A Million Minutes in Africa

A couple weeks ago, I began volunteering at the Kathy Knowles Community Library, which is one of the libraries run by the Osu Children’s Library Fund. [Thanks to Heather, former intern at my former workplace, for telling me about it.]

The library is housed in a converted shipping container!

I was interested in librarian tasks, but what they needed was a literacy teacher, so that’s what I am. There are three classes: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. I am teaching the advanced class. Advanced in this case means they can read basic texts haltingly. Their writing is not as strong as their reading, and spelling is hardest of all for them. The beginners are learning the alphabet — the sound each letter makes and how to hold a pencil and write the letters. The intermediate students are learning to combine letters to sound out syllables and begin to read words.

The students in my class seem to be either in their late teens or early twenties for the most part, although one woman looks to be in her 50s.

I’m not sure why these students are just learning to read, if they ever went to school or weren’t able to for some reason. Anyway, it’s great that they are taking advantage of these free literacy classes to learn. They are all very nice and enthusiastic.

In Santiago, we visited the National Library of Chile. This is the main reading room.

Thanks to a contact Laura has, we were able to visit the Centro de Documentation at El Mercurio, the preeminent newspaper in Chile. I talked shop with the news librarians there — you know, indexing, databases, research, clip files. It was interesting to learn how similar their jobs are to mine.

That’s my gracious host, Veronica Vega, on the right.