Stories as a human right
Five children's books created at BookSprint Namibia 2024
"Develop a book for children aged three to six within twelve hours." This was the aim of the five teams participating at the BookSprint Namibia on Saturday. Hosted at the Goethe Institute, partner groups worked on concepts that convey stories to Namibian children that will be published in various languages by March next year.
A little girl who is called a lion by her classmates due to her hair desperately wants a new hairstyle until she learns to accept her appearance and finds new self-confidence by looking in the mirror.This is just one of five stories that were created at the Goethe Institute on Saturday. The author, Lettisia-Idah Aupindi, was one of the candidates selected for the BookSprint 2024.
Thirty-five applications for the project landed in the mailboxes of the German Embassy and the Goethe Institute. Clarissa Judmann from the German Embassy in Windhoek explained that the number of stories and authors is limited not only by the spatial capacity but also by the number of illustrators.
At the BookSprint, authors work in teams with illustrators to capture their stories in pictures and ultimately develop a finished concept for a children's book, which is then copied and translated into various languages by the embassy and the Goethe Institute. The aim of the model, which has its origins in the South African "Book Dash" campaign, is to give as many children as possible access to books.
The concepts developed this year during the second edition of the BookSprint should be ready for publication by March next year.
According to Clarissa Judmann, the four books from the previous year, 2022, were printed around 15 000 times and translated into nine languages.
The German children's book author Nasrin Siege came to Windhoek to support the teams. The trained psychologist went to Tanzania in 1983 and was touched by the fate of the street children living there. She began to organise storytelling sessions for the children and quickly realised how much she could achieve with them.
“The fairy tales were the bridge to a new world for these children, because many of them are now successful adults with jobs and families.”
Siege believes that telling and reading stories is of fundamental importance in a child’s development. “Through stories, children learn to understand emotions and express their own,” she says. “We are talking about a basic human need here, reading is a human right!”
Of course, it is easy to say that such projects are just a drop in the ocean in view of the problems. “But many drops make a small stream,” Siege says.
Before officially starting work, she hosted a workshop that taught the teams what is important when writing for children (core target group three to six years old).
On Saturday, the five teams had 12 hours to work out their concepts. Siege was on hand to help with this too.