Reading Promotion
The Reading Promotion Program is an invitation to read, play with words and love knowledge through a series of workshops, playful strategies and books created especially for rural families.
Our contents follow a rigorous process that ensures a final product of quality that is relevant, easy to understand and pleasing to the eye, which will remain in all rural homes and schools as an invitation to continue reading and learning every day.
After many years of working in the countryside, Secrets to tell has become a major cultural and educational reference for children, young people and adults from Antioquia’s countryside.
What have you hidden? ―asked the bird.
― It’s my secret. I will never tell.
― But hidden secrets grow too big
and become difficult to keep.Secrets are for telling!
Mission
To share books, workshops, contents and experiences that motivate rural families and teachers to integrate harmoniously into life through strategies for the promotion and enjoyment of reading.
Objetives
1
To promote reading among rural inhabitants in order to create habits that contribute to the improvement of their quality of life.
2
To create, produce and distribute a library designed especially for rural families, with themes and content that strengthen personal skills and community bonding.
3
To make reading a means of family reunion and interaction between generations.
4
To provide pedagogical tools for school work.
A little bit of history
Once upon a time, there was an old man who, when he walked through the countryside, seemed to be talking to the rain trees, cedars and stone pine trees, which he cleaned of dry twigs. He was amazed by everything he saw: a 50-year-old native mango tree, the thriving guava trees, a stone pine tree blossoming with ears, the outline of a mountain, the chattering of a few hens, the cackling of a little Cuban broody hen, the bitter taste of an unripe mango chancleto or the expectant howl of a dog.
Some years ago, in the middle of Antioquia’s mountains, this old man gave his farm workers a book on agriculture and native trees as a Christmas present.
That Christmas, without even knowing it, a great adventure began that continues to this day and seems to have no end. This adventure is called Secrets to tell. It involves rural families, rural teachers, schools, libraries, entities from all sectors and all the people who have had the opportunity to read one of our books. It is an adventure that tells us about the need to learn. It also addresses the bonds with our fellow men and women and how we all weave a network that unites us as a family, as a community, as a region, as a department, as a country, as humanity and as living beings that are part of planet Earth, our home.
But why did it all start that Christmas? Well, months later, while the old man was walking through some of the farm’s pastures with one of his workers, he noticed some trees and asked about them. The worker, enthusiastic, answered with information that surprised the old man: he told him the trees’ common names, their scientific names and some of the uses that could be given to them. He also mentioned the species of fauna that visited them. The old man, a little surprised at the worker’s confidence and knowledge, asked him why he knew so much about those trees.
―I learned of all that in that book you gave us in December.
And that was a spark in the old man’s heart. Something stirred. A seed broke its shell. An idea began to grow in his head. So he gathered a group of people dedicated to various fields of culture, development and education with the idea of promoting the intelligent exchange of ideas and the creation of bonds of friendship and commitment, which laid the foundations for this project.
They investigated the subject in depth and realized that, in general, almost no one in rural homes and schools had anything to read, despite the fact that there was a lively interest in learning in all of them.
This is how the Secrets to tell Foundation was born. Over the years, and thanks to the constant support of hundreds of companies and entities, it became a project to promote reading and education. It now creates and shares contents, books and workshops free of charge with all the rural families in the department of Antioquia that have some of their members attending rural schools in the territory.
These contents and workshops have become an invitation to read and learn from a library created for Antioquia’s rural family. This material is printed on excellent paper and in full color and undergoes a rigorous editorial process that ensures a final product of very good quality that is relevant, easy to read and pleasing to the eye, which will remain in homes as an invitation to continue reading and learning every day.
Unfortunately, sometimes time is not enough to see our dreams come true, and the old man did not get to see how the books that were transported on mules, boats, airplanes, trucks, camiones escalera (a colorful artisan rustic bus common in Colombian rural areas) or garruchas (a rural rustic cable car), managed to cross the dense jungles, the mighty rivers, the wide savannahs, the roads of all kinds and even the deep canyons that separate the mountains, to end up in the hands and hearts of the rural families. This was thanks to the commitment of the workshop leaders of Secrets to tell (“those of the books,” as we are called in many places).
Now, those who plow the soil with the hoe to create the furrows, and sow the seeds that will become food, have books and reading habits that will help them improve their agricultural practices in order to make them more friendly with the Earth and to live in harmony with all living beings.
Protective and loving mothers have books and knowledge to accompany their children’s growth and development and to provide them with well-being and health in the form of love, care, food and medicine.
Children who are learning and shaping the world, students who are thinking about the future, have books and intellectual tools that will help them to learn about the present and the past and to reflect and question, so that the future they represent will be more beneficial for all.
Teachers who help shape the character and knowledge of an entire generation have the tools to awaken curiosity, nurture the intellect and strengthen the bonds that unite us with other human beings.
Now, everyone in the countryside has the opportunity to find the pleasure of reading, of learning, of having fun with old and new stories, of rediscovering the song of the tiple (a musical instrument) that has resounded among the mountains for centuries, because someone, sometime, somewhere dreamed it… and that dream is still alive, growing, adding people, transforming itself and tracing new roads and new paths to help us to fly higher and higher.
In order to have a good relationship with books and reading, it is essential that the first book in life be an object of our own that we can enjoy and manipulate The spark produced by books will change people’s lives and help them find their dreams and motivations. The fact that all the children of a village and their families have the books at the same time generates changes and makes the books begin to be very important in the school and become the textbooks of the schools in the countryside.
Since then, Secrets to tell has created a regional culture, a culture of Secrets to tell.
Our Books
In the first phase, we convene all rural teachers in the municipality through the departments of education and educational centers to hold a workshop.
In this workshop, we give the teachers the books that we are going to bring to the families, and we make a reading promotion, so that they know the most relevant topics that are addressed in each title. The idea is to get them motivated so that they encourage the families to attend the event to be held in each village.
There, we also define the days and times when we will go to each village to bring the books and, with the help of the teachers, we coordinate some important logistical aspects such as the census of families and, if necessary, the possible additional transportation required to reach the most remote villages.
Afterwards, we provide the teachers with invitation flyers for the families, containing the date, place and time of the event, so that they feel part of the process and attend the reading promotion event.
The second phase is the installation of the books. In this phase, our reading promoters visit the rural schools in each municipality, according to the schedules agreed upon with the teachers, and hold the reading promotion event with the families. To reach the most remote areas, we often have to cross forests, mountains and rivers in the most varied means of transportation (by horse or mule, boat, airplane, car, motorcycle or walking).
These workshops are very pleasant spaces, where we spend time with the rural families, talk with them, give them the books in person and encourage them to continue reading. In the reading promotion, we review the most important themes of each book. Always with smiles on our faces, we read together and invite the participants to take ownership of the books, to take care of them and to turn them into new members of the family.
We also deliver some copies of the books to the different urban and rural educational institutions, cultural centers and other entities related to educational processes, in order to make them available to the entire community.
The third phase takes place a few weeks after the delivery of the books to the families and consists of a meeting with the teachers to conduct a teachers’ workshop.
This is a time to discuss the relevance of the books in different contexts and to provide teachers with complementary material to help them prepare their classes or develop topics related to the contents of the books, which all students have at home.
It is a way to provide them with pedagogical tools to deepen and make learning fun for the children, and to complement the educational inputs that exist in the countryside.
