By Mitch Belkin | Program Coordinator
Dear friends,
As you know, we formed Radarami to connect intellectually hungry Georgians with information about the world beyond Georgia’s borders—a world that's only available to speakers of major languages. Because of your support, Radarami has published 10 books, printed 27,450 copies and continues to distribute these copies to 31 library districts, 8 university libraries, 55 bookstores, 2 penitentiaries, 47 public schools and 15 other locations, including the only operating mobile library in Georgia.
Here’s what we’ve been up to the last three months:
In September, we launched our tenth book, "Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science" by Atul Gawande, at the Medical University in Tbilisi. The book is a fascinating story- and interview-based exploration of the limits of medicine. A local surgeon introduced the book and the author of the introduction spoke. Over 60 surgeons, doctors and medical students attended. See the attached photo.
Through our partnership with the Ministry of Education and Culture of Abkhazia in exile, we distributed books to the Gali region in Abkhazia and to IDP (internally displaced person) villages, resettlement communities for those who had to leave their homes in the disputed breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, territories occupied by Russia since the 2008 war. Approximately forty schools in IDP villages and in Gali now have access to Radarami books.
Radarami is glad to welcome onboard several new staff members and interns. We have a very talented translation coordinator, Ketevan Jakeli. After receiving her BA and MA in English Language and Literature, Ketevan taught English and worked on several projects under the Ministry of Education before being hired as an expert textbook evaluator. In 2010, she was hired at Save the Children as a specialist in textbook development for schools and universities, where she oversaw textbook creation, contracting and managing authors, editors, translators, designers and publishers. In 2012, she started working at the Georgian Publishers & Booksellers Association (GPBA) as an Executive Director and was the manager of the GPBA annual Tbilisi Book Fair in 2013. She is currently Deputy Director at a small Georgian publishing house, Logos Press. In addition we have three new interns—Nuri, Mariam and Sandro, who are helping out with grant writing, events organizing and distribution respectively. All three attend Tbilisi State University—Nuri and Mariam are BA students, and Sandro is working toward his MA.
Two weeks ago, we asked our 200 + SMS users which book was their favorite. What we found out is that opinions are quite divided. The most popular Radarami book is Kathryn Schultz’s “Being wrong” (35% of respondents), followed by Tony Judt’s “Ill Fares the Land” (23%). Currently we can send and receive messages to our readers as well as categorize readers into different groups. We are meeting with our SMS system IT designer to upgrade our SMS platform to allow Radarami readers to communicate with each other and organize their own events.
The Open Society Foundation is partially funding the publication and printing of two books in our pipeline: “The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement” by David Graeber and “The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen” by Kwame Anthony Appiah. The Democracy Project reappraises the state of American democracy and argues against inequality, in favor of consensus, equality and broader participation in politics. The Honor Code discusses from a historical perspective how moral practices like foot binding in 19th century China were ended by changes in what is considered honorable, not by legislation from above.
In addition, we are hard at work on translating, editing and fine-tuning Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin”, which chronicles and evaluates the destructive period of German and Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. This book is especially important for Georgians because of the political divisiveness of Stalin, who is still admired by many Georgians as a national hero. There is great need for a public reappraisal of his role. Soon we will launch a holiday fundraiser to raise money to print this much needed book.
If you have any other questions or comments, please email mitch@radarami.org
Happy Holidays from Tbilisi,
The Radarami Team
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
