New Trivizas book in aid of SOS Villages
You can buy coffee at many bookshops these days, children’s author Eugene Trivizas pointed out yesterday at the launch at Starbucks in Kolonaki of his latest book, «Happy Village,» published by Papadopoulos. «I suspect some bookstores sell more cappuccinos than volumes of verse,» he joked. «But while you can go into a bookstore and order an iced coffee, if you went into a cafe and asked for a short-story collection, you’d have no hope of getting served.» His new book, commissioned by SOS Children’s Villages Greece, will be an exception to the rule, as Starbucks is to be the sole distributor. All proceeds from the books will go to support SOS Children’s Villages Greece, which is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its first village in Vari. With the entertaining help of three children and veteran music maker Dionysis Savvopoulos reading excerpts from «Happy Village,» Trivizas presented the story. «I didn’t want to write just any children’s book,» he said, «but first to express the SOS Villages philosophy in a way that was accessible to children and second to alert and mobilize young and old.» And that he has achieved in a moving tale of young animals on their own – a motherless fox cub, a squirrel without a nest, a beaver swept away by a river, a hare that escaped from a laboratory – who form their own family with the help of a motherly bear. SOS Children’s Villages were invented after WWII by Hermann Gmeiner, an Austrian philanthropist, for children who lacked parental care. The model proved so successful that they have been established in 133 countries, caring for 250,000 children in need. SOS Children’s Villages Greece is a charity that relies solely on donations. In addition to its villages at Vari in Attica and Playiari in Thessaloniki, with another to open soon in Alexandroupolis, it runs youth and family support centers in Athens and Thessaloniki. Starbucks, celebrating its fifth year in Greece, supports SOS Children’s Villages, and in 2005 each branch «adopted» a child from one of the villages.
