Karen Asfour is an
American expat living in Jordan for many years. She is married to Jordanian
Mohammed Asfour, who is also the translator of her books into Arabic. Karen is
also the founding member and secretary of the Petra National Trust and is the author
of two children’s books “Anzeh Al-Azeeza Cleans Up Petra” and “Anzeh
Al-Azeeza Protects the Forest”.
We know how passionate you are about the
environment particularly as a founding member of the Petra National Trust. Is
your involvement with the organization the inspiration behind your two books?
I have been very distressed for
several years about the growing amount of litter, in Amman and in the
countryside. When I wrote the first book, I naturally located it in Petra due
to my love for the site and because of my membership with the Petra National
Trust.
Why did you choose Anzeh to be a goat?
My inspiration was from a
children’s book that I picked up while waiting for my flight to Amman in the
Muscat airport. It was written in verse and was about a camel. I showed it to
my son, Jad, who was with me and said, “I can do this.” Right then we discussed
the topic and the character. Jad suggested that it be about the environment and
picked the goat Azeeza as the character. We both felt that camels, donkeys,
sheep and other animals had been used in a lot of books, but not goats......so
Anzeh Al-Azeeza it was! I basically sat and wrote the entire book on that
flight back to Amman but it took almost two years to finally get it published!
Anzeh Al- Azeeza’s first trip was to Petra and
she has recently found herself in a forest, why did you start with Petra and
does Azeeza’s message change from one place to the other?
At one time I thought that I would
write a series of books set in different parts of Jordan but then I became much
more focused on the message that I wanted to deliver and
not the location. The forest was just a convenient place to stress the awful
littering problem that is seen especially after a weekend when families have
picnicked.
Where in your opinion do you think Jordan ranks
in terms of environmental awareness and what more could be done to improve the
situation?
I believe that Jordan has really
fallen behind in environmental awareness but because it has gotten so bad,
people are finally awakening to this situation. There has to be a nationwide
effort to clean up and then to education the population how destructive litter
is to the country, to the people and to the entire world. Then it will no
longer be necessary to have cleanup campaigns, as there will be no litter
needing to be cleaned up.
As an avid reader yourself what do you think would get
people to read more?
I believe that if you begin reading
to children at an early age, it encourages them to be readers when they are
older. In the last few years there has been an increasing number of children’s
books published in this region. In the past, most of the books that were
available were ones that had been translated from English into Arabic and were
therefore, not culturally relevant to this part of the world. With more books
available, this will hopefully encourage more people to read
in Jordan.
You are self-published. Was there a particular
reason you chose to do so and do you think that is the route for authors to
take with all the available technology and media outlets that have rendered
publishing houses irrelevant or at least diminished of their power of who and
what gets published?
I am self-published because it was
too difficult to get a publisher in the Middle East or in America. I tried
several publishing houses but I think that they thought my book was too Jordan
specific. It was just easier then to publish it myself. Thankfully we have
wonderful printing presses here which produce really quality books but the
drawback from self-publishing is that they you have to market and distribute
the books yourself.
What are you reading now?
I just finished reading, just by chance, two books about North Korea. The
first one, which was fiction, was The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam
Johnson. The second, nonfiction, was Nothing
to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick. Since North Korea
is in the news so much this day, my random reading happens to be very relevant
especially since I knew very little about the country before reading these
books.
Any thoughts you would like to add?
My third
book (Anzeh Azeeza and the Zero Footprint
Lesson) should be going to the printer before the end of this month. I feel
that this one has my strongest anti litter message yet as it is very specific
about “what is littering.” It stresses that when one goes on an outing, be it a
visit, a picnic, or any other activity, one needs to leave without a trace that
they have ever been there…..thus, they leave zero footprints!
Find out more about Karen Asfour through her facebook page
