The library is open!

Whew. 

The library. Is. Open. 

Rather than start from the beginning right here and right now and making this an unbelievably long post, why don’t you start from the beginning of this library journey by reading my other two posts about it from quite some time back: My Own Calcutta and Library Logistics. 

It’s okay, I’ll wait for you to finish. 

Ready? Great! Let’s start where the last post left off…

More than two years ago (Wow, has it really been that long?) when I went back to America after my first trip to Noah’s Ark, I began collecting books to start a library for the secondary school. The collection was more successful than I could have imagined. Over the course of six months, I gathered books from four main sources: 

1.  Individuals with books to spare. It turns out not everyone wants to hang onto their childhood books (or their children’s books) forever. I can’t remember how many people brought me boxes of books, everything from Charlie Brown comics to decades-old Nancy Drew to college textbooks. Some people even invited me into their homes to look at their shelves and take what I wanted. It was like Christmas over and over and over again. (Just to clarify, on Christmas I don’t enter people’s homes and take whatever I want. The simile is not that literal.)

2.  Goodwill and other used bookstores. Goodwill sells used books for between ten and fifty cents depending on the type of book. I quickly discovered that one full shopping cart equaled about one hundred dollars. I knew I was buying a lot when the third store in a row sincerely thanked me for clearing off their shelves.

3.  My mother. That generous woman probably spent hours looking up books online and browsing through bookstores to find a handful of good quality, new books to add. The science section has doubled in size and quadrupled in quality because of her. 

4.  And finally, Morton High School! Chris Johnson tipped me off that the school had set aside boxes of books that had been withdrawn from the shelves and would soon be sold, and then set up a chance for me to browse through them before they went anywhere else. After hours of searching, reading the backs, and boxing them up, I ended up with more than one thousand books, several of which I read when I was in high school. For all those, I think we paid a penny. 

I had a lot of books. One could say my house was flooded with books. (One has said my house was flooded with books.) It was beautiful. Besides having to tiptoe around my apartment at camp to avoid the domino effect with all the piles, every time I looked around I was reminded of the students who would get to use them and filled with hope for the impact it would have. I was also filled with a desire to read every last one, but held myself back as best I could. 

Once I acquired so many books, the hard part became figuring out how to get them to Uganda. If it had been only a few boxes I could have asked some American volunteers to pack them in their extra luggage and take them by plane, but it didn’t seem fair (or possible) to ask people to take hundreds of pounds of books halfway around the world as a favor to me. By the grace of God, someone put me in touch with a pastor who was preparing a container to be shipped to Noah’s Ark later that year. Not only did he say there was enough room for my books, but his ministry also covered the cost of some of the shipping, saving me around a thousand dollars (so then I could buy more books!). I was practically giddy when I heard the news. It seemed too easy! All I had to do was ship them to Massachusetts and from there they were taken care of. 

Since the official Book Boxes at U-Haul looked like they were for wimps, I bought dozens of the small packing boxes, which were one size up from the book ones. After all, if I used the smallest boxes I would have to pack more of them. Packing them turned out to be no problem, but as I tried to move them from my apartment to my car I realized why the book boxes were so much smaller. Forty-five pounds of pages are not easy to lift. So if you ever need to haul or ship books, humble yourself and buy the book boxes. 

I shipped the ones from Wisconsin, moved back to Washington and shipped the ones from there, and then that July shipped myself to Uganda, as I had decided the books couldn’t have all the fun living in Africa. Then I waited. 

In January 2015 the container made it to Uganda and the books made it to my house. 

I can’t tell you how many hours I spent opening box after box and sorting them into categories to prepare them for the library. It was tiring—one time my neighbors walked by to find me sitting on my coffee table (the only available space in my house) with my head on a box of books, sound asleep. 

After they were categorized, we started the tedious process of stamping, labeling, and entering the books’ information into a computer system. Most weekends I invited teenagers to my house to make an assembly line while we watched a movie. Even with five or six people working, it took about two hours to do one hundred fifty books.  

Then an angel came, by the name of Josephine. She was in Senior Four, the final year of ordinary level schooling, and was busy studying for her national exams. When she tired of studying, she came to my house to stamp and label books. Many days, she spent more time in my house than I did. Without her, the library would not be open yet. Of that I am sure. 

The stamping, labeling, and entering process took months. Finally, on a sunny Saturday in May, we loaded the boxes onto the tractor trailer, cleared out my house, and moved them to the primary school library, where it had been decided the secondary library would also be. Christian, Josephine and I unpacked the boxes and filled three long bookshelves, then placed an order for a fourth because we had run out of room. Celebrations were in store!

Until Monday, when we were told the library would be in the secondary school instead. A few weeks later, we repacked the boxes (which were getting worn out from so much use), put them on the trailer again, and shifted them to a new room in the secondary school, where Josephine once again organized the shelves and made it look wonderful. 

Over the next month, we had meetings with the headmaster to organize details, textbooks were stamped, labeled, entered into the computer and added to the collection, desks were moved in, a clock purchased, rules written, a schedule distributed, library cards made, announcements  announced… 

And then the doors were opened. 

Okay, the door. There is only one door. But “doors” sounded more poetic. 

The best part—students are using it! 

It will take time for them to understand the value of studying in a library, as they have never had one before, but in the last two weeks dozens of students have taken novels and textbooks to read on their own. It is fun to hear them come back talking of the stories they read. One student told me the library is filled with nightmares—apparently he has accidentally signed for two scary books in a row. 

At its simplest, my goal is to improve literacy. The students need practice, and with thousands of books available to them they should be able to find something that interests them enough to read about it. I have loved reading for as long as I can remember, and it brings me joy to see teenagers here who get as excited about books as I do. Or who get excited about them at all. 

As a bonus, Josephine mentioned last week that she is considering going to university to become a librarian. If you could have seen the smile on her face…

Thank you, THANK YOU to everyone who has contributed to the library in some way or another. If it weren’t for book donations and money to help cover shipping costs I don’t know if this project would ever have come to fruition. And now, finally, it is a real thing!