for their book clubs, travel to their schools for trainings and mentorship, and seed the next round of the circle.
It's a ripples-in-a-pond model, and your donation will cast the stone that makes it all possible.
But don't take my word for it: Solange's story of her personal transformation through reading, and the voices of teenage girls talking about what reading has given them, are what you really need to hear.
Watch the video. Hear the voices of new, devoted readers. And help us make change, one book — and one girl — at a time.
TO DONATE: All donations are now being received through a 501(c)3 fiscal agent called Mothering Across Continents -- a standard arrangement for new organizations still raising funds to register themselves.
You can make a tax-deductible donation to Generation Rise here:
