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Progress at Kitengesa Community Library
Kate Parry
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I have just come back from a three-week visit to Uganda, which included a couple of trips to Kitengesa, near Masaka. The Community Library there (which TEAA supports by housing our funds) continues to do well. Thanks to the involvement of Shelley Jones, a research student from the University of British Columbia, Dan Ahimbisibwe, the chief librarian, is receiving an extra salary for work that he's doing for her, and the organization that she directs, You Lead, is helping him to build himself a house -- right by the library. As a result, Dan can now think of furthering his own education and is planning to take a degree in Development Studies by distance learning from Makerere. Also thanks to Shelley, another UBC student, Leigh Fox, has become interested in Kitengesa. He has worked in forestry in Canada and is at Kitengesa Comprehensive Secondary School now, where the library is housed, teaching students how to grow trees. Developmental spin-offs, one might say. The business of promoting reading through the library continues too. I bought 227 new books this visit, which brings the collection up to more than 2400. Most of these purchases are of children's books because we are planning at the beginning of March to hold a Children's Reading Tent. All the children's books we have, together with an additional 300 that the Reading Association of Uganda has promised us, will be displayed in a big tent put up in the school compound. A hundred children and their teachers will be invited, and professional facilitators will carry out activities with them for a whole day -- reading, telling stories, singing, playing games -- and everyone will be given a good lunch. The librarians and library scholars will take part, and thereafter every first Saturday of the month is to be designated Children's Day at the library: children will be free to come, without payment and without adult accompaniment, and the librarians and library scholars will organize similar activities. In this way we hope to reach a section of the community that hasn't so far been making use of the library: of the 515 members that we have registered over the years, only two have been under ten years old. We had a good hearing for the library at the Fourth Pan African Conference on Reading for All in Swaziland last August, and now I've been invited to speak about it at a conference in London this September. For information about our research and for other news, please visit our website at http://www.kitengesalibrary.org. Kate Parry, kateparry@earthlink.net |