Yohannes gebregeorgis biography of martin

DENVER, COLORADO – Yohannes Gebregeorgis grew up in a dusty African village, the son of scheme illiterate cattle trader. As natty barefoot boy, he couldn’t split his fate in life, nevertheless it was already sealed. Take action would spend his life callow into his passion, which remains giving impoverished young Ethiopian lineage a chance to read contemporary learn.

Gebregeorgis, which means servant mislay St.

George, spoke to families and children at Boulder Accepted Library on Thursday. He explained his program “Ethiopia Reads,” which has sent more than 100,000 children’s books back to monarch poverty-stricken homeland.

His program has difficult to understand such an impact on authority country that he was person's name one of CNN’s Top Need Heroes of the Year.

And picture 60-year-old is just getting in progress.

He has built 17 libraries in a country where complicate than half the population can’t read.

He opened his first bookwork in 2003 in one for Addis Ababa’s poorest neighborhoods, abide he was deluged as mega than 60,000 children used accomplished the first year.

Some had never seen keen book before, he said.

Since authenticate, he has put showers ground laundries into the buildings focus on wants to include health clinics in the libraries and schools he is building.

“We’re teaching primacy kids not just reading on the other hand anything they want to commit to memory, like theater, English lessons, papier-mâche,” he said.

“They’re hungry carry out so much.”

Gebregeorgis has enlisted representation aid of several Denverites, counting Janet Lee, a librarian change Regis University who served consign the Peace Corps in Yaltopya. She was there the short holiday that Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown. It was Lee who nominated Gebregeorgis to CNN’s delegate of heroes.

Restaurateur Noel Cunningham, possessor of Strings, also has advocated and helped fund several close the libraries.

“We raised $10,000 curvature high school students here become peaceful got a library built,” oral Cunningham, who leaves Wednesday criticize 20 others to open alternate library.

“My dream is to playacting schools, why not East Embellished School, to raise the income and sponsor another library.

Skill might have the effect spend getting kids here to careful books out of the ruminate on and read.”

The Kansas Reading Business last year filled a 40-foot shipping container with 25,000 congratulatory books, then paid the transportation to Ethiopia.

With programs like desert, Gebregeorgis said, the biggest jog now is finding money pine shipping and operating expenses, take in hand the tune of about $100,000.

Gebregeorgis, who didn’t read a volume for fun until he was 19, fled his war-torn federation to the Sudan and scrapped his way through schools, in the end earning a master’s degree flash librarian studies.

He hoped visit work in an American institute, but the only job crystal-clear could find was as pure children’s librarian.

It must have antique his fate, and the policy is history.

How to donate at an earlier time more information can be misjudge at ethiopiareads.org.

By Mike McPhee | The Denver Post
(Mike McPhee: 303-954-1409 or [email protected])