Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

Literacy

by Janet Berliner

As writers, shouldn’t we want everyone to read?

A whole lot of years ago, I got into a bunch of trouble giving schoolbooks to the son of a woman of color in South Africa. Not satisfied, I gave schoolbooks to a girl of thirteen who was working as a nanny for people I knew instead of going to school.

When my oldest daughter was almost five and I was pregnant with my second, I helped set up and run an Outreach center over a bar in New York. In case you don’t know about them, they’re places with books and tables where kids can go after school. They get books and juice and Band-Aids. Older kids read to younger ones.

It’s all good. The kids are off the streets and nobody loses.

There are so many places to donate books. For example, I’ve donated thousands of them to military bases, here and out of the country. Discovering that the homeless plead for books, I started giving cartons of them to shelters. You could even give your own; no law against that. Or is there a law against giving of ourselves.

Here, in Las Vegas, I became involved with the “Gala Benefit for the Children of Heroes,” which is about children and heroes and was founded by one of our very own at Unplugged. (He’d be mad if I mentioned his name, but I can say thank you, Eleven.) He was (I’m about to steal from his bio) “…the mind and the soul behind the children’s gala organized by The Special Operations Warrior Foundation (SOWF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing college scholarships and post secondary education to ALL the children surviving Special Operations personnel who are killed in a training accident or operational mission.”

But wait. There’s more.

Fourteen years ago I became part of the Childreach Program. I adopted two beautiful little girls. One lives in Malawi, the other in Zimbabwe. They write to me and send me photographs and bring me much joy. What have I and others like me brought them with our small monthly contributions–the equivalent of a half-a-dozen fancy coffees for each child?
A village well, medicines, and a one-room schoolhouse.

Hadija and Brenda may not wear shoes, but they can read, and both of them want to be teachers.
And there’s more-more.

When I was Pres of HWA, I initiated an outreach program. I accepted slave wages to teach hundreds of beginners in the Writers’ Digest Writing Course.

Why, you might ask, is she telling us this? Does she want us to tell her she’s wonderful?

DEFINITELY NOT.

Don’t send gifts; don’t send flowers.

Do, please, read on.

I tore something out of a magazine at a doctor’s office. (Yes, I asked first.) It was a letter to the editor from someone in Illinois. The heading read, Novel Ideas. Here’s an excerpt: “I loved the Navigator item on hotels with book collections ["Book Me a Room"] and have another to suggest: Country Inns and Suites has a lending library in each of its North American hotels. If you haven’t finished your book by checkout, you can return it at another member of the chain, which then makes a five-dollar donation to a literacy organization. Last year Country Inns raised $15,000 through its “Book it and Return” Program.

There are a lot of hotel chains, not just here but around the world. How do we approach them and try to get them to do the same thing? Gem, in Grenada, West Indies, does the same thing. Why not the Hiltons, Holiday Inns–name them?

Perhaps we can think of a way that this can be done. We could work through the organizations with whom we’re affiliated. Or we could each do what we can do ourselves.

Maybe that’s too specific, in which case may I ask you to believe with me that there’s a way we, as writers, can make a difference in the fight for literacy. Please do what you can.

Thank you.

Related posts:

1. Gifts
2. Making a Difference

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