More than 20 children are sitting in one of Amman's private schools , listening eagerly while a Jordanian volunteer opens a book, asking, "Who among you is excited to hear a story?", as part of an initiative to instill a love of reading among children .

The "We Love Reading" initiative, which has spread to 65 countries, was founded by Jordanian Rana Dajani, professor of biology and biotechnology at the Hashemite University in Jordan.

Dajani spent five years in the United States, and after returning to Jordan in 2006, she founded the "We Love Reading" initiative after seeing that only a few Jordanian children read for pleasure.

"In the beginning, I noticed that the children only read their lessons, so I conducted research and found that the best way is for an adult to read the stories to them aloud," Dajani told AFP.

Dajani started with one weekly session of reading aloud to neighborhood children in a mosque adjacent to her home in Tabarbour, east of Amman, after obtaining the approval of the mosque’s imam.

Dajani recalls that "only 25 children attended on the first day," but she succeeded little by little in attracting more children.

In order to expand her initiative to reach all regions of the Kingdom, she began training other women until, three years later, she established the "Change" Association as a legal umbrella for "We Love Reading".

Its initiative reached all governorates of Jordan, and more than four thousand volunteers, between the ages of 18 and 100, were trained.

"Our program creates leaders, and it is strong and based on scientific research," says Dajani. "Through reading, thinking patterns change and the child's brain and mental health develop."

She points out that "four months, once a week, is enough to enhance the child's reading habits and behaviors."

According to Dajani, about half a million children have benefited from this program in the Kingdom, including tens of thousands of refugee children.

The volunteer is called an "ambassador" and his task is to read stories to children aloud at any time and place they choose, whether it is in a mosque, church, school or nursery school.

Dajani asserts that the most important thing is not to read stories through electronic devices and tablets, "which we want to keep them away from because it will be a losing battle. We want real paper books."

To date, We Love Reading has created 33 children's comics featuring topics around the environment, climate change, empathy, refugees, bullying, gender, social networking and science.

"We have an official website (for the initiative), and we launched, in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture, last year a platform so that people can learn where to read to children, and what to read to them," Dajani says.

"We are about to launch an electronic platform in September for our ambassadors from readers around the world to communicate and exchange their experiences," she added, noting that more than eight thousand volunteers have been trained to read around the world.

"I love the idea of the program, as it develops children's language, ideas and concepts," Huda Abu al-Khair, a volunteer in the reading program for four years, told AFP.

And she adds, "That is why I read to children in kindergarten and during school trips, and to the children of our neighborhood and in public parks and family gatherings, and when the opportunity arises."

More than 20 children between the ages of 4 and 5 sit around Abu al-Khair in an Amman private school, listening eagerly as she reads a story to them.

Abu al-Khair recounts, "I am Dina, and this is my brother Hani. We are twin children. I came to life minutes before him, but we are similar, and we both love birds, swallows, and little hummingbirds."

The narration of the story is accompanied by the sounds of birds chirping through a tape recorder placed on a table, to the astonishment of the children.

Abu al-Khair smiles and affirms that "education in childhood is like engraving in stone."

The "We Love Reading" program won the UNESCO-King Sejong Prize for Literacy and the Nansen Refugee Prize.

According to official figures, the illiteracy rate decreased dramatically in Jordan from 88 percent in 1952 to 19.5 percent in 1990, and by the end of 2020 it reached 5.1 percent.