Allaboutwriting

Thembi Majombozi, a Soweto teacher, was very generously funded by MNET to send a batch of her students to our very first Junior Writers Course – and we’ve kept in pretty constant touch since then. Last year, we,  together with Wesley Thopmson who ran the course, decided to donate the proceeds of  our self -publishing course to a deserving cause and phoned Thembi to ask for her advice. She said that teaching children creative writing (our idea) was all very well – but in the schools she taught in, most of the children don’t even have access to dictionaries. So we decided to donate dictionaries to the Bapedi Primary School in Soweto.

Then, the winner of our last exercise, Julie Masiga, from Kenya, was delighted to have won the book voucher, of course – but rather than use it to buy books through Kalahari, which charges R190 to deliver to Kenya (!), she asked us to donate the R200 to a charity. We told her about Thembi and her dictionary crusade and she at once said – buy as many dictionaries as you can for R200! Actually, R200 buys four and a bit dictionaries thanks to a special price from Macmillan.

Then… Tumi Pitsie who did the self-publishing course made a donation and since then we have had donations from Mandy Collins, Hilary Macaulay, Margaret Renn and Sandy Scott. So we can currently buy 75 dictionaries.

And since the snowball now seems to be thundering down the hill, it came as no surprise — but a great deal of pleasure to us, to hear from Anna Kim who is having a birthday party this weekend and has asked her friends to make donations towards our dictionary drive instead of giving her a present.

Anna told us that she feels very strongly that “having access to dictionaries is really important to kids for increasing literacy, promoting interest & love for words and language, etc.”

Her enthusiasm for the project is driven by a very personal memory. “It was something very special for me,” she says.  ”My Dad taught me how to use one when I was about seven years old (I think he was tired of me asking him what this word and that word meant), and I found it fascinating and empowering because now I didn’t have to ask an adult, could just look it up myself thank you very much!  It’s an incredible tool.”

Mandy Collins and Helen Webster who run our Junior Writers Course have offered to come to Bapedi Primary on the day we deliver the dictionaries and run a dictionary usage workshop for the school.

We are touched by the generosity of  the Allaboutwriting community.  Now our goal is to provide a dictionary for each of the 640 pupils at the school. Can you help us achieve this? If you’d like to make a donation please contact Helen at admin@allaboutwritingcourses.com or click here to make a donation via PayPal.