In the beginning.....

Next Friday evening, I'll be getting on a plane for Zambia. While I know other people buzz about the planet all the time, it's a huge step for me. I've never been to Africa before - I've always been much too terrified of being bitten by a snake or catching some rare disease and living in a tent for a month is my idea of a bad dream!
BUT
last year, I went to a talk given by Quentin Blake, illustrator of the Roald Dahl books. In between drawing pictures for the audience of George making his marvellous medicine and of dragons with books for wings, he told us about his involvement with the Book Bus project. Equipped like a mobile library, the Book Bus, travels to schools and orphanages in Zambia and Malawi, with volunteers on board who read to small groups of  children who may have never seen a picture book before. The aim of the project is to give them some idea of the joy and adventure of reading, something that children in our society take for granted. Children in Zambia are taught in English, but most books they encounter are school text books, and they are taught in large classes where there isn't much opportunity for individual attention. When Quentin Blake showed us a picture of the bus, decorated on the outside in his famililar style, surrounded by kids waving and smiling, I knew this was something I wanted to do. I teach English and Communication to students who don't appear to value reading very highly, and sometimes I feel the education system doesn't either, so the idea of spending some time doing what I love with children who would enjoy it, was very appealing.   It sounded like an ideal way of doing something really worthwhile and travelling somewhere exotic at the same time.