Books for Pakistan

Please Help if You Can
Make a secure donation to this effort – please click here.
OR by mailing your check payable to: ISHK, PO Box 176, Los Altos, CA 94023 USA. (Please write the name of the fund Books for Pakistan on the memo line of your check.)
All donations are tax-deductible in the USA.

Books for Pakistan provides bilingual English and Urdu editions of Idries Shah’s retelling of Hoopoe Books traditional tales from the region. The editions for Pakistan enable children to read the Urdu translation and the English on the facing page.

To date we have three titles: The Lion Who Saw Himself in the Water, The Clever Boy and the Terrible, Dangerous Animal and The Old Woman and the Eagle.

The Lion Who Saw Himself in the Water in Urdu     The Clever Boy and the Terrible Dangerous Animal     The Old Woman and the Eagle

With your support we hope to have two additional titles: The Farmer's Wife and The Boy Without a Name by the Spring of 2013.


NEWS UPDATE! September 2012


boys in Pakistan reading Hoopoe books

Hoopoe Books is delighted to announce a new collaboration with the Alif Laila (Arabian Nights) Book Bus Society. Established in 1978, Alif Laila was one of the first groups in Pakistan to focus primarily on empowerment of civil society and social reform, mainly through education. It has served over one million disadvantaged children through its schools and mobile libraries, and is working with us to distribute Hoopoe Books to these children throughout Pakistan.

Kids in Pakistan reading hoopoe books

Alif Laila uses girls' education to fight poverty and gender inequality, believing that “by educating girls, we are not only eradicating the secondary place of women in our society, and bringing them up to par with men, but also ensuring the advancement and modernization of our total society. An educated mother has it in her power to change the very culture of the most basic social unit – the family.”

We continue to collaborate with DIL (Developments in Literacy) to donate these beautiful children's books to the children they serve. DIL runs 150 schools serving approximately 15,000 children, especially girls, in underdeveloped regions in Pakistan.

In June 2012 we donated 2,800 copies each of two more titles: The Clever Boy and the Terrible, Dangerous Animal and The Old Woman and the Eagle to DIL and received the following report from them:

Pakistani girl reading The Clever Boy and the Terrible, Dangerous Animal

As observed last year when the first Hoopoe book was distributed in the schools, the students instantly gravitate towards these books because of the attractive cover and the brightly colored pictures.

Some comments from DIL Paradise School, Orangi Town the first batch of students who read the 2 new titles:

The Clever Boy and the Terrible, Dangerous Animal:

Afreen Mushtaque (age 7):
“I read the story book called The Clever boy and the Terrible, Dangerous animal. It is a very interesting story and the funny part of this story is that the villagers were very cowardly, they were scared of watermelons.”

Noureen Ayoub (age 6) and Atif Rasheed (age 6):
“This story gives us the lesson that we should not be afraid of anything. We should be like the brave boy.”

Mehak (age 6):
“This story introduced the interesting sides of the human characters in an amazing way.”

4 Pakistani kids reading Hoopoe books

Pakistani boy reading The Old Woman and the Eagle
The Old Woman and the Eagle:

Komal Saeed (age 6):
“We like this story because we learn from it that we must have knowledge so that no one can fool us.”

Ramzan (age 6), Asma Rasheed (age 4) and Kiran Asif (age 5):
“We enjoyed this funny story and learnt the lesson that we should have knowledge about everything, also we should not catch the birds, we should free them. We want to read more story books like this one.”

2 images of Pakistani girls reading Hoopoe books

In June 2011 we distributed an initial 2,800 copies of the first Urdu-English bilingual edition of The Lion Who Saw Himself in the Water to DIL. The response was very heart-warming!

Pakistani children reading The Lion Who Saw Himself in the Water

“The Hoopoe books were distributed in all DIL Orangi Schools last week. The response is absolutely delightful!  The children enjoyed the stories immensely, especially the colourful illustrations and characters. The younger children roared along with the lion, providing sound effects for it amidst peals of laughter saying ‘How can the King of the jungle be afraid of his own reflection?’ The older children talked about how ignorance and miscommunication can induce fear and prevent us from understanding each other but how everything worked out in the end when all the animals understood the lion and stopped fearing it.

“Even the pre-readers loved the books; looking at the pictures giggling and interpreting the images, wondering aloud what would happen next and then turning the page over in anticipation.

“The teachers enjoyed the books just as much as the children did, especially the illustrations, they said, and hoped more books of the same kind would be coming.

“One teacher said she had been doing a lesson on reflection with her grade 2 students when these books were given and was delighted to see that she could use it to reinforce her lesson. Even some of the kids who hadn’t taken an interest earlier, now understood and enjoyed the lesson.”
— Zeba Shafi, Regional Program Manager South, Developments in Literacy.

Pakistani Kids reading Hoopoe books

Our goal:

We want to keep our unit cost as low as possible and will be able to do this only if our print run is high enough. Please help us reach an initial 40,000 copies per title. We would like to do more than that and, with your help, we can.

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