Story To A Star Foundation Launches “Groovy Dee” Book For Children & Adult

Co-founder of Story To A Star Foundation who doubles as the author of “Groovy Dee” book, Mrs Gloria B. Wiredu is calling for volunteers to read books to ease the boredom of children who are hospitalised.

At the launch of the book “Groovy Dee” at Mmofra Place at Dzorwulu, Mrs Wiredu disclosed the event was meant to raise some funds to build corner libraries and stuff them with some books for the children who are hospitalised.

She indicated that the corner libraries in the selected hospitals were yet to be built due to the COVID-19 situation and also needed their “Groovy Dee” books to be ready to feature in the libraries, hence, the delay in building those corner libraries.

“Now that our book is out, we will start the preparation to build those libraries. We have spoken to the Children’s hospital and a few private hospitals as well. We need people to come in and we need volunteers too to read in the hospitals. We need some funds to build the libraries and publications as well”, she said.

The foundation, according to her, was also into training young kids in schools on road safety in order to be equipped with the knowledge of road regulations to protect them from road accidents as statistics show that many of them were being killed or maimed through crossing the roads.

Additionally, she said that when the children were trained on road safety regulations, they intend to train the parents to do the right things on the roads. She mentioned that her foundation which was established with her husband had already gone to three schools to train children on road safety issues.

Mrs Gloria Wiredu stressed that the children after being trained on road safety were issued with certificates to show that they were stars of road safety regulations.

Touching on the content of “Groovy Dee” book, Mrs Gloria Solomon-Zumaro noted that it is meant for children of three to fifteen years; thus, parents could read to their children and also those of the children who could read it themselves could pick it up the book and read.

She added that the book was for adults as well because it has a content of patriotism in the book.

“Groovy Dee is a very fun donkey but at the same time very lazy. His behaviour according to the cat in the story could land all of them in trouble one day but the animals were not willing to let Groovy Dee change because they were enjoying who is. With his laziness and over being happy, being jumpy and frisky one day landed all of them in trouble. The farmer who kept them had a son he loved so much and due to Groovy Dee’s behaviour, landed the boy in a hospital and this affected all of them. After they saw what had happened, they wished they had joined the cat to advise Groovy Dee [donkey] but it was too late”, she narrated from the book.

She said that, morally, the book sought to encourage people to be patriot enough to correct the wrongdoings of others in society; reiterating that “we need to speak about the wrongdoing because if we don’t, one day it will go out of proportion and everyone will be in trouble”.

She asserted that she was inspired to write the book due to her passion for reading to kids and also the desire of children to listen to interesting stories but realised that the book shops did not have Ghanaian writers who wrote books that were well illustrated.

“I thought it was an opportunity to give them something Ghanaian but still have this foreign feel mixed with our cultural values in the book. It is a book that if a parent buys for their children, they know that they are going to learn something out of this.