I grew up in a middle-class family in Tehran. My mother was a teacher before she married and my father was an educator and translator. I have four sisters and one brother and I am the fifth child of the family.
Although we were not a rich and prosperous family, I had a very calm and happy childhood. We did not have a lot of toys or dolls, but we played a lot in our fantasy world, my younger sister and I.
My father loved books. He had quite a big library at home. I cannot imagine him without books. His passion was not limited to reading books; he always encouraged us to read literature and poetry. And he bought us many story books and read to us every night.
I remember he used to tell the stories of “Little Man” to me and my younger sister. I later found out that the series were the stories of his own childhood dreams. My father came from a poor family and experienced a very tough and difficult childhood. He came from his small city, miles away of Tehran, on foot, to study law in a university. But when he graduated, he could not serve as a lawyer. He always told me that it was not easy to judge and he was not sure that he could always do justice and not make the wrong decision. That is why he became a teacher to promote the values of tolerance and respect for others. For a while he became the director of a boys’ orphanage centre. He spent all his time there. On Fridays, he took my younger sister and I to the orphanage. It was my first experience encountering orphans and I compared their situation to someone like me who had parents and a happy life. I had never met children without a home and a family. And I kept asking my father: “Why?” Maybe his responses were beyond the comprehension of a little girl, but they made me try to find the answers later.
I watched my father, who spent his holidays there, teaching the orphans skills that would be useful for them in future in addition to their lessons. He managed to establish a library in the orphanage. Although I could not read at that time because I had not gone to school yet, I read to them the books that my father had already read to us many times; I could narrate them by heart. It was so much fun for me and my sister and those little boys.
I have always loved children and always loved reading books. In the last years of high school, I was fascinated by social activities. It was when Samad Behrangi, a children’s book writer who was a village teacher as well, became popular among young intellectuals because of his critical stories against injustice and oppression. Samad Behrangi was a social activist and critic, folklorist and story writer from Azerbaijan province. Like many other young people, I was influenced and very impressed by his books, which portrayed the lives of the disadvantaged children of deprived villages and cities. I particularly loved The Little Black Fish story. The little black fish lived with her mother in a small pond on the side of a mountain. Their home was behind a black, moss-covered rock, under which they both slept at night. The little fish longed to see the moonlight in their home just once. For several days the little fish had been deep in thought and had talked very little. The little black fish wanted to go see where the stream ends and what’s happening in other places. “I’ve just gotten tired of these swims. I don’t want to continue this boring stuff,I might face death any minute. It is not important if I die, because this is going to happen anyway. I know my purpose, my purpose is: How will my life or death impact the lives of others?” (Samad Behrangi,The Little Black Fish)
I was in such thoughts and beliefs when I entered university, an American University in Shiraz, where the students lived in modern and beautiful dormitories on the slopes of mountains by the big grass fields. But I was not happy about my life there. I felt frustrated and dissatisfied.
That situation made me constantly compare the lives of university students with the lives of poor people in slums. These slums were not very far from our dormitories. People there had no drinking water and their children did not go to school. Again, like when I was a child and asked my father why those children lived in orphanages, I asked myself: Why? Why should these people live in these ruined places? And what should I do? What is my social responsibility?
I left university when I was 19 and moved to a small village in northern Iran to become a teacher to children who lived in poverty near the forests. In that village, I started to read stories to children who had never had any books in their lives.
At that time, I was living in a strange paradox. On the one hand, I wanted to be with the children and read books to them and be their hard-working and dedicated teacher, and on the other hand, I wanted to be a hero who could save all the disadvantaged children. The children who were kept in the orphanages. The children who lived in slums around big cities. I wondered what it would be like to be just a teacher in a deprived area. I intended to do something much bigger and more important for underprivileged children.
But I loved my work and the children of that village, until one morning when I was getting ready to go to school, I was arrested in my place, which was a small room in a country house. They took me handcuffed to the road to get in the car. And the school was right on that road. When they put me in the back seat of the car, my eyes caught the worried eyes of my children who came up from the short wall of the school to see me once more and maybe for the last time. I never forget their anxious looks. I was not allowed to say goodbye to those children or even wave to them, but I said to myself, “I wish I had not left them.” I never told anybody what I wished. I wanted to be a hero, not an ordinary teacher! Even at the cost of going to jail. In prison, I saw mothers who met their small children every weekend. Their children were kept in an orphanage, and they came to visit their parents only on weekends.
During the weeks, I planned which stories I could share with them. There were no books, no pictures. I knitted gloves and socks for them, on which I would embroider images of various animals with coloured threads. I told stories of those animals to the children and they returned to the orphanage with those pictorial gloves and socks and could live in a beautiful fantasy world of that story for a week.
Most of my youth passed in this mental turmoil. And after a decade, when I was behind bars for the second time, I had the opportunity to think thoroughly and review my whole life and evaluate myself for what I was really looking for. When I was in the cell, all I could do was entertain myself with handiwork. And because I loved painting, I tried to paint my thoughts withcoloured pain medication tablets on cardboard boxes of washing powder or by sewing them with the threads of my cellmates’ clothes.
And once, when I was sewing the Alfred Gabali ‘s fishermen, I imagined myself rowing in a turbulent ocean like his painting and felt that there was no hope in that darkness, but it was not true.
I found out how fishermen struggled to get fish in that stormy weather. I tried not lose my hope. To find it among those tall breaking waves and place it like a slippery fish in the net. I made my decision. I did not want to be that hero anymore. I decided to put my feet on the ground and find my true motivations for living. I was hoping to make the lives of underprivileged children better and more beautiful, even if it was just one step.
When I was released, I was looking for a different way to follow my dreams.
I decided to return to the love I had when I was a village teacher. Getting to know the Children’s Book Council of Iran (IBBY Iran) and meeting Noushin Ansari led me to research and study the history of childhood culture. And it was a turning point in my life when I was a co-researcher and writer in The Institute for Research on the History of Children’s Literature in Iran. Although I had a lot of information about my society and could get different experiences in my life, I did not realize the dynamic connection between the past, the present and the future before starting research on the history.
When I got into this study, I tried to discover the truth through the dust of history. Tracing the work of the devoted Iranian educators, writers and children’s rights activists, and their amazing progress in improving the lives of children in the very difficult situation at that time taught me that we should remain optimistic during challenging times.
After half a century, I still saw children who lived in slums, not having much food to eat and not going to school! It was dreadful and outrageous that the abandoned children in nurseries sometimes died from systematic neglect. It was terrible to see girls who had to drop out of school and get married as children due to family poverty and lack of education. It was a shame when we encountered children who had fled Afghanistan alone or with one of their relatives and were looking for recycled materials in the garbage to sell and support themselves and their families who were left behind in Afghanistan. I was deeply dissatisfied. I had a sense of anger and frustration. But I remembered the Sierra Leonean politician, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, saying that we all have the ability to turn that frustration into a positive feeling, by allowing our dissatisfaction to give birth to change. This was absolutely true.
The dissatisfaction opened up the space for me to design a plan for a deep change. A plan or program to implement it around the country by the READ WITH ME community. But you know, we are all small communities in our societies. We cannot help all children in crisis, refugee children, children who are not seen, children who do not have a voice. No, w cannot. But how about making effective and successful models in giving a voice to children who have no voice? Or to those who are not seen?
I thought that, like disaster relief organizations constantly facing various crises in human societies, we should have models for disaster management, the effective and proper models for problems! We needed flexible and sustainable models for the children in crisis in different situations. The only solution is making dynamic models!
We planned models to rescue children from difficulties and darkness. To hold the babies and toddlers in our arms, to talk to them about hope in the moments when they are left in loneliness and fear, to feel the warmth of our existence, to hear our voice, to look into our eyes, to know that we are there, beside them and behind them.
We designed an effective model for educating children in marginal parts of Zahedan, Sistan and Baluchistan, who do not own ID cards and have no access to education. We trained young women living in that region to serve as tutors and teachers.
We developed the model “Reading with Family” to promote reading among all members of the low-income families who cannot afford books and do not have access to quality books, in order to transform their homes into high literacy environments and to make reading books and learning literacy a part of families’ daily routine.
We developed a model of maternal functional literacy for empowering oppressed, neglected and illiterate mothers, Iranian and Afghan, in remote areas, to foster their children’s learning and reading.
We designed and implemented various creative models for different problems and dropped them like red balls in the darkness. Like this picture which was gifted to me by Marit Törnqvist a few years ago. Now we are determined to spread more and more red balls in the darkness to invite more interested and dedicated people to reading promotion, not only in my homeland, but also in all other places where children’s rights activists want to build a better world for their children!
We invite more people to unite behind the power of dissatisfaction to give birth to a change and to make earth safe and peaceful for our children.
Photo caption: Zohreh Ghaeni and Jane Kurtz receiving their awards from Sylvia Vardel, incoming President of IBBY Executive Committee and Mingzhou Zhang, President of IBBY Executive Committee (outgoing)
Acceptance Speech: Zohreh Ghaeni (Iran)
Co-Recipient: IBBY-iRead Outstanding Reading Promoter Award 2022 for Read with Me
Dropping Red Balls in the Darkness
View Zohreh’s PowerPoint that accompanied her speech.
I grew up in a middle-class family in Tehran. My mother was a teacher before she married and my father was an educator and translator. I have four sisters and one brother and I am the fifth child of the family.
Although we were not a rich and prosperous family, I had a very calm and happy childhood. We did not have a lot of toys or dolls, but we played a lot in our fantasy world, my younger sister and I.
My father loved books. He had quite a big library at home. I cannot imagine him without books. His passion was not limited to reading books; he always encouraged us to read literature and poetry. And he bought us many story books and read to us every night.
I remember he used to tell the stories of “Little Man” to me and my younger sister. I later found out that the series were the stories of his own childhood dreams. My father came from a poor family and experienced a very tough and difficult childhood. He came from his small city, miles away of Tehran, on foot, to study law in a university. But when he graduated, he could not serve as a lawyer. He always told me that it was not easy to judge and he was not sure that he could always do justice and not make the wrong decision. That is why he became a teacher to promote the values of tolerance and respect for others. For a while he became the director of a boys’ orphanage centre. He spent all his time there. On Fridays, he took my younger sister and I to the orphanage. It was my first experience encountering orphans and I compared their situation to someone like me who had parents and a happy life. I had never met children without a home and a family. And I kept asking my father: “Why?” Maybe his responses were beyond the comprehension of a little girl, but they made me try to find the answers later.
I watched my father, who spent his holidays there, teaching the orphans skills that would be useful for them in future in addition to their lessons. He managed to establish a library in the orphanage. Although I could not read at that time because I had not gone to school yet, I read to them the books that my father had already read to us many times; I could narrate them by heart. It was so much fun for me and my sister and those little boys.
I have always loved children and always loved reading books. In the last years of high school, I was fascinated by social activities. It was when Samad Behrangi, a children’s book writer who was a village teacher as well, became popular among young intellectuals because of his critical stories against injustice and oppression. Samad Behrangi was a social activist and critic, folklorist and story writer from Azerbaijan province. Like many other young people, I was influenced and very impressed by his books, which portrayed the lives of the disadvantaged children of deprived villages and cities. I particularly loved The Little Black Fish story. The little black fish lived with her mother in a small pond on the side of a mountain. Their home was behind a black, moss-covered rock, under which they both slept at night. The little fish longed to see the moonlight in their home just once. For several days the little fish had been deep in thought and had talked very little. The little black fish wanted to go see where the stream ends and what’s happening in other places. “I’ve just gotten tired of these swims. I don’t want to continue this boring stuff,I might face death any minute. It is not important if I die, because this is going to happen anyway. I know my purpose, my purpose is: How will my life or death impact the lives of others?” (Samad Behrangi, The Little Black Fish)
I was in such thoughts and beliefs when I entered university, an American University in Shiraz, where the students lived in modern and beautiful dormitories on the slopes of mountains by the big grass fields. But I was not happy about my life there. I felt frustrated and dissatisfied.
That situation made me constantly compare the lives of university students with the lives of poor people in slums. These slums were not very far from our dormitories. People there had no drinking water and their children did not go to school. Again, like when I was a child and asked my father why those children lived in orphanages, I asked myself: Why? Why should these people live in these ruined places? And what should I do? What is my social responsibility?
I left university when I was 19 and moved to a small village in northern Iran to become a teacher to children who lived in poverty near the forests. In that village, I started to read stories to children who had never had any books in their lives.
At that time, I was living in a strange paradox. On the one hand, I wanted to be with the children and read books to them and be their hard-working and dedicated teacher, and on the other hand, I wanted to be a hero who could save all the disadvantaged children. The children who were kept in the orphanages. The children who lived in slums around big cities. I wondered what it would be like to be just a teacher in a deprived area. I intended to do something much bigger and more important for underprivileged children.
But I loved my work and the children of that village, until one morning when I was getting ready to go to school, I was arrested in my place, which was a small room in a country house. They took me handcuffed to the road to get in the car. And the school was right on that road. When they put me in the back seat of the car, my eyes caught the worried eyes of my children who came up from the short wall of the school to see me once more and maybe for the last time. I never forget their anxious looks. I was not allowed to say goodbye to those children or even wave to them, but I said to myself, “I wish I had not left them.” I never told anybody what I wished. I wanted to be a hero, not an ordinary teacher! Even at the cost of going to jail. In prison, I saw mothers who met their small children every weekend. Their children were kept in an orphanage, and they came to visit their parents only on weekends.
During the weeks, I planned which stories I could share with them. There were no books, no pictures. I knitted gloves and socks for them, on which I would embroider images of various animals with coloured threads. I told stories of those animals to the children and they returned to the orphanage with those pictorial gloves and socks and could live in a beautiful fantasy world of that story for a week.
Most of my youth passed in this mental turmoil. And after a decade, when I was behind bars for the second time, I had the opportunity to think thoroughly and review my whole life and evaluate myself for what I was really looking for. When I was in the cell, all I could do was entertain myself with handiwork. And because I loved painting, I tried to paint my thoughts withcoloured pain medication tablets on cardboard boxes of washing powder or by sewing them with the threads of my cellmates’ clothes.
And once, when I was sewing the Alfred Gabali ‘s fishermen, I imagined myself rowing in a turbulent ocean like his painting and felt that there was no hope in that darkness, but it was not true.
I found out how fishermen struggled to get fish in that stormy weather. I tried not lose my hope. To find it among those tall breaking waves and place it like a slippery fish in the net. I made my decision. I did not want to be that hero anymore. I decided to put my feet on the ground and find my true motivations for living. I was hoping to make the lives of underprivileged children better and more beautiful, even if it was just one step.
When I was released, I was looking for a different way to follow my dreams.
I decided to return to the love I had when I was a village teacher. Getting to know the Children’s Book Council of Iran (IBBY Iran) and meeting Noushin Ansari led me to research and study the history of childhood culture. And it was a turning point in my life when I was a co-researcher and writer in The Institute for Research on the History of Children’s Literature in Iran. Although I had a lot of information about my society and could get different experiences in my life, I did not realize the dynamic connection between the past, the present and the future before starting research on the history.
When I got into this study, I tried to discover the truth through the dust of history. Tracing the work of the devoted Iranian educators, writers and children’s rights activists, and their amazing progress in improving the lives of children in the very difficult situation at that time taught me that we should remain optimistic during challenging times.
After half a century, I still saw children who lived in slums, not having much food to eat and not going to school! It was dreadful and outrageous that the abandoned children in nurseries sometimes died from systematic neglect. It was terrible to see girls who had to drop out of school and get married as children due to family poverty and lack of education. It was a shame when we encountered children who had fled Afghanistan alone or with one of their relatives and were looking for recycled materials in the garbage to sell and support themselves and their families who were left behind in Afghanistan. I was deeply dissatisfied. I had a sense of anger and frustration. But I remembered the Sierra Leonean politician, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, saying that we all have the ability to turn that frustration into a positive feeling, by allowing our dissatisfaction to give birth to change. This was absolutely true.
The dissatisfaction opened up the space for me to design a plan for a deep change. A plan or program to implement it around the country by the READ WITH ME community. But you know, we are all small communities in our societies. We cannot help all children in crisis, refugee children, children who are not seen, children who do not have a voice. No, w cannot. But how about making effective and successful models in giving a voice to children who have no voice? Or to those who are not seen?
I thought that, like disaster relief organizations constantly facing various crises in human societies, we should have models for disaster management, the effective and proper models for problems! We needed flexible and sustainable models for the children in crisis in different situations. The only solution is making dynamic models!
We planned models to rescue children from difficulties and darkness. To hold the babies and toddlers in our arms, to talk to them about hope in the moments when they are left in loneliness and fear, to feel the warmth of our existence, to hear our voice, to look into our eyes, to know that we are there, beside them and behind them.
We designed an effective model for educating children in marginal parts of Zahedan, Sistan and Baluchistan, who do not own ID cards and have no access to education. We trained young women living in that region to serve as tutors and teachers.
We developed the model “Reading with Family” to promote reading among all members of the low-income families who cannot afford books and do not have access to quality books, in order to transform their homes into high literacy environments and to make reading books and learning literacy a part of families’ daily routine.
We developed a model of maternal functional literacy for empowering oppressed, neglected and illiterate mothers, Iranian and Afghan, in remote areas, to foster their children’s learning and reading.
We designed and implemented various creative models for different problems and dropped them like red balls in the darkness. Like this picture which was gifted to me by Marit Törnqvist a few years ago. Now we are determined to spread more and more red balls in the darkness to invite more interested and dedicated people to reading promotion, not only in my homeland, but also in all other places where children’s rights activists want to build a better world for their children!
We invite more people to unite behind the power of dissatisfaction to give birth to a change and to make earth safe and peaceful for our children.
Photo caption: Zohreh Ghaeni and Jane Kurtz receiving their awards from Sylvia Vardel, incoming President of IBBY Executive Committee and Mingzhou Zhang, President of IBBY Executive Committee (outgoing)
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