This is a cultural development for the promotion of the readings in the poorest schools and outlying areas of the City of Resistencia (Chaco, Argentina) and its metropolitan area (Puerto Barranqueras, Puerto Vilelas and the village of Fontana).
Besides, the first transference has been made successfully and the activities of the Program are developed, at the moment, in the second city of the Province: Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña.
The activity consists of summoning senior citizens who have vocation and desires to read stories for children. These people, trained by specialized personnel, get together with children in many schools of the metropolitan area of Resistencia. Most of the children of this area, never, or very rarely, have had the opportunity of sharing this experience of affection and beauty with their own relatives.
This is a very generous and stimulating service that tries to bring what we consider spiritual food -the Reading. At the same time it is possible to bring them the particularly extraordinary spectacle of Literature to thousand of the poorest children in the nation, many of them natives that live in marginal communities. Our Grandmothers offer them an opportunity to develop ontological and aesthetic sense that will be useful for them throughout their lives.
In fact, they are Reading Grandmothers, not exactly storytellers. This means that the entire activity turns around the book. They try to teach its symbolic value through the most loving and generous way its symbolic value to achieve our specific objective which is to promote the Reading since the first age.
This is a participative Program of integration that not only includes senior citizens, but also unties energies and organizes activities in all the communities where the Grandmothers arrive (such as elementary schools, hospitals, institutes for disabled people, children’s dining halls and orphanages, whose deans, educational and professional staff and students participate actively in the experience.
The Grandmothers Program has gradually but consistently created opportunities for exchanges across generations, usually condemned to the distance by the age differences that often prevail in places conceived for culture, leisure and pleasure.
Moreover, the Program has an important impact on the self-esteem of the Grandmothers. As they are volunteers, mainly instructed women in their 50-60’s excluded from the labor market by the ferocity of the Argentinean economical shock (early and for good). These women express their gratitude for they have found in this Program a new and productive way of using their time and their capacity to give affection in the role of Story-tellers.
