Three months ago… 15000 children in over 1000 villages began a new venture.  These children decided that they had enough of reading other people’s stories and now they would themselves write stories instead!   And over the next month, village after village saw a large number of children busily writing stories.  It was a sight most people had never seen: Kids – 8 years to 14 years old – sitting seriously and writing & re-writing stories. Out of the 15000 children, about 400 children have been selected for district level story competitions. The 2 day competition will have series of educational and fun activities. 

The answer to how 15000 children in 1000 villages started to write stories is Eureka Village Libraries Movement. The village library program is designed to make the libraries reach the poorest children and to encourage reading habit particularly in neo-literate children. These low-cost designed libraries have so far been implemented in 1800 villages. In this innovative program, the children don’t go to the library – but the library goes to the children!

We discovered that most children like to read short stories with a lot of cartoons.  So we have been developing really short stories – only 1 page long!  We have now created about 100 one-page laminated colorful story cards in Tamil that are extremely popular with children. We visualize the library as a free and open learning resource structure in each village for children and also for adults.  We see the movement as the first step towards creating a continuously learning society.This festival, organized by AID India, is expected to facilitate cross-cultural exchange to children and hosts. The festival is an opportunity for children and teachers to realize that Science, Math, and Social Sciences are not dead worlds found in the textbooks, but live worlds inside and around us.

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Balaji Sampath, AID-Chennai