Exhibits
WIGUIWTB Exhibits:
The World Affairs Council of San Francisco
The Rosa Parks Museum and Library, Montgomery AL
The College of Lake County, Grays Lake IL
Presbyterian Church, Vashon Island, WA
Milwaukee City Hall, Milwaukee WI
Marquette University, Milwaukee WI
University of Michigan New England Literature Program presentation and exhibit at Sebago Lake, ME
McHenry County College, Crystal Lake IL
Daley Center, Chicago IL
Fox River Country Day School, Elgin IL
Deerfield High School, Deerfield IL
New Trier High School, Winnetka IL
Introduction to the When I Grow Up I Want To Be Exhibit by
award-winning author Jane Kurtz...
In Ethiopia,
a land of ancient churches and castles,
of mountains and waterfalls,
of coffee beans roasting on the fire,
the sun rises over the city of Addis Ababa,
over the palaces of former kings,
over beautiful houses of stone and brick,
with electric lights and televisions
and water that runs out of the faucets,
and over small houses where the children
own almost nothing, sometimes only a pigeon.
Only a Pigeon (Simon & Schuster)
by Jane Kurtz and Christopher Kurtz
“Early in the 1990s, my brother and I sat down to write Only a Pigeon, a picture book story of Andualem, the boy who used to shine my brother’s shoes when Christopher was teaching in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Andualem represents the children we’d seen all the years of our childhood spent in Ethiopia, children in the poor neighborhoods of a large city where perhaps five million people struggle on in the face of 40-50% unemployment. In drafty houses, the children who have at least one living parent or grandparent curl on the floor to sleep, sharing a mat and blanket with two-three siblings. In the morning, they clutch a small handful of grain for breakfast. The lucky ones attend school for half a day with as many as 180 children in each classroom and no books. At recess, they play soccer with a ball made from scrounged plastic bags. The rest of the day, they shine shoes or sell gum or watch cars to pick up a few coins.
Addis Ababa, capital city of what some call the third poorest country in the world, is crowded with children. Some sell tissues for ten hours a day, eight cents a pack. Five-year-olds crouch forlornly against a wall; seven or eight-year-olds tote younger siblings on their backs and run alongside tourists, looking up with hopeful eyes. If AIDS has taken away every one of their relatives, they curl to sleep under a piece of tin leaning against a wall made of brown earth and straw. Since the city has no garbage pick-up
system, dusk coaxes hyenas out of the surrounding hills; their weird, dislocated laughter echoes in the children’s ears.
How is it that tenderness, playfulness blossom still? Even in the poorest neighborhoods, children roll a tire rim down the street or feed a baby pigeon by chewing up a bit of grain in their own mouths. Adults from many places all over the world—though sometimes overwhelmed —don’t give up. They build orphanages and schools. Programs that offer new work to prostitutes. The first free library for children. They bring bits of paper, glue, and paint and watch, amazed, as children use their eyes and fingers to show what they have seen and what they long to see. Hope rises every morning with the smell of eucalyptus wood fires, soaking everything, impossible to completely stamp out.”
Award-winning author Jane Kurtz spent most of her childhood in Ethiopia, where many of her picture books and novels for young readers are set. She now writes books, speaks nationally and internationally, and supports Yohannes Gebregeorgis's efforts to publish children's books and plant some of the very first free libraries for children in Ethiopia. You can read more about her books and projects at: