Heba el-Omari sat proudly in front of a tree painted on the walls of a community center. Each branch of the tree held up a storybook on a shelf. “It took us a long time to prepare this,” she tells us, “but now it looks great”!
She tells us that the We Love Reading program had inspired Butterfly Story, the newly established community center. The name of the center is inspired by our training material, which incorporates the butterfly effect and chaos theory, and the idea that small actions have larger effects.
Heba has been reading aloud to groups of children ever since she attended the We Love Reading training in Irbid in 2018 and received a seed library of 25 children’s books.
She attended the two-day training, which to this date, has been delivered in many other locations in Jordan, with women and men of different ages and professions in her area. The trainings have encouraged a large number of volunteers across the country to read aloud to children in their neighborhoods wherever and whenever they find the space and time.
The center is running a summer school, and Heba holds reading sessions there 5 days a week. She tells us that she loved reading as a child, and that now she loves reading to children.