Friends,
I have decided to go to Ethiopia to spend the year working on improving reading in the primary grades. This has always been my passion and it is one important reason I have been working for years on building the library and sending books there) through h2 Empower (www.h2empower.org). It is essential that children learn to read. Then they can ask questions and find ways to solve themselves, become critical thinkers and lovers of learning. But in Ethiopia children are not being taught how to read and studies have just been done which demonstrate that children up to grade 4 are not learning to read in their mother tongue or in English. 70% of the grade 3 students couldn't read a word on the assessment in their mother tongue. This is not surprising to me, having seen classrooms and the lack of anything to read and the lack of training the teachers have in this area.

When IFESH ( the International Foundation for Education and Self Help) decided to concentrate on this and send their volunteers to help develop reading departments in teacher training colleges and to have one person working on Early Grade Reading at the Ministry of Education I decided that this was what I must do. I was accepted to represent IFESH at the Ministry of Education and am now in Addis Ababa living and working on this full time.

I am very excited to be given this opportunity to apply all my experience in teaching reading- and, of course, writing, in working with Ethiopian colleagues and others to help improve the quality of education for the children of Ethiopia. This is quite a challenge- requiring carefull long and short term planning, training at all levels, developing reading material in many languages, curriculum, and new ways of thinking about teaching in the early grades. Educators here now recognize the importance of a strong foundation of learning and reading in the beginning and I am happy to working on this effort.

At the same time I will be working on our library project and am planning to get the library open and functioning shortly. I will report more on that soon. Meanwhile I thank my family and friends who are doing things at home so that I can be in Ethiopia at the forefront of this important work. Thanks to all.

I will be blogging more often now that I am settled here and have figured out how to use the internet. I am full of hope.