Call your local office / GSA: Coyne Airways helping Georgian children to learn English
Coyne Airways has brought hundreds of children’s book from Great Britain to Georgia since 2003 free of charge. These books are on their way to villages all over Georgia where they are helping children between five and nine years old learn English. While the schools have reference books and encyclopedias, they are very short of story books, especially illustrated ones.
The books are collected from schools and charity bazaars in England by Genette Dagtoglou, a London-based octogenarian, she has organised book missions for children in various countries for nearly 20 years now. She selects books with plenty of pictures, good vocabularies and appealing stories.
Getting books to Georgia was a challenge because logistics between the UK and Georgia are not well developed. Normal land, sea or air services would be too expensive for this charitable work, which Genette has been funding by herself. So Coyne Airways came to the rescue.
The books are sent out from Tbilisi to the villages, making the rest of their journey with English language teachers who live in the more remote corners of Georgia. The donated book parcels are warmly received by these volunteer teachers as it provides new learning materials, and by the children as this way of learning is fun. Despite the numbers of books there are not sufficient amounts to give the children their own copies, but they enjoy reading them aloud to their fellow classmates, and poring over the pictures together.
