To enhance the value of French and Arabic literacy classes for 2,500-3,000 students in 11-12 villages in eastern Chad, Book Wish Foundation requests your help to provide mini-libraries of 50 easy reading books for each village. The books will be at an appropriate reading level for the newly literate, and will cover topics of local need and interest. These will be some of the first real books the students will ever read!

This is your chance to start a revolution, a revolution in learning for Darfur refugees and villagers in eastern Chad.

Book Wish Foundation, with your help, will provide solar lighting for schools in the Bredjing, Treguine, and Gaga refugee camps and the 11 nearby Chadian villages of Barde, Bakhita, Bredjing, Faguire, Fodji, Kadjala, Kinouane, Koundoulba, Lira, Mobouguine, and Rataye. The lighting will:

• illuminate literacy classes for 2,500 students in the villages
• help school teachers at 13 refugee schools grade papers and prepare lessons in the evening
• enable self-study groups of school teachers to meet after dark, to improve their subject knowledge and teaching skill (the teachers are themselves refugees)
• improve night-time English classes for 300 Darfuris in Treguine camp, which meet in very basic homes in groups of up to 30

If you have ever dreamed of helping to build a school in Africa, this is your chance. 12 primary schools in eastern Chad are in partial stages of construction, and need a little extra funding to be completed. When you read some of what is needed and why, you won't know whether to laugh or cry. What makes this an unusually important opportunity, though, is the location of the schools. They serve Chadian villages in the vicinity of Darfur refugee camps, communities desperately poor to begin with and further stressed by the massive influx of refugees. Your support for the villagers, who have been relatively overlooked by donors, will have the added benefit of easing tensions in this critical region.

The adult literacy rate of Chad is abysmally low, only 25.7%, the third lowest of 177 countries reported on by the United Nations Development Programme. For Chadian women, the situation is even more dire. Book Wish Foundation is excited to partner with CORD to improve literacy classes for 2,500 villagers — 60% of them women — in 11 villages in eastern Chad.