It's Never too Late for a First

“Sara”, called an eight year old neighbor, “I heard there was a party at the library this morning!” 

The building of the library took a lot longer than I had hoped and after its opening, I felt somewhat bad and definitely disappointed that I wouldn’t have much time to try to start some reading programs with the community.  I felt a little like I had dumped the library on my counterparts and then was kind of abandoning it, hoping they would be able to execute the projects we had discussed like organizing children’s reading sessions, finding volunteers who would help out with the library’s programs, holding a mini training to demonstrate and discuss some methods for working with kids and how to plan a session.  But these past few months had flown by and my hopes of seeing such activities executed were slowly diminishing as I faced the reality of leaving soon. 

Turns out, I had nothing to worry about!  By its own initiative, this week, AJUDEMU, the community organization responsible for the library, organized a group of nine eager student volunteers and created programming for a mobile library project.

The volunteers in their fancy Mobile Library t-shirts

I had always known my counterpart Iassito was an incredible guy with a great amount of initiative and passion for helping his community.  He had arrived on Saturday afternoon, informing me that he had the idea of taking some volunteers to the smaller surrounding towns outside our vila, hoping to spread the knowledge of the existence of the library and reach a larger audience who didn’t have easy access to it.  

On Sunday, we met with 9 student volunteers for a planning meeting.  They designed their program for the session including read aloud and individual reading time, local songs and dances, games like Hot Potato and João (just like Simon Says), and educational games to review the alphabet, spelling, and numbers.  I was impressed by all of their ideas and left the programming entirely up to them.

On Monday, they did a small rehearsal of their programming with children from our community, becoming the first of what will hopefully be monthly children’s sessions at the library.

As they prepared in the morning, I walked around the neighborhood, asking any child I encountered if they wanted to study and play.  Though they often looked at me utterly confused, I got them to follow me to the library, eventually gathering a group of about 50-60 children of all ages. 

I was a fly on the wall during the session, excitedly watching the volunteers interacting with the 50 or so children, my counterparts leading them and taking control, myself not really having to do anything but take pictures.  And the kids loved it!  They practiced writing their letters in the sand.  Counted aloud forwards and backwards.  Attentively listened to their volunteer leader reading a book aloud.  Excitedly paged through a book themselves, sounding out a few of the words or just looking at the pictures on the pages.  It was such an awesome experience to see the community taking control, using the resources we had gathered, having a passion for doing such a project that I had envisioned but that they designed and implemented all on their own, on their own initiative!  I felt totally confident, knowing that the library couldn’t be in better hands, that with my counterpart’s passion and incredible ability to motivate people, he could really do great things with the library.  It still has its growing and expansion, trials and errors to overcome, but it’s slowly making progress in becoming the dream both Iassito and I had envisioned. 

Demonstrating a local dance called Eyuna

Another dance

Playing hot potato

The volunteers are planning this week to go to a local orphanage in a small town called Nihessiue located about 18km outside of our vila.  Though I’m sad to not go with them, it’s time to let this project run on it’s own and I’m excited to hear about their experience afterwards.  They are an awesome group of teenagers who all seem truly interested in helping with the program, in helping their community. 

“Yes,” I responded to my little friend, “We studied, danced, played games.  And there is going to be another one on Saturday.”  “Yeah, I heard,” he responded, “I’ll be there!”