As I mentioned before, Jackie and I are in the midst of facilitating a "Writer's Workshop" for folks from 5 different language groups here. Yesterday, by way of introduction, we were discussing how powerful and influential the written word can be, and we discussed some of the books which had been most influential in our lives.
One of the team leaders, a dear guy who really is quite a character, stood up to tell the group about his own personal library. He talked about how precious his books are to him. He shocked the group by telling us about how much money he had spent on a certain book once. For the price that he paid for the book, he could have bought a bull! You have to understand this guy's ethnic group - to them, their cattle are everything! Their life's ambition is to gather as many cattle as possible, and in fact, they believe that they are the actual owners of all the cattle throughout the world. So for this man to stand up in public and buy a book, rather than a bull... wow. Now if there were more people like that in this country, we might have a literacy rate that's higher than the current 30%!
All in all, this workshop so far has been great! I love seeing these guys get together in their groups to really get into things - telling stories, learning about breathy vowels and heavy consonants and how to write them correctly! And then having some good laughs together, as well.
One of the guys that I work with here, who is also a team leader in the workshop, told me today, "You are such a good teacher! I have not laughed like I did today since I moved to this city!". Slightly sad in some ways, because I would like for this guy to be able to laugh more often, but I'm really glad that at least I can be a part of helping him to enjoy his work and life here!
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