It was a bright sunny day, but 4-year-old Ferohar Bellagh and other preschoolers at Fremont's Brier Elementary School weren't interested in going outside.
Instead, they were captivated inside Room 11 by their teacher reading a story of a boy from another country who travels to a neighboring village to find its residents terrified by a dangerous animal.
Ferohar, who wore black braids tied with a pink ribbon, laughed along with her classmates when the forbidding creature turned out to be a mere watermelon.
Having overwhelmed the "animal," the boy in the story hands out delicious fruit slices to villagers and teaches them how to grow watermelon. The town will henceforth be known as Watermelon Village.
"The Clever Boy and the Terrible, Dangerous Animal," which aims to teach children how to overcome their fears and question prejudices, is one of many children's stories from the rich oral traditions of Afghanistan.
Its publisher, Hoopoe Books, has published such stories since its inception in 1998. The company, a division of the Los Altos-based educational nonprofit Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge, publishes tales collected and retold by the late Afghan author and teacher Idries Shah.
Born in India to a family of Afghan nobility, Shah wrote more than three dozen books before his death in 1966. His writings generally show how Sufism - the mystical dimension of Islam - is a source of wisdom.
Since 2009, Hoopoe Books has distributed the books to Afghan and U.S. libraries, schools and orphanages under the label Books for Afghanistan.
"By repatriating these tales to the nation, we are restoring a part of Afghan cultural tradition and fighting illiteracy," Hoopoe Books Director Sally Mallam said.
Almost three-quarters of Afghans over the age of 15, according to Hoopoe Books, cannot read or write, while 5 million of the country's 12 million school-age children have no access to education.
The Books for Afghanistan program recently received a Public Diplomacy Grant award of $4.5 million from the U.S. State Department, which will allow it to print and distribute nearly 2.6 million books by September, including 1.7 million copies in Dari and Pashto, the major languages of Afghanistan. That's a huge boost from its paltry 2011 budget of $67,000 from private donors.
The books are printed in Afghanistan and delivered in cooperation with such Afghan nongovernmental organizations as the Kabul-based Khatiz Organization for Rehabilitation.
Shah's tales are designed to encourage children to think on their own, question authority and counter extremist ideologies. They also convey values and capabilities such as kindness and courage, as in the story about the boy and the "terrible, dangerous animal."
"The tales revitalize a storytelling tradition disrupted by three decades of conflict and help to enable the next generation to fully participate in a modern country," Mallam said.
To date, more than 600,000 books, which are illustrated by Bay Area artists, have been distributed across the United States.
Brier Elementary received more than 300 kits, which include books and CDs, last year.
"The kids, parents and teachers like the stories, because they are authentic and exciting," said Beverly Taub, program manager of Brier's preschool programs.
English is not the first language of many Brier parents, who come from such countries as Mexico, India and China.
"The kits from Hoopoe came with a CD and in an English as well as a Spanish version. That's a good way to bring books into the homes," Taub said. "Many households do not own more than one or two children's books."
Ferohar's parents are Afghans. Fremont has the largest Afghan community in the country, which is centered in an area known as Little Kabul. Some Afghan families might recognize the tales from their childhood.
Picture: Ferohar Bellagh and Sohaila Belagh look at "The Clever Boy and the Terrible, Dangerous Animal". Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle.
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