No matter what country you live in, what your nationality is, your age, or if you have children, you can do something important by choosing a book that you think would fire the imagination of a child in Nicoya or Hojancha and sending it to us. The Voice of Guanacaste is committed to making sure a child receives it.
This is because the benefits of reading are many, especially when the habit is learned since childhood. Our brains become more agile and healthy when we read a lot, we are better informed and therefore we make better decisions. It has been proven that when a mother reads her children a story every night, they are twice as likely to become avid readers as children who have hardly ever heard one.
That’s why, as part of International Book Day on April 23rd, we want to stimulate early reading and provide children in one-teacher schools in Nicoya and Hojancha with the best books.
Toward that end, we’ve organized a campaign that is as original as it is significant. We want our readers to be able to mail us a children’s book dedicated to a specific child with a sincere inscription— in your own handwriting— inviting the child to read forever.
We will send a message by Inbox to all of the people who want to participate with basic information about the boy or girl to whom they will send a book dedicated in a sealed envelope. Why send it by mail? Because of the surprise that little ones experience when they receive a package with their name on it and see the mailman arrive at their school— something that many children have never experienced— and to receive a personalized gift from someone they don’t know. And what better gift than a good book?
People who decide to help us with this should buy a children’s book, write a dedication in it and take it to the nearest post office. They will write the child’s name and school address on the package. A few days later, the postman will be bringing the packages to the educational institutions loaded with good stories, joy and a lot of hope.
If you like the idea and want to help stimulate the culture of reading among children of the peninsula, send us an email to [email protected] and we will send you the name, age and address of the school of the student that you will sponsor.
This campaign will run until March 31st.
Irina Bokova, General Director of UNESCO, put it well when she said that the aim of International Book Day is “to encourage authors and artists and to ensure that more women and men benefit from literacy and accessible formats, because books are our most powerful forces of poverty eradication and peace building.”
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