Again from Buzz Balls & Hype. A moving post about the Camel Book Drive. Click here for author Masha Hamilton’s photos.
.. . the bush is hard on books and the traveling library needs more. The books they have are written in either English or Swahili, both of which are taught in school. (…) The librarians in the Northeast Province who travel with the camel bookmobile told me patrons especially love it when a book is inscribed with a note from the sender.
Susan Ito has compiled an Amazon wish list of what she would buy, and she says:
What kinds of books are good for a camel bookmobile? I tried to imagine. Obviously, books about technology and computers are less than useless. Ditto on home decorating. Or most cookbooks. But books about art? Math? Science? People doing things in the world. People doing things in other parts of Africa. Stories. Photographs.
Masha also says on her site:
The Camel Bookmobile books are primarily in English. The children are taught the language in outdoor “classrooms” under acacia trees for the younger students, indoor classrooms for the older students. They particularly like children’s storybooks, though all fiction is also sought-after, as well as books about math and astronomy, biology and other sciences. As you can imagine, the camel library always needs more books — the trip is hard on books and, as these are a semi-nomadic people known as pastoralists, not all volumes are returned.
Think we could get together a 25# box of maybe children’s books? Fiction as well as non? I’ll gather the books, box them up, and ship them out.
It wouldn’t take a lot of us to meet 25# I’m thinking, so post here if you’d like to participate by sending me one book, or one dollar to go toward postage. We’ll try that for now, so how far we get.
Be sure and leave an email addresss so I can contact you with instructions. (No one will see the email addy but me.) Don’t email me directly. Just post here and let me contact you!
I ran one across 7 writing blogs for the launch of my column on Feb 1.
