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Books for Bhutan
A message from Joy Vardy
Friends,
I recently spent a month in Bhutan with the Bhutan Canada Foundation the largest foreign education group in the country. The children of Bhutan left footprints on my heart. They thrive in large classes taught by remarkable teachers with little more than a blackboard and chalk. Books are precious. The country has undergone a social revolution within my lifetime- progressing from medieval feudalism to universal education. Potable water maybe a few years away but every child goes to school.
The scheme I have launched is asking you to help me make a difference to 860 children at a school where I was teaching.
Lobesa Lower Secondary School sits above the paddy fields in the Punakha valley in central Bhutan and serves children in this rural area from Pre-school to year eight. All instruction (with the exception of Dzonka, the local language) is conducted in English.
The school library consists of a few shelves of tattered, passed-over paper backs which supplement the year readers issued to each pupil. At home, a child may own one, at most three personal books. School prizes are always books, always highly valued and always cheap editions. Unfortunately these slim titles are often Disney paperbacks, remaindered issues or discontinued print runs because these are all the school can afford.
Quality literature is found only in the school issued class reader. There is no supplementary reading material; there are no class sets of mini books; no “big books”; no reading series; few ancillary texts - all of which are very dated and culturally irrelevant.
The few books the school does have, fuel a galaxy of imagination for a child.
You and I can make a difference… Will you help me raise the cost of sending a pallet of books to Bhutan?
If we can get the books to Lobesa, the Bhutan Canada Foundation will allocate a western literacy teacher to the school for a month-long summer placement this August to catalogue and install the library.
Heart Felt thanks for help,
Kindest regards,
Joy
| “Books for Bhutan” J Vardy |
| Westpac BSB/ACC: 034013 / 381653 |
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