Reading Aloud to Children - By Mary Lou Hughes

Hopefully we all remember being read to as children. Reading aloud together not only bonds the reader and the listener, but whets a child's desire to read on his or her own.

Fairy tales, myths, fables and folk tales are filled with talking animals, scary monsters, lovely maidens, wise rulers and astonishing feats of magic. These stories can both capture a child's vivid imagination and teach important life lessons. They are also a look at how people in different societies interact and communicate. Many of the stories have been handed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next.

Check out one of this genre of children's books from your local library. See how much you can learn about a different culture from reading just one picture book. There may be no more rewarding family activity than reading these stories aloud together.

Love, Mary Lou



Here’s a list of children’s books relating to this year’s HB Reads book, “They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky”:

The Origin of Life on Earth: An African Creation Myth. Anderson, David. Sights, 1991. Pre-kindergarten- Elementary. A well-told and wonderfully- illustrated retelling of the Yoruba (Nigeria) creation myth.

How Anansi Obtained the Sky God’s Stories. Washington, Donna. Children’s Press, 1991. Pre-kindergarten - 3rd grade.

How Stories Came into the World: A Folktale from West Africa. Troughton, Joanna. Peter Bedrick, 1989. Pre-kindergarten- 3rd grade. A collection of six West African creation myths.

Yoruba Folktales. Tutuola, Amos. African Book Collective, 1987. Elementary-Middle school. Includes seven Yoruba folktales.

Anansi and the Moss Covered Rock. Kimmel, Eric. New York: Holiday House, 1988. Pre-kindergarten- 3rd grade. A trickster tale where Anansi uses a magic rock to steal food from his friends in the forest. The tale is still told in the Caribbean.

How Spider Tricked Snake. Benitez, Mirna. Raintree/Steck Vaughn, 1992. Pre-kindergarten-3rd grade. Adapted from a Jamaican story of the West African Ananse tradition.

Anansi Goes Fishing. New York: Holiday House, 1991. Pre-kindergarten- 3rd grade. Another trickster tale, with the implied moral lesson about the pitfalls of telling lies.


Find more books on the “Bibliography” page of this website, http://www.hbreads.org/biblio.html.

First Things First for Refugees - By LeRoy Lucian

"It was Joseph Jok..." With these words Judy Bernstein begins her introduction of the man who introduced her to the Authors of "They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky". These words also begin the book introduction.

Judy first introduced Joseph to a group of HB Reads committee members when we visited the International Rescue Committee in San Diego a few months ago. I recently saw Joseph again after having lunch with Judy and several staff members of the IRC.

We spoke of many things including cultural differences and misunderstandings. Joseph told us how the Authors were initially confused by offers to visit the Zoo and the local mountains. Why would you want to go to see these things that were abundant in Africa? I don't know if the Authors have changed their minds about the Zoo, but Judy says that after spending enough time in our 'Concrete Jungles' they have come to appreciate the respite of Nature.

I was given a tour of the 'First Things First' Educational Program that morning by Colleen Krause, who with her able staff and wonderful volunteers provides the first stable educational experience that many of the new refugee community have ever experienced.

It was very heartening to see community partnership in action for such a worthy cause. This program in partnership with The San Diego City School District (which provides buildings, utilities, internet, phones and proximity to the community) and The San Diego Community College - Mid City Campus (which provides a part-time Adult Education/ESL Teacher). The School Partnership saves the Program $25,000 a year and the Community College Partnership saves the Program an additional $40,000 a year. Additional Community Support enables this program to continue.

Our own Huntington Beach Friends of the Library was able to donate Children's books for the program because of the community support that it receives.

I toured three classrooms. First the Kindergarten/Nursery where the Children are taught and the Infants of Adult Students are cared for. Next up is the 'Intermediate Class' for those Adults with some writing and language skills. The third classroom is for the 'Beginning' Adult students who have thus far in life been denied even a basic education. In many cases before entering this program, they are completely illiterate. There is also a 'Store' where store credits earned by fulfilling certain tasks can be exchanged for useful donated items. The students can also work and learn job skills such as working a cash register thus helping them to gain in self esteem and confidence.

These new arrivals are very grateful for the opportunity to become hard working, productive citizens. According to Sharon Darrough, Development Manager for The IRC San Diego approximately 200 refugees were processed in the month of September and approximately 1,300 in the last fiscal year. By comparison the year following 9/11, 105 refugees were processed.

So you see that the need is great for Community Support whether large or small. It matters not where or how much you give but that you do. The most valuable commodity that you can give is to give of yourself, to invest your time and your energy. The dividends you reap are beyond measure.

Thank You, LeRoy Lucian

The Movement Continues - By Paul Tayyar

Use the term “Civil Rights” in an American college classroom and you will find a great majority of students have a narrow, limited understanding of the term’s genuine meaning. For most, the Civil Rights Movement was a two-decade window of time when men like Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Medgar Evers, and a cross-section of anonymous Americans—hippies, priests, homemakers, carpenters, schoolteachers, veterans—peacefully, gallantly fought to guarantee that no man or woman should be discriminated against because of the color of their skin. It is good to know that by the time our students are eighteen or nineteen years old, they are familiar with King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the heroism of Rosa Parks, and the assassination of Malcolm X. Some students—though not nearly enough—know that it was Lyndon Johnson who ensured passage of the Civil Rights Bill, and that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would not have happened without the bravery of men like John Lewis and Edward Kennedy.

But the Civil Rights Movement is as old as America itself. And it is a Movement that, at various times, has focused its energies not only against virulent racism, but against sexism, economic inequalities, and religious discrimination; the Civil Rights Movement is the story of the struggle for worker’s rights, women’s suffrage, and gay equality. Therefore, when it comes to discussing Civil Rights in American classrooms, students should not just know about King and Parks and Evers, they should know about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who in her tireless quest for women’s rights composed The Woman’s Bible, a text that provides a feminist reading of the Old and New Testaments; they should know about Woody Guthrie, the folksinger who crisscrossed the country for decades singing his workingman’s ballads, whose lyrics demanded the ethical treatment of Mexican laborers and itinerant Midwestern farmers; they should know that Cesar Chavez earned his holiday by organizing a series of grape-workers strikes that galvanized activists across the country; they should know about Walt Whitman, the Father of American poetry, whose poems about the devastating violence that the Civil War wrought—for soldiers on both sides of the conflict—sought to heal a ruptured nation.

I write this because the beauty of the contemporary American college classroom—where, in each and every class, there are students from countless nations and various faiths, with often vastly disparate economic backgrounds and lifestyles—has not happened overnight, nor has it occurred by accident. Rather, the wondrous diversity of individuals that I interact with every day in the classroom has been made possible by the sacrifices of men and women for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so we owe it to our students to make sure that the names of those who have made such educational diversity possible are celebrated and discussed in our classrooms—that is the role we can play in seeing that the American Civil Rights Movement never subsides, loses faith, or surrenders to cynicism or fatigue.

Comparing my travels to the “Lost Boys” of Sudan

In 1969 after four years of college I climbed into my roommate's 1956 T-Bird and we drove across the country. We had read Kerouac and wanted to see his road. We got to New York just as Woodstock was happening, Manhattan in time to see Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway in Hello Dolly, Long Island for a couple of months of working and visiting NYC, and drove back across a snowy Canada on our way home -- at trip that lasted about four months.

Every few days I wrote on notepads I had bought, first a letter to my girlfriend, then on a separate sheet a summary of the day. I asked her to save the diary, so that I would have the beginning of my great book when I arrived home. When I got home my girlfriend gave me the saved letters, broke up with me and said goodbye. I still have those stories in a box somewhere in the garage.

Our authors for “They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky” had a far different fate. As I read the book I am drawn into a very different place and time, lacking the freedom, sparkling with description but drawing closer to tragedy with every page. This book of memories, then, is a miracle of survival and a testament to hope.

That hope grew when they started writing their memories and their friend turned into an editor and shaped their stories into a terrific read. Even as she teases us in the introduction with the way they started writing, their writing hints at the horrors to come, even as it relates the day-to-day details of joy and life in their part of the world.

I can only feel fortunate and relieved that my journey's most traumatic occurrence was a blown transmission on the highway in Alberta. "I can tow you to Pincher Creek or Cardston," the man said. "What's the difference?" we asked. "Cardston is dry," he replied with a smile. "Take us to Pincher Creek!" Even so, a week waiting for a '56 T-Bird tranny in remote Alberta left us with little to do. I did do some soap carving.

On the other hand, these “Lost Boys” show resourcefulness that puts my travels to shame. As they take turns telling their stories, they pay attention to tradition as it is transmitted through their elders' tales of long ago. The survive mishap and take heed of warnings. They bring us their message, filled with caution, inspiration and challenge

Children’s Events planned for HB Reads!

Children’s Events planned for HB Reads!

This year three special Children's Events are planned in connection with Huntington Beach Reads One Book!

Each afternoon program will feature folk tales from Sudan and related activities and art projects designed to help children better understand the life of the Sudanese people. Three different Huntington Beach locations will be used in order to make the events accessible to families in different parts of the city.

Mark you calendars:

Oak View Branch Library Friday, January 29 2:00 p.m. (Kindergarten - Third grade); 3:00 p.m. (Fourth - Fifth grade)

Barnes & Noble at Bella Terra Monday, February 28 2:00 p.m. (Kindergarten - Third grade)

Central Library Thursday, February 18 3:00 p.m. (Kindergarten - Third grade)

Parents and children of all ages are cordially invited to enjoy the stories and work together on the art activities. Africa is an especially vibrant continent and its children's stories are both colorful and entertaining.

Love, Mary Lou

The King of Santa Barbara - By Paul Kareem Tayyar

I have always been partial to poets whose verses possess a touch of the lyric: perhaps it is because the earliest poets I loved were those who refused to let adulthood stifle the romanticism that childhood provides us in spades. I can still remember the first time I read Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud” (thirteen years old, the Huntington Beach Library, there was a girl involved that I was trying to impress), Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (UC Santa Barbara Bookstore, in between classes, I remember I re-read it five or six times to make sure I wasn’t dreaming), and Dylan Thomas’ “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” (a late-night DVD viewing of the American remake of Tarkovsky’s Solaris starring George Clooney, where the poem plays a featured role), and those types of I’ll-Never-Forget-Where-I-Was-When-I-First-Read kind of experiences are still how I judge whether I consider a writer’s work worthy of being placed into my literary Olympus. I read poetry heart first, and I am a fan of poems that make me feel like the world is a parade of the wondrous and the mystic. And there is no writer who makes me feel this more consistently than Barry Spacks (the former Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara), whose poems speak to the heart in a way that makes me wonder if when he dies and the doctors open him up for an autopsy bluebirds and butterflies will fly out of his chest. He is that good.

If a large part of this column is motivated by trying to turn readers on to writers whose work is interested in reminding us of the infinite moments of peace, beauty, fellowship, and spirituality that are waiting to be found every day on this earth, then one must pick up one of Barry Spacks’ breathtaking books, which include The Hope of the Air (Michigan State University Press), Regarding Women (Cherry Grove), and his latest, the-so-lovely-it’s-gospel Food for the Journey (Cherry Grove). In Spacks’ poems readers will be transported into a world where Christian and Muslim find common ground on a downtown street corner, where unicorns still roam a postmodern earth, where women fall in love with magical trees that forever protect them through summer and storm. In “Whitewater Vision,” the first poem from Journey, Spacks works through the desire to find meaning in a difficult world that so often seems like it is sitting on top of us:

Like everyone else I’ve served my time

Lying under the weight of a mountain

breathing stones…

In the poem, Spacks reminds us to slow down and take time to commune with ourselves, to remember that we are possessed of a richness and mercy that cannot be found anywhere else, and the poem closes with a stanza that we can repeat like a prayer:

On days when it seems the food for the journey

is clay, not bread, and the spirit famished,

as dusk transfigures everything

I pause, near silence: listening.

It is the self as a budding mystic, an artist whose canvas is the interior world, aware that his daydreams are much more than the mere passings of time.

Whenever I find myself going through particularly difficult periods in my life, be it dealing with the sickness of a relative, the death of a friend, or the awful feeling that the world will never realize the potential it holds, I find myself going back to read Barry Spacks’ poetry. His poems remind me that we can always make the world a little better than it was when we found it.

Our next Huntington Beach Reads One Book selection - LeRoy Lucian

Our next Huntington Beach Reads One Book selection—“They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky”—tells the Authors’ stories as 'Lost Boys Of Sudan'. Their long and harrowing journey takes them from their childhood village through desert, jungle and inescapable war. They find their way despite seemingly insurmountable odds to survive and eventually land upon these shores. They now live here in Southern California.

The average stay in a Refugee Camp is 15 years. The life in these camps is harsh and often brutal. Survival under such conditions is a hard fought goal which many do not attain. Through the many acts of kindness and compassion which come from people just like you many of these refugees do survive and do find their way out of the camps and to a place of safety.

Our Authors’ stories are such as these. Our 'Concrete Jungles' have their own laws of survival. Through a network of support and guidance these new arrivals find their way in this new world.

One such instance involves the Somali Bantu community in San Diego. Being from an agrarian society they are accustomed to growing their own healthful organic food. Finding themselves now living in small apartments and lacking enough space to grow food even in containers they sought help from their mentors at the International Rescue Committee. After a long journey through the halls of Bureaucracy finally their dream is real. The New Roots Garden is a community effort and beautiful to see. I was a guest at the Grand Opening of what will hopefully be but the first of many such gardens in San Diego.

The name 'New Roots' is especially appropriate. Many of the community members are refugees and as new members of our society are putting down new roots in their lives in many ways. The garden is as a microcosm with members of diverse cultures working side by side with a common goal. The fruits of an enterprise such as this go beyond the edible. Friendship, Cultural Understanding and Respect are I believe among the many fruits which will sprout from this plot of land.

We are busy planning many exciting events leading up to our Authors’ Event so please follow our progress here or sign up for our mailing list.

Thank you all, LeRoy Lucian