Finally, the project I have been working on for a year (and more) comes to an end. Not that this was actually a long project, it just had long periods of waiting.
Books are not essentially plentiful in Africa. We, in America, have a rather long history of literacy, and even the educated of Europeans have loved books for generations. Africa, at least Ghana, is new to the world of reading its club of book lovers. For centuries, the people educated enough to enjoy books have left Ghana for more education and life abroad. The populations that have remained have not been literate populations. It is only within the last twenty years or so that the people on a wide scale have been learning to read, and that they have been needing those skills. School enrollment has increased a lot since independence, so more and more people are able to read, but the quality of that skill is still very poor. There are many factors contributing to this, but one of the main ones is that books are not plentiful. Publishing companies and book distributors and importers exist in Accra, and book stores are around, but their quality is usually poor because they have to be made cheaply. And their wares rarely get to the village.
Furnishing a school library was one of the earliest projects the (school) community requested for. After some months of bouncing ideas around, researching possibilities, and weighing the seriousness of the idea, we decided that the best plan was to work on the neglected space that had been built for that purpose many years ago. At first, I didn't really want to put it in this particular space because it was attached to one of the schools. I thought more students and teachers would access it if it were in a more central location. However, after trying various places, the space in the junior high school was the best for money and means.
The room already had two large, empty bookshelves and a shelf tables along the outer wall. The rest of it was being used as storage and bats had infested the ceiling. Normally, the already cramped school would have used this room as a quieter place to study or for overflow during exams, but the bats were so bad that the smell was unbearable after too long. We used the Peace Corps' fundraising program to get enough funds to refurbish the neglected library space in the school. Thanks to friends and family at home, and especially Liz Gartley in Massachusettes and her network of generous folks, we raised met our goal rather quickly and got to work on the room. We hired workmen to replace most of the wooden shutters and window frames, replace rotten ceiling tiles and rotten wooden beams in the roof and around the overhang, fix and stabilize the two front doors, give the room a new coat of paint as well as the book shelves, and fix leaks in the roof. We installed wiring for light bulbs and affixed two ceiling fans for air circulation during the humid months to prevent book mold as well as provide comfort.
During this time, The Interact Club of New Bern High School in New Bern, NC and especially Dierdre Kiernan and my parents were were hard to collect a thousand books that would be sent directly to this new library. I had hooked up with an organization called the African Library Project (ALP) that connects libraries in various parts of Africa to schools or organization in America. These schools in America organize book drives with the goal of collecting 1,000 books which go directly to a needed library in Africa. ALP helps by getting the books from one place to the other. Once the books were sorted, counted and packaged in North Carolina and sent to ALP's warehouse in New Orleans, they were put in a container and on a ship to Accra to arrive three months later.
Then we waited
and waited
and waited some more
then waited again.
At a Peace Corps function, I touched base with my friend Richard who I hadn't seen in a while. After we discovered we were both doing library projects, he offered a wonderful gift. His books had all come from the World Bank, which sends thousands of books to establish large community libraries. He had many left over including lots of middle school to high school textbooks. Most books collected from the book drive were children's books and young adult novels, materials to improve their reading, but not their studying. Soon after, I traveled to Richard's site and spent some time sifting through and compiling books for science and math, English, composition, French, and lots of language arts. We stowed them at a nearby friendly institution and my District Chief Executive (a local politician responsible for development projects) picked them up with his own car a couple weeks later.
Then we waited some more.
True to form, the ship came to Accra later than expected. Then a partnering organization in Ho, the regional capital for the Volta, came to pick up all books for the Volta region. But they didn't move them for a couple of weeks. Then we waited four more weeks for the DCE to find time in his campaign schedule to pick up the books from there.
By the time the books came, I didn't have a lot of time to enjoy them with the kids because the time for my service was up. It was time for me to go home. But it was a blast to discover the contents of the boxes with the kids.
First the books, which were packed in boxes, had to be taken from my house to the library. Students are always great help at carrying things. They can just plant the boxes on their heads and walk easily for long distances. Others used bicycles to transport them. Some of the boxes were weak, so it was just easier to stack the textbooks on their heads rather than using the box. What a quaint African tableau—a pack of school children in matching uniforms carrying almost brand-new brightly colored books atop their elegantly sculpted heads, dresses and arms swaying. Once at the renewed and waiting library room, we unloaded all of the books from the boxes and prepared them for stamping. I had obtained a stamp from Accra that said “Damanko School Library” and now all the books had to be thus tattooed. Once the stampers were in place, we had to sort the books into some kind of order. Dewey Decimal System seemed quite unnecessary, so I tried to set it up more like a book store—alphabetical by author and organized by subject. I taped small pieces of paper, each with a letter, around the room so we sort the books by author's last name. Now I had to teach the students how to find the author on any given book and make sure they used the surname. Since none of the students know how to alphabetize anything, I only involved them in this first step. After about two hours, we were getting to the end of the 13 boxes of books, most had been stamped and most had been put into the right piles. By this time most of the kids had seen most of the books, so I took those that were interested and got them started writing letters of appreciation while I went back with a few of the older students and organized some more. We separated the children's books from the more advanced ones and I put the young adult books on the shelf by author. By the time I got to the children's books, I knew it wouldn't make much difference, so I just put them on the shelves to be perused at will.
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