Sunday, February 9, 2014

Library progress

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to give a quick update on the status of my school library. It's really coming along, and I think that we'll be ready to open in the next month!

The room
There are a bunch of different components to the project. The first thing that we bought was the solar panels and computer/printer/photocopier setup, which a local electrician installed right away. Use of the electronics has been somewhat frustrating because the school staff members don't really understand how to use them properly or take care of them, but we're getting there.

For the world map that we're painting outside a school building, I was hoping to do that while my mom was visiting in December, but as usual with Burkina, everything took way longer than expected. However, it's finally happening now. We paid a mason to come and make a flat surface for the map with cement, and then we painted it with a white and blue background. I borrowed a projector from the Peace Corps so I could project a map onto the surface and trace it, which was great, except it turns out that the "permanent" markers that we used to trace the countries actually disappeared after 5 days in the sunlight. Whoops. This past week, I've been going over it with black paint, which has been a rather laborious process between trying to decipher where the country borders used to be, and adding in more detail (the projector wasn't quite high enough resolution for the job). I haven't finished with all of the country borders yet, but I'm almost there, and I'm proud of how it looks so far. Students walking by have been really curious about it, and they like to come and stare at the map while I'm working. The number of students who have confused South America with Africa convinces me of how needed it is. Once I've finished marking all the country borders in, we'll paint the individual countries in different colors and label them. I'm open to suggestions for what to paint around the borders behind the map.

My student Alaye posing with the world map
The librarian: we selected the president of the parents' association to be the librarian. He just finished a 2-week training course with the NGO FAVL (Friends of African Village Libraries), so this week I hope that he'll be able to help us with sorting books and creating a cataloging system. We also got library membership cards and cards for tracking books from FAVL.

The books: I went to a bookstore and bought about $200 worth of books a few months ago, and we just got a bunch of novels and textbooks delivered this past week. The school also keeps randomly coming out with more and more books that they've had hidden in corners of the school offices for years that are currently unavailable to students, so we'll add them to our collection as well. I'm not sure how many books we have in total now, but I estimate that it must be at least 600. With the library funds, we also bought some didactic materials, including maps of Africa and Burkina, plus soccer balls and posters of things like the human skeletal system for biology teachers. (In the past, the teachers had to draw the entire skeleton on the chalkboard for each class that they taught, and then students copied the diagrams into their notebooks.)

Librarian at work
Other stuff: We got the tables and chairs a couple of weeks ago, and the library building already came with bookshelves in place. Funny thing with the tables and chairs: we ordered them from a carpenter, but he didn't show us any models or anything before he made them. When he delivered them, they looked fine, and it wasn't until the next week when the tables were arranged in the library and I sat at a chair that I realized how low the chairs are compared to the tables. Sitting in a chair, my elbows are pretty much on the same level with my shoulders if I rest them on a table. Burkina...We've also gotten the electricity for the library set up, so there are lights inside, and a light in front of the library so students can sit outside and study at night even when the library is closed.


Like everything in Burkina, the project has had a lot of hiccups, but it's really happening. We're about done with the purchases for now, but I've set aside some money so we can have a nice opening ceremony and invite all the big people in the community when we open. I will keep you updated as we progress!