I am his father and I will be dead by the time you read this'. "But what stood out for me about Plan was the fact that it was set up by a British war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War who stopped what he was doing when he came across a small child with a brown tag around his neck on which was written in clumsy letters, Paddington-Bear like, 'this boy is called Jose, please look after him. "You get asked to do so many things," Butcher says once he has been steered off the subject of elephants. It is being sold in aid of Plan's Because I Am A Girl campaign, which aims to transform the lives of the world's poorest girls by ensuring they get properly taught through, for example, sponsorship programmes and funding for education.
The chapter is called Bendu's Dream and is one of seven short stories written by authors including Irvine Welsh, Joanne Harris and Kathy Lette in a book called Because I Am A Girl. They clearly have a lot in common, but Butcher is here to talk about African women, not elephants, and his involvement in a project called Because I Am A Girl organised by Plan, a leading children's rights aid group.īutcher has written a moving account of one girl's horrific "upbringing" at the hands of warring armed factions in Sierra Leone.
We walk over to McCall-Smith's table and they start chatting about elephants. In fact, I've been wanting to thank him for years for endorsing my book." "That's Alexander McCall-Smith, the bestselling author. "Do you know who that is?" asks Tim Butcher as we make our way to a table at the Bistro Madeleine at the Intercontinental Hotel in Dubai, where he is taking part in the Emirates Literary Festival. Tim Butcher has joined a project that draws attention to the plight of young women across the globe by writing a story of abuse and degradation in Sierra Leone - where he went to banish some of his own demons.
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