Where do books come from?

In our library we have an ever-increasing number of books, the majority of which are textbooks.  Some of the books, however, are small readers for students.  About half of these are written in Kinyarwanda, and the rest are in English.  My students love these books!  All of the textbooks are written in English and I’ve yet to discern if students are truly understanding them.  Although, I’m happy knowing that they’re trying and are learning as a result. 

All of these came from the Rwandan Ministry of Education (or MINEDUC as we like to call it).  They arrive in boxes, out of the blue and only mildly organized, and it seems to be fairly luck of the draw as far as what books we receive.  I have yet to discover if we are able to really request what books we want, and like many things in Rwanda, I’ll probably never really know. 

I have looked into purchasing books from abroad/ working with an organization to get books, but all of these methods are pretty involved.  My priority was to get a functioning library in place, and gauge the level of interest.  Now that I see level of interest is high, I’m almost out of time!  However, the good news is that my site (and school) expects a new Peace Corps Volunteer to come to replace me in December.  Now, what they decide to do will be entirely up to them, but I’m hoping they too will want to help improve the library!

After our LIP is finished and the renovations are seen to fruition, I plan on taking some time to work with teachers on how to use the books.  Books are rarely used in the Rwandan classroom as instructional aids.  More often, you can see teachers simply copying information from books onto the black board and students subsequently copying information into their notebooks.  Our goal is to get teachers to use class sets of books to do various exercises and activities, and to help students understand just how textbooks can help them in their lessons.

When we last catalogued the books, we had about 6,000.  Now I believe we’re closer to 10,000.  This is great and opens up so many possibilities!  Another reason why efficient and effective library organization is needed here.