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Kitengesa Community Library Kate Parry |
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| This is a February 2005 letter to the Friends of Kitengesa Community Library. |
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So much has happened in our community library project this year that
it's hard to know how to begin. Let me start by acknowledging your
generosity: donations made in connection with last year's benefit,
together with sundry contributions over the 2003-4 academic year,
added up to more than $2000 to spend on books. So in July I went with
one of our librarians, Dan Ahimbisibwe, to Uganda's national book fair
and purchased books for about $1324. Together with a donation from the
Uganda National Library, our collection is now up to more than 1600
volumes, with more books still on order. Thank you all!
But that is not all. One big inhibition on the use of the library has been lack of lighting, for Kitengesa and the area round it has no main electricity supply. So last year we asked the United Nations One Per Cent Fund (which, as you may remember, gave us the grant with which we put up the library building), whether it might give us a second grant to enable us to buy a solar electricity system. The Fund responded most generously, so we now have two solar panels that give us light until 9 o'clock at night and can operate a laptop computer in the library during the day*which means that the librarians, Dan and Lucy, have taken over the work of maintaining the library's database and are becoming increasingly competent computer users. That Dan and Lucy have learned so fast is largely thanks to two librarians from Hunter College, Lauren Yannotta and Valeda Dent. They spent six weeks in Kitengesa last summer, teaching Dan and Lucy and doing research on the impact of the library on the local community. They collected masses of interesting data, making a strong case for this kind of library as a means of promoting literacy in Africa. Valeda has also made a tremendous contribution by setting up a website for us. The address is www.kitengesalibrary.org; please visit it to learn more about their research, and to see some wonderful pictures of the library and of the solar panels being put in place. The web space and domain name have been donated to us by Cummins Educational Planning Consulting, Inc. of Ottawa. We are grateful to Patrick and Vivian Cummins for this support. The electricity means that the library can be open for longer hours; and that, in turn, means that we need more person power to run it. A student at Kitengesa Comprehensive Secondary School (where the library is located and whose members provide its core membership) gave me the idea of getting such person power by offering student scholarships. Tuition fees at the school are only about $75 per year, but this is more than many families in Kitengesa can afford, and students often drop out of school because they can't raise the fees. So on the occasion of our "Switching on the Lights" ceremony, we announced that from henceforth we would offer donors the opportunity to sponsor individual students who, in return for their scholarships, would give ten hours a week to working in the library and would correspond with their sponsors if the sponsors so wished. We now have four Library Scholars, and Dan is training them to do all the work that he does. The sponsor of the first two Library Scholars is the Youth Millennium Project (YMP) of the University of British Columbia. The Director of this Project, Shelley Jones, is in Kitengesa as I write doing research on the literacy practices of women and girls. YMP and Shelley personally have made generous donations to the library not only of scholarships but also of furniture (comfortable armchairs), and games (for Dan has instituted Saturday night as Games Night, when people come to play such games as Ludo, Cribbage, or Drafts). The school is also the location for a research project directed by Bonny Norton, also of the University of British Columbia. Thanks to Bonny's generosity the library now has a subscription to the national newspaper, New Vision. A Ugandan donor has also contributed the Luganda newspaper, Bukedde, and one of my former students from Makerere University is just launching on a project to study how that newspaper is being used. So the Kitengesa Community Library has become the Kitengesa Literacy Research Center. We have made great progress, but we still need funds, not only for books and librarians' salaries but now also for Library Scholars. To raise these funds, we are organizing another benefit at which students and graduates from Hunter College's MFA in Creative Writing program will read from their work. The occasion will be on WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, at 7:30 P.M. and will take place in THE PRESIDENT'S CONFERENCE ROOM, 16th FLOOR, EAST BUILDING, HUNTER COLLEGE, 68th Street and Lexington Avenue. The suggested donation is $25, or $75 if you wish to sponsor a Library Scholar. We do hope you can come, but if you can't, please send a contribution. Checks should be made out to TEAA. TEAA (Teachers for East African Alumni), is a recognized not-for-profit that is looking after our funds so that your contributions will be tax deductible. Please send any check to me at the address below, and if you wish to sponsor a scholar include a note saying so. Kate Parry kateparry@earthlink.net Tel: (212) 772 5169 (o); (718) 515 0336 (h) |
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