Books are for everyone

My gorgeous friend Gayle is involved in a church outreach program. This took her to Jairos Jiri home for the disabled. This is a residential school for some 140 children, many of them severely disabled. The children come from mostly poor homes from all over and reside at the school during term time and go home to families and guardians during school holidays.

However you feel about this concept of care for children, it exists and is in quite a run down state.   During her visit there Gayle discovered the facility had a large library room, neglected and unused. She persuaded me to come and have a look. Next weekend some of her church group (mostly teenagers in the churches dare to serve program) are going to do a clean up and help with painting. She had hope we could paint and cheer up this room and get the children back in there.

Sadly, the state of disrepair is too severe for anything substantive to happen next weekend. Shelves will need to be removed and lots and lots of piled up 'junk'. It seems people have been very keen to donate things over the years. Not things that the children or their carers and teachers actually need, but stuff they just have to give. Seeing all this being piled up and rotting gets you thinking about the fine balance between what people need and the need to give. Get it wrong, and things just get worse.

So having spoken to Margaret, the lady in charge as well as Evelyn the teacher assigned to assist us with the library, they are keen to have the library space restored, as much because they can use it for training as for the children. Cool.

So, next weekend I will join Gayle and her group and help them clear the space and make it safe. Margaret has someone to fix the roof (critical, can't do much with books if the roof leaks). With a donation of new ceiling boards (who i wonder can do this??) we can then, only then, be in a position to clear the shelves, clean and paint, design a simple but fun and colourful space for the children and repurpose some of the furniture for children's activity and adult learning. Big job, huh. But worth doing. I will use the Mount Pleasant Branch model as a template for this space.

Here is what it looked like today. I do hope something can be done. I believe St Georges College Form 4 boys do a service project here too (and those lucky young men benefit from one of the finest school library spaces I have seen).

A life without books is a much, much smaller one- and how much smaller can it get for a child in a wheel chair. Books are for everyone.