Tell a story and tell it well, and you may open wide the eyes of a child, open up lines of communication in a business, or even open people's mind to another culture or race. People in many places are digging up the old folk stories and the messages in them. For example, most American storytellers get their tales from a wide variety of sources, cultures, and times. They regard storytelling not only as a useful tool in child education, but also as a meaningful activity that helps adults understand themselves as well as those whose culture may be very different from their own. "Most local stories are based on a larger theme," American storyteller Opalanga Pugh says, "Cinderella , or the central idea of a good child protected by her goodness, appears in various forms in almost every culture of the world." Working with students in schools, Pugh helps them understand their own cultures and the general messages of the stories. She works with prisoners too, helping them know who they are by telling stories that her listeners can write, direct, and act in their own lives. _ Pugh also works to help open up lines of communication between managers and workers. "For every advance in business," she says, "there is a greater need for communication." Storytelling can have a great effect on either side of the manager-worker relationship, she says. Pugh spent several years in Nigeria, where she learned how closely storytelling was linked to the everyday life of the people there. The benefits of storytelling are found everywhere, she says. "I learned how people used stories to spread their culture," she says. "What I do is to focus on the value of stories that people can translate into their own daily world of affairs. We are all storytellers. We all have a story to tell. We tell everybody's story." Pugh has practised storytelling with   _   groups of people.
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