So I’ve mentioned in the past that my town has no functioning library. The city government in Arsi Negele built a building to house the library several years ago, but ran out of funding to equip it with books and supplies. Well, I’m proud to announce that through some super generous donations, my local officials and I were able to collect 10,000 books, a dozen desktop computers, and a bunch of desks for the library. In fact, we had so many amazing donations, I have been able to fill several new local high school libraries with the overflow books that wouldn’t fit in the municipal library. By far one of the more proud moments of my working life. Below are a few photos of our previously-empty town library the day we brought all the books over and put them in the shelves (we had so many books, the only way the city could transport them from my office was in the back of a dump truck).
Special thanks to our donors, which include: CODE Ethiopia, Darian Book Aid, Ethiopia Reads, the United States Air Force, USAID, PEPFAR, and my wonderful counterpart Dekebo Dale!
The books are in four languages--English, Amharic, Tigray, and Afan Oromo
A few local folks helping us stock the books
Our Librarians stocking the little kids section
Mountains of books to sort and shelve. Not a bad problem to have!
And if you want to participate in this amazing and ongoing project, I’m still looking for a couple e-readers for the library. To my knowledge we may be the first rural African library trying to experiment with the technology. Let me know if you’ve got an old one you’d like to donate (peacecorpsanceda@gmail.com).
This African Life 
Posted by Lindsey Wolf on February 29, 2012 at 10:06 pm
amazing amazing amazing! Well done Spencer!