My time at Peace House Secondary School (pictured above) was incredible! In addition to morning runs through the orchard, watching the sun rise and set on either side of Mt. Meru and hanging out with the students in their free time, the majority of my time was spent in the library, which was still in the same state of disaster I had seen it in July. I arrived Sunday night and began working bright and early on Monday morning with the immediate task of figuring out the system of classification, which turns out was easier said than done. I was the third volunteer to come to the school to work on the library project, and the previous volunteers did not use the same system consistently. Turns out there were four separate spreadsheets on the computer – fiction, nonfiction, textbooks, resources – into which each book would fit accordingly.
With the system deciphered, my days flew past as I worked amongst one of my greatest loves – books – by stamping, labeling and entering into the computer each individual book. Believe it or not, the entire mountain of books you saw in a previous picture was conquered as I was able to sort, mark and enter over 4,000 books including all the textbooks; finishing the textbooks because my goal once I got started so students and faculty could begin using them as soon as possible. Additionally, the books which still needed to be marked and entered were separated and boxed as well.
One of my favorite parts about working in the library was when people stopped by to visit (well, unless it was the math teacher who very decidedly assured me that it was impossible to get through all the books in one week or perhaps, he predicted, ever) and found themselves wandering to one of the tables and browsing through titles or pausing to read a page or two; it really felt like the little storage room had already become the library! And I was delighted to discover PHS library is now in possession of countless titles that make up my childhood and young adult favorites as well as more recent classics: Little House on the Prairie, American Girl books, Baby Sitter Club, Nancy Drew, The Giver, Aliens Ate My Homework (this was a Westby road-trip book-on-tape classic), Emma, Mansfield Park, Sierra Jensen series, anything by Lurlene McDaniels and Michael Crichton. How lucky! But I'll admit, it was a challenge to not stop what I was doing to page through the stories that filled so many of my school bus rides, family road trips and before-bedtime reading (which always went well past hours I should have been asleep).
Ironically enough, the books were donated by Books for Africa, an organization based out of Minnesota, and the majority of the textbooks came from Lakeville, Anoka, Minneapolis, Andover and many other familiar Twin Cities names. So here's a shout-out from East Africa to my peeps in MN!
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