Patricia Aldana
| Patricia Aldana (Toronto, Canada) was re-elected as President for the term 2008-2010 at IBBY’s 31st General Assembly in Copenhagen, Denmark.
She previously served as President 2006-2008, Vice-President of IBBY between 2004-2006 and 1998-2000 and as a member of the IBBY EC from 1996-1998.
Although born (1946) and brought up in Guatemala she attended high school and university in the United States. Since 1971 she has been living in Canada, where she has been actively involved in children's books.
In 1978 Aldana founded Groundwood Books of which she is the publisher. Groundwood publishes for all ages of children and is known for the high quality of its award winning Canadian books and for its active programme of translations from other languages. In 1996 Groundwood began to publish original books in Spanish under its imprint Libros Tigrillo.
Patricia Aldana has been active in the Canadian and international children's book and publishing communities, especially in developing policy that will encourage the national publication of children's books everywhere in the world, the development of readers in all countries especially through library networks, and in promoting a genuine exchange of books between countries.
paldana@groundwoodbooks.com
|
|
Message from the President, June 20099 June 2009
Dear Friends,
At this halfway point of the year I wish to share with you news of IBBY's activities around the world.
IBBY worldwide
IBBY’s 71 national sections are coping with the current crisis as best they can. For the most part they continue to do their day-to-day work of reading promotion, training, publishing, and selecting of quality books and bringing them to children.
Our Dutch and Irish sections are actively twinning with the Uruguayan and Zimbabwean sections respectively. IBBY South Africa has also been supporting the work of our fledgling Zimbabwean section. IBBY Sweden not only nominated the Tamer Institute in Palestine for the ALMA, which they won, but is also involved in what we hope will soon be a Cambodian section. Other sections have been actively considering twinning and how to get involved in working with another section in a way that can be mutually rewarding. Our US section has continued to generously support the work of a number of other sections. Meanwhile, IBBY Mexico will be hosting a Latin America meeting later this year for all the countries in the region.
Looking further into the future, IBBY Mexico has been selected to host the 2014 Congress – an ambitious undertaking for any national section as we know!
Children in Crisis
Our Children in Crisis programme continues to be one of our most important priorities.
In January thisyear at the American Library Association annual midwinter meeting in Denver we were able to raise funds for the Children in Crisis programme. A number of authors, including Canadian top author Deborah Ellis, have now assigned royalties or part of the royalties from their books to the Children in Crisis Fund. In Deborah’s case this represents a donation of Cdn$20,000 over a period of two years! Katherine Paterson and the Paterson Family Foundation continue to be huge supporters of the Children in Crisis Fund, in particular with funds towards our project in Gaza.
Haiti
Our Haitian section is about to begin a project that will use the healing power of storytelling and books to help reduce the trauma brought on by the deadly hurricanes that hit Haiti last year. The country is just about the poorest in the world and then they were further devastated by these series of severe storms; storms that are becoming more and more frequent. The project will help children and young people who lost their homes, families and everything they knew. Books will be translated into their mother tongue of Creole to reach them more directly and training of therapists will take place so that they can continue with the work after the initial IBBY project is finished.
Gaza
At its most recent meeting the IBBY Executive Committee agreed to renew funding for IBBY Palestine for the two libraries in Gaza. More books will be acquired and the librarians will receive further training, especially in working with children who are severely traumatised. These libraries are some of the few places that children can go and feel safe, so young adults up to about eighteen are also benefiting. To help them in their work, our Palestinian section is in close contact with the Gaza Community Mental Health Centre. The rebuilding in Gaza has not really begun and the situation there grows more and more dire as the blockade continues to hamper humanitarian and other aid from reaching the people who need it.
Afghanistan and Farsi-speaking region
In May, Executive Director Liz Page and I convened a meeting in Turkey of an interesting group of people from the Farsi-speaking countries of Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. We were joined by a member of IBBY Turkey, Ayfer Unal and Basarat Kazim president of IBBY Pakistan, for four days of very intense discussions on what strategies might best be suited to the creation of a reading culture in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Examples of what has been achieved in Iran, Mexico, Pakistan and Brazil were presented. Our colleagues from IBBY Iran expounded the value of quality books and creative education. A full report will soon be available on the IBBY website, thanks to the translation of the talks by IBBY Iran. Until then, in brief…
The Afghan participants were a fascinating group – the feminist director of the Noor Education Centre in Kabul who works with the Canadian organization Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WA); the founder and director of Aschiana, a very successful agency working with over 6,000 street children; a cultural advisor at the Goethe Institute in Kabul; a professor of journalism at Kabul University and advisor to the Ministry of Education; the chief editor of the Pavaz magazine for children and eminent Afghan novelist; librarians; publishers; and a reading promoter from Bamiyan.
The first and really the most shocking problem we learned of was that, despite the incredible number of NGO’s working in Afghanistan and the billions of dollars being spent by the countries fighting there, the concept of childhood itself has no legal or moral status in the country. Only half of the twelve million children in the country go to any kind of school. And half of those who do attend a school are learning in the open air. Apart from the organization Ainaworld, an NGO based in Paris and founded by Reza Deghati, a well-known National Geographic photographer, no NGO has put any consistent money into publishing materials for young Afghans. Up to now Ainaworld has collected funds for the excellent children's magazine published in Afghanistan: Parvaz, that is packed with stories that promote children's rights, the rights of girls, information on health and nutrition, and is wonderfully designed and illustrated with cartoons and photographs. Sadly, this is now published very infrequently because lack of funds from interested donors. Book donations are sent in inappropriate languages, such as in English and Korean, which are of no use at all for child readers. Even the high quality Iranian books written in Farsi, a language that is understood by many, are not accessible to young Afghans because of the differences in vocabulary and usage.
How can one even begin to build a democracy in a country in which there are no readers? And how can there be readers in a country at war, where billions are spent, but no thought is given to what might help the children to become readers and thus have a future? It is all very well to promote higher education, but without the basic, long-term, fundamental work of building a good basic, primary education system with access to decent libraries filled with appropriate local and international books published in the children's daily language, there cannot be any real hope for an Afghan democracy nor for the future of these young people who have suffered so much from the constant wars throughout their lives.
The Afghan participants deplored the fact that their government’s priorities are almost entirely driven by the warring countries and the NGO’s own agendas rather than by what the Afghan people most desperately need, including: a decent, free public school system with trained teachers; a network of public libraries and an Afghan publishing industry capable of producing good books and magazines to give Afghan children a love of reading. This could take years, a fixed determination, and a properly worked out plan, but there is a strong determination that would make it possible despite the conditions. However, the sad reality is that Afghans are not making the decisions in Afghanistan today.
Having met this diverse, magnificent, compassionate, funny, smart and heroic group of people, the rest of us came away determined to spread the word – Afghan children, like all children, are special and are owed a special duty of care. The only hope for Afghanistan lies in educating the next generation – after all, they are the future. They deserve to be given every possible tool so that they can confidently confront the problems they are inheriting.
We came away moved by their courage and determination and committed to help. We hope the fact that all these people met each other will result in some steps being taken. Of course, our dream is that we have brought together the basis for IBBY sections in Afghanistan and Tajikistan, though this may take some time. In the meanwhile, we will work to find some external support for the reading promotion projects that will emerge from this meeting and beyond, and try to find more outside funding to support an increase in the production of high-quality children’s reading materials within and for Afghanistan.
Colombia
The Colombian Children in Crisis project to establish reading clubs for children is in its second year. In October, there will be a meeting in Colombia where the results of our project will be presented to the people who are concerned with reading, working with children in crisis, and other interested parties in the country. We hope that this meeting will produce a manual to help other sections as they consider how to work in this field.
Italy
Finally, following the recent earthquake in Italy our colleagues at IBBY Italia asked us for moral and practical support – mainly ideas about what to do in such a situation. This shows once again that we really need to be able to provide concrete materials for what to do in a crisis. One main area of expertise that IBBY can call upon is its wide network of people who have experience and connect them with those who need advice and support.
IBBY-Yamada workshop programme
The 2009 IBBY-Yamada programme is moving ahead. Two workshops in Africa, in Zimbabwe and Guinea have take place and we are waiting for their reports, which we shall share on the website. Other projects are being prepared and will take place over the course of the year. These are in South Africa, Mongolia, India, Indonesia and Cuba! The IBBY-Yamada scholarship will support a young Venezuelan as he takes part in the on-line M.A. on books and literature for children and young people. Since the IBBY-Yamada programme began, IBBY has supported 26 projects in 20 different countries!
IBBY Partners
The Children’s Libraries Section and the Reading Section of IFLA, have nominated IBBY for the 2010 ALMA. We thank them very much for their support.
We are working on our joint project with IFLA/IRA to create a database for Reading Promotion projects. This is a very broad and ambitious project, but one that we hope will be of great importance and use to everyone working with books and children around the world.
IRA, IFLA and IBBY have agreed to try to work more closely with each other in our representative national sections. We will send out an appeal to our respective National Sections and members to reach out to each other and to find ways to strengthen their work by expanding the number of people they are working with.
The V Premio Iberoamericano SM de literatura Infantil y Juvenil jury will meet this year in Chile. Each year IBBY nominates a member of the jury from the country where the meeting is held. The Fundaciõn SM is also generously supporting our next IBBY Congress, which will take place in Santiago de Compostela, Spain in September 2010.
Hans Christian Andersen Award and dissemination of news
Thanks to our wonderful new funding partner, Nami Island Inc., we have been able to reach agreement with an experienced publicity and promotion agency Susan Raab Associates to actively promote the Andersen Awards, the winners and the Andersen shortlist and so draw far more attention to the awards that has been possible up to now. We will also promote the IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Awards and the other major IBBY activities.
Patsy Aldana
IBBY President
9 June 2009
paldana@groundwoodbooks.com
|
