Howdy, Friends!
Thanks for stopping in to check us out. Let us tell you a little bit about Radarami, and then feel free to click around our website to learn more.
We are a group of Americans and Georgians all living in the Republic of Georgia - a small, beautiful, and poor country that has had the unfortunate luck to be sandwiched between the Russians, Persians, Arabs, and Turks for all of its history. When they weren't busy getting run over by one empire after another, the Georgians were preserving their unique culture and language - one of only 15 language families on earth, Georgian has no resemblance to any other known language.
We are a group of Americans and Georgians all living in the Republic of Georgia - a small, beautiful, and poor country that has had the unfortunate luck to be sandwiched between the Russians, Persians, Arabs, and Turks for all of its history. When they weren't busy getting run over by one empire after another, the Georgians were preserving their unique culture and language - one of only 15 language families on earth, Georgian has no resemblance to any other known language.
The Small Language Trap
Despite being a very poor country where more than half the population lives on less than $50 a month and hundreds of thousands are displaced by conflict, there is universal adult literacy in Georgia and a proud tradition of writers and poets dating back to the medieval ages. The problem? These days, there's nothing to read.
Imagine if you spoke a language incomprehensible to anybody else, and the number of people that spoke it was about the same as the population of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex. It's not worth anybody's time to translate into your obscure language, and you don't produce enough writers yourself to keep things interesting. As a result, you live in a vacuum. The rest of the world is talking about the financial crisis, scientific breakthroughs, reading books about climate change or the rise of China. But unless you had the resources and education to learn another language fluently -- all you know is whatever they tell you on the nightly news.
So Georgia, in a hotbed of geopolitics, still smashed between Russia and Iran, between Turkey and Turkmenistan, still stuck between an authoritarian past and an uncertain democratic future, at a turning point in history when it needs informed and engaged and critically thinking citizens -- well, they're turning to rumor and hearsay and not to the written word.
That's where we come in.
Imagine if you spoke a language incomprehensible to anybody else, and the number of people that spoke it was about the same as the population of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex. It's not worth anybody's time to translate into your obscure language, and you don't produce enough writers yourself to keep things interesting. As a result, you live in a vacuum. The rest of the world is talking about the financial crisis, scientific breakthroughs, reading books about climate change or the rise of China. But unless you had the resources and education to learn another language fluently -- all you know is whatever they tell you on the nightly news.
So Georgia, in a hotbed of geopolitics, still smashed between Russia and Iran, between Turkey and Turkmenistan, still stuck between an authoritarian past and an uncertain democratic future, at a turning point in history when it needs informed and engaged and critically thinking citizens -- well, they're turning to rumor and hearsay and not to the written word.
That's where we come in.
Bringing the "big ideas"
Our international book selection committee chose a slate of influential, "big idea" non-fiction books that are published in recent years and generated a lot of discussion. We get the rights to those books from the publishers for a nominal fee, and with the support of donors, we translate the books to a high quality, print them, and distribute them throughout the country with a special focus on outlying rural regions and villages.
With the help of donors, we give them for free to bookstores and libraries -- requiring bookstores to sell them for no more than the equivalent of $1.25 -- a price affordable to nearly all Georgians. The bookstores keep all the revenue.
Not many Georgians have the internet outside of the capital, but nearly everyone has a cell phone. So we got a 4-digit text message exchange and we ask our readers to send us a free message telling us where they live and what they're reading. We've received hundreds of messages from interested readers, many of which are in the villages outside the capital. We had a hunch there were a lot of intellectually hungry and curious readers out there, and we found them.
With the help of donors, we give them for free to bookstores and libraries -- requiring bookstores to sell them for no more than the equivalent of $1.25 -- a price affordable to nearly all Georgians. The bookstores keep all the revenue.
Not many Georgians have the internet outside of the capital, but nearly everyone has a cell phone. So we got a 4-digit text message exchange and we ask our readers to send us a free message telling us where they live and what they're reading. We've received hundreds of messages from interested readers, many of which are in the villages outside the capital. We had a hunch there were a lot of intellectually hungry and curious readers out there, and we found them.
What we Need
We really need your support to keep our project afloat. We've got a pipeline of great books coming up, but limited funds for printing and translation. Run by a nearly all-volunteer staff, we can assure you that donor funds go straight into operations, not into overhead.
Please check out our video below and we encourage you to pitch in at our Global Giving donation site.
Please check out our video below and we encourage you to pitch in at our Global Giving donation site.
