Library Project

I can tell that English is the most difficult aspect of school for my students.  All of their course work other than kiswahili is in English, yet most of them did not really start learning English until grade 3, 4, or 5.  I have been trying to encourage them to read for fun to help them improve their comprehension, but it is difficult when books are so rare and coveted.

That is why I talked to the chairman of the constituency development fund about getting money for our school to build a library. 

Aside: The constituency development fund can be compared to pork-barrel spending, except that here is is directly accounted for in the budget and each constituency is allocated an equal amount of money.  In my opinion it is capable of being a much more functional system than writing spending clauses into unrelated bills.  That is, if it is used properly and if money is not skimmed off of the top through corruption.   

Now our library is almost complete and I have also been fortunate enough to be invited to participate in a multi-school book donation project that has been developed by my good friend and “neighbor,” Matt Palma, as well as two returned Peace Corps volunteers.

They (and now we) are working with Books For Africa to bring an entire container of books from America to Kenya.  The container holds about 20 thousand books, and each school will keep approximately five thousand.

Now the library structure is almost complete and the books are slated to arrive around the end of June or the start of July.