Friday, July 16, 2010

Primary School Library Grand Opening


The other week, Ngwane Central Primary School held a Grand Opening ceremony for its brand new (and first ever) library. In all, the project has been a great success, bridging old book donations with new ones from 3 different sources: Darien Book Aid, Books for Africa (which many of you personally donated through via the Peace Corps Partnership Program), and from the teachers and Penpal students in Cottonwood Arizona. In all, there are now over 2000 books on the shelves. A new Library Committee has been formed, a card catalogue has been created, books have been color-coded and organized by subjects and the lending can begin.

Thank you to all who contributed to this project. It's been a lot of fun for us, and really rewarding for everyone involved (hopefully you too).

Here's a very short video about the Grand Opening day...



And here are a few pics of the book check-in process, which we helped the kids do over a 2 or 3 week period.

This was early on, when the shelves were still mostly bare. In all, more than 30 kids helped us and a handful of teachers in the book check-in process. Many of them had never before known how to identify an author, publisher, or even title. So this was quite a crash-course for them.

Here's the book check-in assembly line. 5 stations, all in a long row... Henry Ford would be so proud.

We received enough dictionaries to keep one in every single classroom, plus have a few left in the library. this made the English teachers very, very happy.

We received lots of beginner/young kids' books as well as young-adult books. a good mix.

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