DENVER, COLORADO – Yohannes Gebregeorgis grew up in a dusty Ethiopian village, the son of an illiterate cattle trader. As a barefoot boy, he couldn't know his fate in life, but it was already sealed. He would spend his life growing into his passion, which is giving impoverished young Ethiopian children a chance to read and learn.
Gebregeorgis, which means servant of St. George, spoke to families and children at Boulder Public Library on Thursday. He explained his program "Ethiopia Reads," which has sent more than 100,000 children's books back to his poverty-stricken homeland.
His program has had such an impact on his country that he was named one of CNN's Top Ten Heroes of the Year.
And the 60-year-old is just getting started. He has built 17 libraries in a country where more than half the population can't read.
He opened his first library in 2003 in one of Addis Ababa's poorest neighborhoods, and he was deluged as more than 60,000 children used it the first year. Some had never seen a book before, he said.
Since then, he has put showers and laundries into the buildings and wants to include health clinics in the libraries and schools he is building.
"We're teaching the kids not just reading but anything they want to learn, like theater, English lessons, papier-mâche," he said. "They're hungry for so much."
Gebregeorgis has enlisted the aid of several Denverites, including Janet Lee, a librarian at Regis University who served in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia. She was there the day that Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown. It was Lee who nominated Gebregeorgis to CNN's list of heroes.
Restaurateur Noel Cunningham, owner of Strings, also has sponsored and helped fund several of the libraries.
"We raised $10,000 through high school students here and got a library built," said Cunningham, who leaves Wednesday with 20 others to open another library.
"My dream is to get schools, why not East High School, to raise the funds and sponsor another library. It might have the effect of getting kids here to take books out of the library and read."
The Kansas Reading Association last year filled a 40-foot shipping container with 25,000 donated books, then paid the freight to Ethiopia.
With programs like that, Gebregeorgis said, the biggest obstacle now is finding money for shipping and operating expenses, to the tune of about $100,000.
Gebregeorgis, who didn't read a book for fun until he was 19, fled his war-torn country to the Sudan and scrapped his way through schools, eventually earning a master's degree in librarian studies. He hoped to work in an American university, but the only job he could find was as a children's librarian.
It must have been his fate, and the rest is history.
How to donate and more information can be found at ethiopiareads.org.
By Mike McPhee | The Denver Post
(Mike McPhee: 303-954-1409 or mmcphee@denverpost.com)
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