By Vaga Lume | Team
Dear friends,
We could not start telling our stories in the Amazon without thanking all our supporters and friends that helped Vaga Lume to succeed in GlobalGiving’s September Challenge! It was very exciting for us to see each donation arriving day by day as we got closer to achieving our goal. We would like to offer our deepest gratitude to all of you!
You are now part of Vaga Lume, and you can be sure that you are contributing a lot to provide quality education to around 24,000 children that live in the 160 rural communities of 23 municipalities in the Brazilian Legal Amazon region where the organization created community libraries. Twelve years ago, Vaga Lume started promoting reading in the North region of Brazil, which has a very rich cultural diversity and, yet, a very worrying illiteracy rate.
Since 2001, we bring books where it has never arrived before and train teachers and volunteers to make it accessible for the whole community. Because of such hard work, we have amazing cases of young book-lovers in the middle of the biggest rainforest in the world.
In this opportunity, we invite you to meet Jersen Hiury, a 13 year-old boy who is the most frequent user of the library in Terra Nova community. The community library is called Lights of Knowledge (Luz do Saber, in Portuguese) and is located in the Unini River, a tributary of the Black River, in Barcelos municipality, Amazonas state.
Jersen is the winner of the most active reader in Terra Nova community contest that was organized by the library’s volunteers. To win the challenge, Jersen, who always participate in library’s cultural activities and games, read 17 books in one month: it is more than one book every other day!
“I thought the contest was really fun and I decided to participate in it because I love to read! I usually visit the library every week and my favorite book is ‘The Voyage of the Poppykettle’, written and illustrated by Robert Ingpen. I am not a volunteer of the library yet, but I intend to become one soon!”, said Jersen.
Stories like Jersen’s show how books and reading are powerful weapons to improve the quality of education and transform realities around the Amazon region of Brazil.
At last, but not least, we invite you to revel in our stories and reports so as to discover the Amazon, its culture and its people from a new - and fantastic – perspective! Please visit Vaga Lume’s website (www.vagalume.org.br/english) and subscribe to our newsletter!
Please feel free to contact us to share your thoughts and questions!
Warm regards,
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