A Wonderful Gift Idea

Students in Haiti reading FabiolaExpect great things from a publishing company built with the children of the world mind!

One Moore Book is dedicated to providing literature that educates and entertains children who live in marginalized countries. These books are filled with characters who are much like the children who read them. The plots follow the lives of ordinary school-aged children thriving under extraordinarily harsh conditions. Children love these books, because they see themselves in the characters; they are represented.

OMB’s debut series, written for and dedicated to the children of Liberia, continues to receive praise. More importantly, however, the Liberia Series is currently in the hands of children who remain out of school due to the Ebola outbreak. While we work and pray for a resolution for afflicted Liberia and neighboring regions, there is a dot of comfort in knowing that One Moore Book had the vision to supply the world’s most desperate children with a means of escaping bleak realities–if only for brief moments. The illustrations are attractive and vivid, contributing to raising comprehension levels by beginning readers, fluent ones, and non-readers alike.

One Moore Book’s Haiti Series features native born writers, as well as Haitian-Americans: Ibi Zoboi, Michele Jessica Fievre, Maureen Boyer,   Edwidge Danticat, Sybill St. Aude, and Katia D. Ulysse each contributed one book: These six amazing books have brought priceless smiles to countless adults and children in Haiti and in the Diaspora. The books are for everyone who wants to learn a little more about Haitian culture. I have heard from people as far as Scotland who value these books for the lessons they teach in fun ways.

This Holiday season, One Moore Book has partnered with an education foundation–Free the Slaves –to give copies of “Fabiola Can Count” to all children who not only deserve to see themselves validated in literature, but need to know they are not alone in their plight. (Fabiola Can Count is about a little stay-with girl who learns to count, using the few resources available to an indentured servant).

Stay-with  children, as benign as the term sounds, is a long-established condition that too often translates to enslavement of powerless children–some as young as five years old.  Although there are those who prefer to deny the existence of Stay-with children, finding evidence is easy and well-documented. To be sure, this phenomenon is present in most cultures throughout the known world. Children are made to care for entire households of adults and other children much older than the servants. This phenomenon is slowly declining in Haiti. Those would might have waved dismissive hands are now willing to hold conversations on the subject. The fact that modern day slavery persists anywhere in the world is tragic.

Fabiola Can Count, written in Haitian Creole and in English, provides children with beautiful illustrations and an engaging story that promote first language literacy and English language learning.  This holiday season, One Moore Book is ready to give Fabiola to every Stay-with child in Haiti. We need your help.

Here is the message from One Moore Book. I hope you will support this effort. It is heartwarming and necessary. What a super opportunity to bring joy into an unsuspecting child’s heart! This offer will end 1/30.

Happy Holidays!

YOU BUY, WE GIVE. HOLIDAY 1-FOR-1

Christmas is an incredible time of year for many children around the world, but not all. In Haiti, a child who is a modern-day slave is called a restavek–a term which means “stay with.” This season, every time you buy Katia D. Ulysse’s incredible book, “Fabiola Konn Konte”, a counting book about a young restavek girl from the OMB Haiti Series, we will match this and donate a copy to a restavek child through a partnership with the Free the Slaves organization and Fondasyon Limyé Lavi in Haiti. 

This giving program will end on January 31st.

Pictured: Children read One Moore Book’s Fabiola Can Count by Katia D. Ulysse at the Innovation Hub in Port-au-Prince,

 

Black History Month: The Little Rock Nine, Wayétu Moore, and Fabiola


little-rock-nine-students
It was supposed to the beginning of a new school year–a season charged with expectation and optimism, not a time to be caught in other people’s petty, stale, yet violent wars.

The year was 1957. Teachers, good and refreshed, had prepared thoughtful and engaging lessons. Governor Orval Eugene Faubus–hellbent on preventing children of all colors to sit together in the same classroom–had prepared his own lesson so meticulously that it took federal troops to help him modify it.

Uncertain of his own power to defy the Supreme Court ruling that outlawed segregation (Brown v. Board of Education), Governor Faubus summoned the Arkansas National Guard to hold back little Elizabeth. For extra reinforcement, mobs of grown men, women, and their children took aim, firing their sharpest insults and threats.

Elizabeth Ann Eckford - will_counts1_fElizabeth Eckford had wanted only to go to school–like most ‘normal’  high school students.  Holding her books securely against her chest, she took careful steps toward Central High’s front door.

Bullies disguised as everyday white-folk had gathered to teach Elizabeth their own rigorous lesson.  Their objective: Student will be so completely traumatized and terrorized that she will run/walk/stumble as far away from Central High and everyone’s sight as swiftly as possible.

The bullies won that September morning.  They pumped their fists and spat as Elizabeth walked back to her bus stop, leaving Little Rock’s Central High School. The girl’s face was set like stone. But like any stone thrown violently into a body of water, Elizabeth Eckford caused concentric circles to form and spread.

When Elizabeth returned to Central High weeks after she was forced to walk away, eight other determined students had joined her. The hate-mobs returned as well, but they were like paper dolls in a hurricane. The winds of change would scatter them; history would be made.

d090457Millions of black students walk into schools today with an opportunity to learn because The Little Rock Nine dared. Elizabeth and her schoolmates were like nine stones hurled into the seemingly infinite ocean of racism, causing concentric circles to spread so far and so wide within the Civil Rights Movement that we see them even today.

This Black History Month, VoicesfromHaiti honors Melba Pattillo Beals, Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Ann Eckford, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Themlma Mothershed, and Terrence Roberts: The Little Rock Nine who risked their lives for a chance to go to school.

We honor Wayétu Moore. This lady has made it her business to illuminate the mindpath of children from countries with low literacy rates. Moore’s young publishing company, One Moore Book, delivers children’s own stories to them.

Wayetu-Moore
Wayetu Moore

Wayétu dedicated the first cycle of books to her beloved father and the children of her native Liberia, saying:  “I will never be able to give my father back the twenty years he spent working to educate us, or the home and life in Liberia he lost. I repay his sacrifice by honoring the education he fought for and offering my art to the world, with stories that make the histories and narratives of my people come alive. . .”

One Moore Book’s current series is dedicated to the children of my beloved Haiti. The six books in the series are written by Maureen Boyer, Edwidge Danticat, Michele Jessica Fievre, Cybille St. Aude, Ibi Zoboi, and Katia D. Ulysse.

Finally, much honor and respect for a little girl named Fabiola who lives thousands of miles away in Toupatou, Haiti. Fabiola does not go to school, not because a stubborn governor has deployed guards to keep her out. Fabiola is a modern-day slave: a rèstavèk. Learn more about rèstavèks in Haiti. Read and share Fabiola’s story. Support One Moore Book’s Haiti Series by buying all six books!

Every child deserves the chance to go to school.

I am ridingI am Riding by Michele Jessica Fievre ~ Illustrated by Jean Patrick Icart-Pierre

The Last Mapou by Edwidge Danticat

 

 

The Last Mapou by Edwidge Danticat ~ Illustrated by Eduard Duval Carrie

 

FabiolacancountFabiola Can Count by Katia D. Ulysse ~ Illustrated by Kula Moore

 

a is for ayiti

A is for Ayiti by Ibi Zoboi

 

 

 

where is lola

 

Where is Lola?

by

Maureen Boyer