This is a guest post by Samara Alazar, one of volunteers about her experience leading a project to fundraise for locally printed books and distribute them in Ethiopia. Over the winter break of 2022, I traveled to Ethiopia. My goal was increasing literacy amongst underprivileged children. I have been working with Open Hearts Big Dreams […]
Spreading Book Joy in Ethiopia Read More »
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Yoseph Ayalew phone: 251 965 696 969 / 911 227 650 / email: yosephopenheartbigdreams@gmail.com Ellenore Angelidis phone: 425-295-8841 / email: ellenore@openheartsbigdreams.org IBBY Ethiopia and Open Hearts Big Dreams Announce Exciting New International Developments March 2024 – The Ethiopian Section of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY Ethiopia) and Open
We have a wonderful collaboration with Pelargos that helps bring Greek and Amharic versions of some our favorite books to kids in Greece. Below is a translation, thank you Michael Angelidis, from a recent article in Greece about this initiative. For those that read Greek, here is the original Did you know that Andromeda, the
Bilingual Children’s Books delight Ethiopian and Greek kids in Greece Read More »
In late 2020, we were awarded a grant from the American Corners to run Computer Science and Entrepreneurship Boot Camps along with a series of leadership talks. It was the most challenging of environments with conflict and the virus each presenting what seemed like insurmountable challenges. The OHBD team had to consistently reinvent and reimagine
Debtsa is a small agricultural community in the high mountains of southwest Ethiopia. It’s a hard 2-day drive from Addis Ababa, mostly on dirt roads. It is beautiful, it is remote. It’s challenging to get there, it’s challenging to stay there, and it’s especially challenging to leave. A piece of my heart is planted there
A New Library, A New Language for OHBD-RSG Books, More Big Dreams! Read More »
Process and Creative are often oxymorons. But with this project we needed to make them play nice together. We need to be creative without losing sight of our goals to create many culturally appropriate bilingual books for children in Ethiopia and beyond. And we needed process that would overwhelm or undermine being creative especially since
I am an incoming High School Junior, founder of Linguistics Justice League (LJL) and a Youth Board Member of Invest in Youth. I have been working at the intersection of Data Science, NLP and ML, earning a Society of Women Engineers Next (SWE) STEM in Action award, National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) award
How do we do it—pull meaning from symbols on paper, or from bits of light and dark in flickering electric impulses? This miracle is called reading. I learned to read in Maji, in deep southern Ethiopia. My mother taught me in my own childhood language of English. As I filled workbooks at our dining room
Learning to decode words — transforming marks on a page (or screen) into sounds in our brains — is one big reading skill. Learning to read those words fluently in sentences is another. The Creative Team considers those skills as we create Ready Set Go Books. But other skills are needed for understanding the sentences
Creating OHBD RSG Books to Enhance Reading Comprehension Skills Read More »
My educational journey started in Gambella, Ethiopia where I was born. Growing up, I never had nongovernmental printed Anuak books. The school provided textbooks which we always returned at the end of each year. Since the schools couldn’t afford to print new copies each year, we were always given the same recycled books. It’s only
Preserving a Rare Ethiopian Language for the Anuak People of Gambella Read More »
