“For children in their most impressionable years, there is, in fantasy, the highest of stimulating and educational powers.” ~Arthur Rackham, illustrator
Books, in general, can impact our lives profoundly and the way we view the world. Taking it from the perspective of children, any book that they’ve come to love can change their lives forever and drive them to be better human beings.
This is a belief shared by Korean-American author Linda Sue Park based on her father’s humble beginnings as an immigrant from Korea in the ‘50s, her own life experiences and that of Salva Dut, the protagonist in her 2010-published children’s book A Long Walk To Water.
Growing up in a town outside Chicago, where they were the only Korean family until she was eight years old, she vividly remembers enduring “racist taunts in elementary school, invisibility in junior high and don’t even get me started on high school.”
“My father raised me and my siblings as faithful library patrons and for me this proved to have two enormous blessings. The book in the library showed me that there was a very big world out there, big enough for even misfits like me to eventually find a place,” she recalls in a TEDx talking session uploaded on YouTube in December 2015.
Even more important, Linda says, was that books provided her with practice at life – the one thing she believes everyone needs the most because to her, life isn’t fair. She explains, “The books I read showed me how people faced unfairness in hundreds, thousands of different ways which did not include pressing buttons to blow things up. Instead, through the characters I came to love, I practised facing unfairness with bitterness and anger sometimes, but also with hope, with righteous anger, with determination.”
These gospel truths, she didn’t learn them at school. She didn’t learn them from any one she knew personally. Instead, by being immersed in a book, the stories became part of her. She lost herself in a book, and consequently found herself. Such is the power of books because reading is a “complex task which depends on a range of cognitive and linguistic processes” (Nation, 2019). One study has found that children in their most impressionable years who have a more nurturing home reading environment prior to kindergarten may have a more stimulated brain development supporting language and literacy skills.
“If books have the power to help us find ourselves, then a children’s book has superpowers because you never again love a book the way you do when you’re a child. Most of us remember our favorite childhood books for our entire lives. That is a powerful love,” she notes.
Empathy leading to action
Fast forward to recent times when Linda had released her book A Long Walk To Water based on the true life story of a man named Salva Dut.
An 11-year-old Salva, separated from his family, fled the civil war in Sudan in East Africa and became one of the so-called ‘lost boys of Sudan’. It was the term given to a group of over 20,000 boys that were displaced or orphaned during the Second Sudanese Civil War. Most below 10 years old, they fled to Ethiopia to escape death or being drafted into the northern army. Salva Dut was one of them. But after living in a refugee camp for 10 years, he got selected to receive an immigrant visa to the US where an American family adopted and took care of him. As founder of the nonprofit organization Water For South Sudan, he has since spearheaded the drilling of 259 wells in some of the most remote regions in South Sudan, bringing clean water to hundreds of thousands of people who never had it before.
To Linda’s awe and delight, soon after her book was published, she has received hundreds of letters from readers and their teachers, parents, librarians, many of them saying how excited they are to see their students so engaged with the book. She quotes one comment from a teacher in Upstate New York: “My non-readers love it! For the first time, all of them are reading beyond the assigned chapter, and as they read they practice Salva’s responses to the unfairness he faced: hope and perseverance.”
Putting that practice into practice, the students go out and raise money, hold walkathons carrying water, sell wrist bands, save pennies to donate to Salva’s organization. Hope and perseverance at its best. “To date, [student] readers of A Long Walk To Water have raised more than one million dollars for WFSS. That is the rough equivalent of about 60 wells, each one of them serving more than 2,000 people who no longer have to fear illness and death from water-borne diseases, especially the infants and children,” she reports with joy.
These children have been engaged and their empathy lightened up. They, as readers of the poignant book, have learned to empathize with its character’s situation, strengths and weaknesses.
In Linda’s own words, “Readers’ empathy for Salva and Nya [a fictional character in the book whose village benefits from WFSS’ cause] has turned them from normal, ordinary students into heroes who are saving lives every single day and enabling girls to get an education. That is significant. That’s real…And two crucial pathways are being laid down. The first in their brains, reading for practice at life. The second in their lives, empathy enlightening engagement.”
Check them out: There are many books that instill the kind of empathy that leads to action. Crenshaw by Katherine Applegate has inspired food drives for the homeless. How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids by Mary Reckmeyer and Tom Rath has sparked conversations around the world about the importance of positive interactions in schools and homes. I cannot wait to see the potential of the following Stampa-published books to inspire people to do noble things: In The Beginning by Daisy Graham, Case of the Missing Dog by Greg Grant, It’s OK To Tell by Marie Giles, New Mountain, New River, New Home? by Margaret Eldridge, Reflect, Dream & Be Enlightened by Dr Pat Keogh, and Saving Our Boys by Greg Griffiths, to name a few.
So to answer the question, “Can a children’s book save the world?” Perhaps not, but its readers – especially the young people – can be so moved by the story, it will lead them into action to become better human beings. That powerful love young people have for stories is what can save the world.