Bring books and magazines...

For those of you visiting Armenia this year, with some extra space in your luggage, or thinking of what would make good gifts for people in Armenia - bring something that will help them learn English! Grab your old books, go to the Salvation Army or other thrift stores and buy good books for a dollar or less, save good magazines for people just learning (National Geographic, Readers Digest, etc), get books for younger readers (Hardy Boys, Disney, whatever), and give them out in Armenia. Give them to children, the young, give them to taxi drivers or waiters trying out a few words of English on you, give it to a school for their library, hell, just leave it out on a street somewhere. There really is precious little access to this type of material in Armenia and I think having more of these materials around will help both satisfy a need that is there, and create more interest and demand. There is no good place to go for cheap English books and magazines.

If you feel up for it, go to bookcrossing.com and print out some tags to attach to the books which tell people who pick them up to read them, then leave them out again somewhere for another person to read. The theory is that each person who picks it up will log in an share where they found it, what they thought of it, and where they released it. If that's too much trouble, write "FREE BOOK - PASS ALONG" or something like that all over the outside to encourage people both to take it (if you're just leaving it in say, Ijevan town square), and to give it to someone when they're done. If you're leaving it somewhere where expats hang out, you might include a note asking people to not take the book out of Armenia...

Anyway, just a thought. I'm shipping a few hundred books, most of them slated for "release" into the wild...