Community Library Kitengesa

NewsletterMarch 2012

• New Library Building opened in January• Library now has full Internet access• Benefit Dinner on April 17 (see page 2).

Dear Friends,

It’s unusual for me to write to you all in the middle of the academic year, but the January just past has been an extraordinary month for the Kitengesa Community Library, and I must tell you about what has been hap-pening.

The Big Event was the of-ficial opening of our library building on January 18. Uganda’s Vice President, who comes from a village a few miles down the road,

was invited as the Guest of Honour, and he came complete with entourage, albeit a couple of hours late (but that’s normal be-haviour in politicians). Some two or three hundred other people came as well, including the representatives of about fifty of the 96 libraries that are now members of the Uganda Community Li-braries Association (UgCLA). Kitengesa is a leader amongst those libraries, and we held the Association’s annual conference in the nearby town of Masaka over the preceding two days so that the participants could come to the occasion before returning home.

It was a typical Ugandan Function, with speeches from Mawa-nda and me, as co-founders of the library, from my husband, Kasozi, as Chairman of the Library Board, and, of course, from the Vice President. But the highlights for me were the Mass at the beginning—at which the choir, including several of the library’s Women’s Group, sang with extraordinary beauty—and the “entertainment” in the middle—in which Moses, our Library

Composer, sang a song with the Women’s Group proclaiming that they, the women, were heroes. Liliana Hertling, one of the Ameri-can guests who came to stay with us for the occasion, filmed this song and has posted it on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U00ZT3QRp7Q.

There you can see Angella (in dark green), who learned how to read in the library and became one of our most avid readers; Margaret (in white with red flowers), who organized the women’s chair-renting project; Josephine (in a white top and dark skirt), whose children were among the first to come regularly to the library; and Julius, Moses’ brother, who gave me the idea of the Library Scholarship programme, and who is now in charge of the library’s new computer centre.

The new building includes a reading room of the same size as the old one-room library, a slightly smaller computer room, and a much larger community hall. This hall will enable us to raise a revenue for the library since we will rent it out for meetings and par-ties—the local MP has already asked to use it. But we will also use it for our own purposes, with one corner specially designated for children and another for the Fam-ily Literacy Project that we run with the Women’s Group; and the space will be invaluable for the hordes of primary school children that come to the library every week.

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But there’s still more: the computer room has now been set up with built-in desks round the walls for computers; and our good friends of the Maendeleo Foundation (see www.maendeleofoun-dation.org) gave us last July six Intel Classmate computers. Then this January the Hawk Children’s Fund of the University of Mary-land Eastern Shore campus (UMES) gave us funds to buy four more laptops as well as additional solar panels to power them and a wireless modem-router with one year of unlimited airtime.

So now the Kitengesa library has full access to the internet! The next thing is to find funds to train people in using it, and we are working out systems for getting users to pay for airtime once our initial year’s supply runs out. As you may imagine, this is an enormous step forward for the library, and indeed for the whole of UgCLA, for the systems and programmes that we develop here will serve as pilots for national projects.

So, please, rejoice with us! For those of you who are within reach of New York City we are organizing a special celebration on April 17—a party at a midtown restaurant where you can see pictures and videos, buy a few Ugandan items (including UgCLA’s newly published picture books for children), and meet some of the people who have worked with Uganda’s community libraries. For the rest of you, we are busy updating the library’s and UgCLA’s websites, and you can get more information about our doings from the blog run by our umbrella organization, Friends of Afri-can Village Libraries (FAVL, at www.favl.org).

And, should you be inspired to send us a cheque, FAVL will always be happy to receive it for us. We have a prospect of revenue now, but I don’t expect it to cover more than the librarians’ salaries. We will still be dependent on your generosity for supporting Li-brary Scholars, buying books, and organizing programmes.

But see what your generosity has achieved already!“Nayanziza,” we say in Luganda, thank you very much, for you have helped us build a vibrant institution that is both promoting literacy in Kitengesa and its neighouring parishes and setting an example for nearly a hundred other libraries across Uganda.

Please make checks out to FAVL (Friends of African Village Libraries) and mail them to FAVL, P.O. Box 90533, San Jose, CA 95109-3533. Write “Kitengesa Community Library” on the memo line of the check.

Thank you!

Kate

Newsletter - March 2012Kitengesa Community Library

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