Acclaimed author visits Smallwood Academy

Don't try telling Jo-Anne Broders a little persistence doesn't pay off.

In 2001, after reading The Breadwinner, a novel about an 11-year-old girl named Parvana living in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, who must disguise herself as a boy to provide food for her family, Ms. Broders, an English and social studies teacher at Smallwood Academy in Gambo, e-mailed the novel's author, Deborah Ellis, to thank her for writing the book.

That blossomed into the students corresponding with the author by e-mail every year after reading the novel, as well as numerous invitations to Ms. Ellis to come to Gambo to meet with the children at the school.

Those invitations finally paid off last week.

For two days, students from William Mercer Academy in Dover, St. Paul's Intermediate in Gander, and Smallwood Academy met with Ms. Ellis in Gambo to chat with the author, discuss her books and her trips around the world, and to give presentations about their interpretations of the Breadwinner as the novelist watched nearby.

On Thursday, groups of students marched to the front of the school's gymnasium to display their pictures, act in plays they organized, and give presentations of different themes and scenes in The Breadwinn-er.

And it was all a worthwhile experience, according to Ms. Ellis.

"I've seen a lot of interesting ways of approaching the book," she told The Beacon Thursday. "Some kids focused on different parts of the plot, and others talk about war, in general. It's been really interesting."

She added she also enjoyed meeting with the children to learn how the novel influenced them.

"They talked about how the book has affected them, how it has expanded their thinking beyond the borders of their community, and taught them to look beyond that, and at the world in general," she said.

"It's made them think more about the people who live behind the news stories, so they reflect upon ordinary people's lives during war and other things going on."

Well-received novel

By lunchtime Thursday, Ms. Broders was still ecstatic the students' letters to the author finally resulted in a visit.

She said the students were delighted to have Ms. Ellis, who donates profits from her books to help the people she writes about, come to Gambo, since they all enjoyed the novel so much.

"The Breadwinner was rated 10-out-of-10 in class by the students. We brought so much political awareness into the classroom and had such great discussions on freedom," Ms. Broders said of the first class to read the book as part of their coursework.

"Every year since then, I've had the Grade 7 students to write her as part of the course to thank her, and every year the novel gets a 10-out-of-10 rating by students. Even some parents have read it and said the same thing."

And what also impresses Ms. Broders is that Ms. Ellis always replies to the e-mails.

"A lot of times, when you speak to authors, they may send back one quick paragraph and then it's done," she said. "But she wrote a letter to me, a letter to the kids, and she kept doing it every year.

"A lot of the kids felt like they got to know her through the letters she wrote. She made it personal by staying in contact with us."

The novel, she added, paints a picture of what Afghanistan was like while ruled by the Taliban, and while some people initially feared some scenes depicted in the book may be too graphic and violent for students in junior high school, it gave the students a chance to learn what living conditions are really like in other places of the world.

And in the end, both Ms. Broders and Ms. Ellis hope the students will remember the lessons learned in The Breadwinner.

"We carry with us the books we read as kids," said Ms. Ellis. "Hopefully, when they grow up, they'll remember Parvana's story, remember there are a lot of people behind the decisions that get made, and people end up being affected by those decision.

"That's my hope."

Ms. Ellis' new book, Off to War, will be released in September, and deals with children's experiences living on American and Canadian military bases serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.