At age 6, a little boy with a lisp is told by his parents if he wants to succeed in Canada, he has to learn English. He’s the son of two refugees from Vietnam, neither of whom speak the language.So his mother calls the Dial-A-Story program, a Toronto Public Library service that lets kids and their families call in to listen to a bedtime story at any time of day, free.“She would hold the phone, dial (the hotline) every night, give me the phone and I would sit at the edge of her bed,” Andrew Do, now 29, tells the Star. “She couldn’t really read bedtime stories to me in English and she wanted me to learn English to succeed in school. This was her way to read bedtime stories to me.”Today, Do works at a downtown Toronto think tank. He designs research projects, facilitates policy hack-a-thons and workshops for government clients. He has no lisp.The ritual with his mother, which Do said started when he was in senior kindergarten around 1995 at the family’s condo at Keele St. and Finch Ave., gave him a love and appreciation for stories — and the confidence he lacked to tell his own.“I think just hearing someone tell you a story kind of just gives you that confidence to articulate yourself,” he says.A quick call to 416-395-5400 transports the listener to the 24-hour Dial-a-Story hotline, where on Wednesday morning the Star heard a woman’s kind, animated voice on the other end. “Hi my name is Itah Sadu and boy, do I have a story to tell you,” the narrator says, in a recording, before launching into a morality tale about how a man named Gor decides which of his two daughters will inherit his wealth.A caller has the choice between a story for “older” children up to age 12, or “younger” children under age 7, with the narrators and stories changing throughout the week.In Sadu’s tale, which is for the younger audience, Gor asks his daughters to fill a room with just $5 ...
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