A January 8, 2009 BBC News story, Donkeys Boost Ethiopian Literacy, features a heartwarming video of a young boy teaching the Amharic alphabet to a group of young children—barely older than he is. A mighty task for a small child, made even more difficult by the fact that for most of the students, Amharic is not even their first language.
In addition to the fact that there are over 300 symbols in the Amharic alphabet, these young students face additional difficulties associated with mastering the Amharic language that are due to the fact that there is no one correct way of speaking Amharic—poor systems of communication in Ethiopia have led to the development of various local dialects. Also adding to the students' daunting task is the fact that as in other Ethiopian Semitic languages, consonant length can distinguish words from one another--spoken consonants are pronounced for an audibly longer period than short consonants.
With few to none books to read at home, and with many of Ethiopia’s primary schools having no libraries of their own, children on the edge of the town of Awassa, located in the Sidama Zone of Ethiopia, are fortunate in that they are getting regular access to books.
Parked outside their bamboo shelter is a brightly painted donkey-drawn wooden cart, with foldaway shelves displaying an array of books that have been brought to them by the two donkeys resting in the shade.
An informative glimpse of this Donkey Mobile Library, part of EBCEF (Ethiopian Books for Children and Educational Foundation) a grassroots nonprofit and nongovernmental organization founded by an Ethiopian expatriate, Yohannes Gebregiorgis, can be seen in a short YouTube clip, Yohannes Gebregiorgis, Mobile Donkey Librarian
"Most schools don't have libraries. Basically, that makes it very difficult for kids to get reading material," said Yohannes, who left a comfortable life as a librarian in San Francisco to bring books to school children who have no books, no libraries—partly, because there are almost no children’s books written in the Amharic Language.
A Semitic language and the national language of Ethiopia, Amharic is spoken by nearly 27 million people, mainly in North Central Ethiopia, but also in Eritrea, Egypt, Israel and Sweden. Also, as is the case in many languages written in the Ge’ez alphabet, there is no agreed upon manner of translating the Amharic language into Roman characters, and few materials available for learning the Amharic language.
However, due to the success of the Donkey Mobile Libraries of EBCEF, which is also a publishing company, the children of Awassa are overcoming the difficulties of learning the Amharic language as they eagerly sift through a variety of books written in Amharic and English—even if they do not quite know how to read them yet.
Similar Donkey drawn libraries have also been established to provide extended library services to remote communities in the Nkayi District in northwestern Zimbabwe. Many of these mobile units also provide electronic communications: radio, telephone, fax, email, Internet. More details http://www.ifla.org/V/press/pr0225-02.htm about these services, which are often operated by solar energy or satellite transmissions, can be viewed in an article featured at IFLANET, the International Federation of Library Associations, and Institutions.
