Author Description

For many rural families all over Ethiopia, children carry the job of watching cattle and sheep. In the high, northern Simian Mountains, children may walk as much as 20 miles a day with their sheep to find water and grass. They carry the sheep when necessary. Some of them spend a few hours a day in school and then go back to their jobs with the livestock. It is a challenging life, but it can be the source of valuable life. The people listening to the story retold in this book, first told 2000 years ago, would have understood this sense of trust and responsibility felt by a shepherd. It was a wonderful metaphor to describe the trustworthiness of God. Ready Set Go Books, an Open Hearts Big Dreams Project, is focused on increasing the literacy rate in Ethiopia through giving readers books with stories in their heart languages, full of colorful illustrations with Ethiopian settings and details. Profits from books sales will be used to create, print, and distribute more Ready Set Go Books to kids in Ethiopia, Africa's second most populous country. Ethiopia's population is 44% children, ages 0-14 (43 million out of 97 million total). Only 5.5% of children attend pre-school or kindergarten, and the adult literacy rate is 49%.