On Tuesday, February 14, the St. Vincent and Grenadines embassy held a ceremony to cut the ribbon on its new reading room.
In a speech, St. Vincent and the Grenadines Ambassador Andrea Bowman said that the space is meant to “present and attract a catalog of important, informative, and entertaining reading material in English for the Taiwanese and the English-speaking community in Taiwan.”
“The more you read, the better writer you will become. “The more you read, the more you can compare, contrast, and think critically about different points of view,” Bowman said. “Active reading makes you think and reflect more deeply, which should make you act more thoughtfully,” she said.
Bowman said that English language teachers can sometimes use the room to share readings with students from elementary school to college. She also said that the embassy is open to creative ideas about how the space could be used in other ways.
She said that anyone who wants to use the room can set up a time with the embassy secretary and get past security on the first floor.
The ambassador said that the reading room is part of the embassy’s work to help Taiwan reach its goal of being bilingual by 2030.
Foreign Minister Keisal Peters of St. Vincent and the Grenadines praised Bowman and her team for their hard work and said that education is “a very important cornerstone” of the Caribbean country. She talked about the “education revolution” that Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves is trying to start and said that reading is one of the keys to this revolution.
Peters is in Taiwan for the Empower Women! Empower LAC! Forum on February 15. After the ceremony, she told reporters that her goal for the meeting was to “present from the Vincentian point of view.”
“I want to find out about new projects that other countries may have tried and if they were successful. I also want to see if SVG could use something similar,” she said.
She said that St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Taiwan worked together on different projects to help women get more power. This includes teaching women how to fix electronics and make their small and medium-sized businesses better.
The foreign minister said that the people of Vincent are strong and hardworking. She told her fellow Chinese people in Taiwan to “keep putting their best foot forward” and to keep loving and working with Taiwanese people. She said that St. Vincent and the Grenadines has shown that it cares about Taiwan’s government and people “at every step.”
There are 47 books in the reading room right now. All of them were written by Vincentians, like Prime Minister Gonsalves.
