Fishing for Food and Mushrooms is a collection of stories, poems and pen pictures by Traveller children in Belfast. It was developed to engage children aged 4–12 years in celebrating their culture and history through language, song and visual art and opens the door to explore stories from around the world. We hope teachers and others will use this book as a stimulus to explore storytelling in their own classroom by collecting family stories, remembering life stories or re-telling folk tales and making their own collections.

Written and illustrated by children in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

The women always wore the aprons, yes it was like a pocket, a beady pocket.They would have made the fanciest of pockets which tied around them, and that was the only place to really carry important stuff that they wanted with them.
Mags Dundon, storyteller.

Once upon a time an eagle was coming down and my cousin got a new pup, a terrier, and the eagle was coming down. But the eagle grabbed the pup and the eagle brought it up to the sky. But the eagle let it go and it came down and it died. It happened when I was over in England, when I was 10.
Jack McGinley, age 11.

The Gayla L’Esko Project (meaning ‘Children’s Stories’) is a partnership arts and heritage education project between Belfast Traveller Support Group and St. Mary’s Primary School, Divis St and Kids’ Own Publishing Partnership. It was developed to engage Traveller children aged 4-12 years in celebrating their culture and history through the medium of language, storytelling, song and visual art.

This project and publication was made possible by the generous and imaginative support of The Heritage Lottery Fund.