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and entered another new career in a college of
further education, eventually climbing my way up
the ladder from a lecturer to a Head of Department
in six years. This new-found career I adored but my
life once again changed, and I found myself in
Brazil heading up a publishing company. It all
seems a huge jump now but at the time it all made
sense.
The Brazilian stereotype is not generally a reader
and in fact at the time I arrived in Brazil there were
more bookshops in Paris than there were in the
whole of Brazil. However, they did have a
government-sponsored reading program called
“Reading in the Classroom” which had an
associated catalogue with suitable reading books
that teachers could select for reading material in
the classroom.
It then took three full years to understand how to
meet the criteria for that system; to get suitable
books authors and illustrators and how to beat the
bureaucratic Brazilian system and the protocol that
surrounded it. This was a very long task but one of
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