January 2012

Every morning, we invite visitors to come to our shop in Luang Prabang, and help young people in Laos practice their English. It gets quite full some days. Morever, because of jobs and school schedules, many students can't come in the morning. So we've expanded the hours for English practice: It's now 7 days a week, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., and again from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. It's a drop-in event: We encourage everyone to come promptly at 9 a.m. or 5 p.m., but if you can't come until later, that's okay. Stay for the full 2 hours, or leave earlier if you need to.

We've been offering these sessions for 5 years. As you travel in northern Laos, you'll probably meet young people working in restaurants or shops, or as guides, who learned their English at Big Brother Mouse.

December 2011

Thanks to support from the U.S. Embassy, we have been able to make repeated visits to 8 villages in rural Nan district. In each village we held a book party at the rural school, and helped to set up a reading room in the home of a volunteer, then went back 4 times to bring more books, hold workshops, and provide training. We have some enthusiastic people helping to make books available in the district, but they have no experience with such things. We offer suggestions, but we don't always know what will work best, so we also watch and listen..

The district governor kindly let us know the government meeting hall for a workshop in December. Here, some of the volunteers try a system that allows everyone to record each book they've read, and what they think of it, with the goal of prompting others to take an interest in the same book.

December 2011

Young people in developed countries get a wide range of experiences that everyone takes for granted. Playing board games. Reading for pleasure. Watching movies. Expressing their opinion in a group discussion about something of significance. Taking fun day trips to the countryside, if they live in the city, or vice-versa. Flying off to Paris for a week. Experimenting with science kits. Solving puzzles of many sorts. Learning to speak in public.

Young people here get little or none of that. Typically they go to school, and take notes as the teacher reads or lectures. Then, if they live at home, they help with work in the field; if they've moved away for school, they go off to their job.

The Mouse Experience is a week when our staff gets an opportunity for other experiences, such as those mentioned above. (The trip to Paris isn't in our budget, but we're happy to hear from sponsors.) Here, Ae and Vanali are playing charades, one of a dozen activities, games, and trips we offered during a week-long break for the book party teams.

November 2011

From the beginning, we've wanted to hold teacher training workshops. Today's Lao teachers never saw books like ours when they were children. They have no experience using fun, lively books in their classroom work. But first, we had to focus on creating such books.

This year, we've made teacher training our #1 priority. Save the Children, an international organization that works in Laos, graciously invited us to a teacher workshop in Phontong district, and added an extra day to the schedule so we could share ideas about using books in class. Here, teachers practice effective techniques for reading aloud.

October 2011

We've held book parties at 95% of the primary schools in Luang Prabang province. For the other 5%, we tried to go but encountered washed-out roads, had transportation difficulties, or there were unexpected school closings; we'll try again. Thanks to a grant from Planet Wheeler, this year we're also going to all 61 of the high schools (grades 6 to 12) in the province.

Only a minority of Lao children continue school after 5th grade. Those who do are highly motivated. They often move away from home and live with relatives in a town that has a high school. They're eager to learn; now, they've got good books that will help them and challenge them.

High schools are much bigger than primary schools. Typical enrollments are from 250 to 2,000 students. We've developed new activities that are exciting for students of this age. A quiz game is fun, and highlights the interesting content of the books we're presenting to the school.

August 2011

Which country in ASEAN (the Association of South-East Asian Nations) formerly had a flag with a picture of a three-headed elephant? How long is a giant sea squid? Those questions were joined by nearly a hundred other questions for a fundraiser at Vientiane College on 6 August.

People often ask how they can help Big Brother Mouse. Hannah McDonald-Moniz and Alex Godfrey, who teach at the college, did just what we suggested: They held a trivia-contest. Everyone had fun, and they raised in some $3,000 to help us publish new books. Thank you, Hannah and Alex, and all those who attended.

July 2011

Biblioteka Ermera, which is working to improve literacy and education in East Timor, liked New, Improved Buffalo enough that they asked if they could translate and publish it there. Their Tetun language edition just came off press. In this photo, translator Ilda de Jesus Martins and library coordinator Jonas ho Nia Karau hold up both the original and the East Timor editions. New, Improved Buffalo has also been published in Cambodia, in both Khmer and French. When possible, we're happy to give permission to organizations such as Biblioteka Ermera to reprint our books.

June 2011

This buffalo is turning two giant, hand-carved wooden gears. Sugar cane is pressed between the spools at the bottom, to form a juice, which is boiled down to make sugar of a golden brown color. (The Lao word for brown is "sugar".) This is one of many scenes of Lao life captured by our photographer Si, documenting every aspect of life in Laos. We plan a continuing series of books, drawing from the thousands of photos we've already collected, and the many more we expect to get. The first title will be Beautiful Luang Prabang. This photography project has been made possible by a grant from the travel company Butterfield and Robinson. Thank you!

May 2011

Number skills are as valuable as reading skills. In 'Number Bingo,' players take turns rolling 3 dice. They combine the numbers using common arithmetic signs, to make a new number, which they can cover up. The first play to cover 4 numbers in a row. Here, at a staff workshop, we experiment with a method of teaching this, using oversize dice and teams, rather than individual players. This will go into a book of educational games that we're preparing, and we may sometimes play it at school book parties, or in village events.

March 2011

Our first 8-page books, announced last July, have come off press. These very short, simple books feature bright illustrations, simple words, and lots of repetition. Even the youngest readers discover that "I can read a book!" Moreover, new writers discover that "I can write a book!" Three young members of our staff, Visone, Jan, and La, have become published authors by writing one of these books. This photo shows Visone with her book, The Crab Flexes its Muscles.

In the year ahead, thanks to Planet Wheeler in Australia, we'll hold a book party and deliver books to all 61 high schools in Luang Prabang province. (This includes what in some countries would be called "middle schools"; we're reaching students in grades 6 to 12.) Books are new enough to most people in Laos that all these students enjoy fairy tales. We also have an growing number of nonfiction titles that are highly popular, with subjects ranging from women's health to wonders of the world, from geography to World War II.

December 2010

The biggest book we've published so far is also the book that took the longest to translate: Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. There were many challenges in the translation, not just because European terms often had no equivalent in Lao, but also because few people here know enough about World War II to fully understand the context of this important book. But our illustrated history of the war will come off the press soon, and already we're seeing college-age readers absorbed in the diary.

As we've set up reading rooms in villages, then gone back for visits and training, one thing has become clear: That follow-up is an essential aspect of helping these reading rooms, and the volunteers who run them, to become effective. We've set up more than 100 reading rooms, thanks largely to Planet Wheeler in Australia, and now we're closely looking for the best ways to help them develop.

In December and January we held reading room workshops in Nong Kiao for village volunteers in the Ngoi district. The primary focus was encouraging people to read aloud in their villages, and teaching them techniques for doing so. This young man overcame his considerable initial shyness, and kept his listeners' eager attention when we went to a nearby village for practice.

November 2010

Our book party teams spend a week on the road, typically visiting 2 schools a day. It's satisfying but tiring. This month, they stayed in Luang Prabang for a week of "The Mouse Experience": A variety of activities and new experiences that help them develop both personal skills and work skills, while having fun and learning new things. The week included writing a new song to teach at our book parties; a visit to Kwangsi Waterfall; electronics experiments; animated read-aloud practice; and trying out some educational board games that we'll later teach in villages.

October 2010

Toot toot! "Toot" is the Lao word for "Ambassador". We've begun read-aloud practices for the many young people who come to Luang Prabang for work or school, but periodically return to their home villages and families. They get tips and practice reading aloud, then when they go to their village, we give them some books to read with children and adults in their village. It doesn't solve the problem of books not being available in most villages, but it's one step in creating the enthusiasm for books that will help as we get to more villages. (Orange robes are not a requirement; on this particular day, we had several novice monks come in for the practice.)

August 2010

School starts soon, in Laos and in many other countries. Would your school or class like to sponsor a book party at a Lao school? We've got some materials to help, including a short picture book you can download, which tells what life is like for a fairly typical child in Laos. Please see our special page for School Classes.

July 2010

You might think a 32-page book is short, but for a child who's never seen a book, and whose parents can't read, that can still seem like too much to start with. So we're developing some very short books: 8 pages, with just one short sentence per page. And we're trying to make them as much fun, for children and adults, as the longer books.

It turns out that very short books are a good starting-point not only for new readers, but also for new writers. We had a writing workshop for members of our staff who had no writing experience, and three of them then wrote their first books, which we're now preparing for publiation. They include La with The Hungry Frog and Jan with The Bird Carries His Sister. Then James, who learned desktop publishing and design skills here at Big Brother Mouse, gave them a crisp, appealing look.

May 2010

Thanks to support from the U.S. Embassy and Elefantasia Vientiane, we took books into remote villages that do not have access by road or river. Oh, we should thank Boom-Boom, the book elephant, and her friend, as well. In addition to sponsoring these elephant-based trips, the U.S. Embassy has sponsored home-based reading rooms and school libraries in 8 rural villages.

February 2010

As in so much of the world, traditional toys in Laos are losing ground to cheap, colorful plastic toys from China. But the traditional toys have many merits: They're cheaper; making them often is an enjoyable parent-child activity; they generally require more active participation from the child and may improve many physical and mental skills; when they break, they can be fixed with local materials and know-how; and when they break too much for that, they won't still be lingering around 100 years from now. Sonesoulilat, who has written several other books, including Game Time! has written a book describing how to make some of the most popular traditional toys.Thanks to a grant from the Global Fund for Children, we will soon publish it.