Excitement in the world of the library

So, I'd more or less given up hope on this whole "mobile library" project. I'd called and written to every library in Limpopo and Mpumalanga (the two provinces we sit between), and none of them were of any use. Neither was the department of education. Neither was anyone else. So, I cut my losses, decided I'd bit off more than I could chew, and figured I ought to be happy with what I got, which was adult fiction books for the entertainment of the people who actually use the library (servicing user's needs), and then just carry on with my other library duties.

Then, after handing in my mid-term journal, my faculty supervisor for this internship back at URI contacted me about making a personal donation to the cause, and possibly getting other library students on board as well. This of course was amazing news. You have no idea how elated I felt after reading that email.

The rest of the week went by in a happy flurry of passion-driven library work. After feeling hopelessly rejected in all my attempts to get book donations, here comes a promise of cash to buy new books. There was so much to do!

I spoke with Sunel and our department's supervisor, Kathleen, as well as the finance department head, Sharmain, to figure out how to handle it. We set up an internal project fund for the mobile library, I forwarded donation instructions/banking details to my professor. After that, I did some research and came up with a wish-list of 50 titles in Shangaan to serve as a base collection. It's so hard to find native-language books in South Africa, but I did manage it. Also, with renewed enthusiasm to search, I found some charitable NGOs to solicit for either book or money donations, and began writing up proposals. I've identified three major charities and solicited two of them already. One of them has already turned me down, but I'm not despairing. The third one is pending approval of my supervisor before I send it out, and the second one has not responded yet, but that's okay. There's still hope.

Gosh, I'm so excited about this project now! I feel like now that I've finally gotten the ball rolling on this thing, it's getting close to the time that I have to leave this place, and I fear I won't complete anything meaningful before I go, and Lord knows if the person after me will be able to pick up where I left off. I kind of want to stay longer, or come back later, or something. But I know I can't.

Doing good things

Thursday at work was rather interesting. After cataloging another small collection akin to the WWF manuals (these ones were the Redbooks - lists of endangered species), Sunel said she had a project for me. We are a very small library, and as such, have a very small budget. Therefore, any money that we do spend, has to be justified that it meets the needs of facilitating education and training. This means that we don't really have a budget for entertainment, which is unfortunate for the staff and students who live here and don't have transportation to go out after work/class or on the weekends. So, it was put to me to develop a collection of fiction books for the library so that staff and students have leisure reading during their time off, which they had been requesting for some time, but alas, no budget. And there's no ILL or anything like that here, either. If we don't have it in-house, we don't have it, and you're not getting it. The key, though, is that I have to develop this collection with absolutely zero money. Good thing I'm resourceful, and know how to politely beg.

I spent the next two days (minus part of Friday which I spent putting some files into the archives) soliciting donations from local public libraries for discarded fiction books. Initially I was just going to ask for adult fiction books, but noting our involvement with the village schools near here, I wondered if I mightn't ask for some children's books too, because if we're poor, they're probably much more so. Sunel thought this was a great idea, so I had at it. I've actually had a bit of luck and some good responses so far. Next week, actually, Sunel is supposed to go out and collect a bunch of donations from one of the libraries that responded (being that I don't have a car and such), and I'm anticipating the arrival of these "new" books greatly. This is pretty much going to be my baby, my big project, of the semester, in addition to all the routine stuff, and I like the idea of that.

Both days after work I went on a sunset game drive. It was a little harder to capture the animals I saw on camera because of the fading light, but I did see a lot more of them, which I'm really happy about. Funny observation: the whole "deer in the headlights" phenomenon is worldwide. After it got dark, the impala would just stand right in front of the car, frozen in the headlights, just like North American deer, and we had to drive forward slowly with the lights off so that they would jump away from the vehicle moving toward them.

Most of my weekend I spent either cleaning house, catching up on sleep, or shooing critters out of my room. Seriously. A scorpion, a baboon spider, a baby squirrel, our resident frog, and a bat all made themselves part of my life this weekend, in addition to the normal bugs that abound. The elephants were really loud this weekend too. Gawie noted that it's probably the bull elephant we've been seeing trying to move in on some younger females, and either they don't want it and/or the older females are jealous. When elephants get mad, they don't just trumpet, they growl too, and they're incredibly loud. More than once I'd heard them and gone running to the fence to see what I could see, and they were nowhere, but I could still hear them so loudly as if they were right in front of me.

Next weekend, one of the administrators is taking a trip to town and has invited me to come along. It's nothing special, she says, but it'll get you out of the bush for a day. She wants to go get a facial and get her nails done among other girly pursuits, which seems kind of ridiculous for the part of Africa we're in and what we do here, but on some level I understand it. Sweating all the time, bugs, critters, dirt 24/7...I completely get the need to break away every once in a while and do something nice for yourself. I'd settle for a shower with more water pressure than a leaky faucet, but getting my hair done and going shopping will do just as well. I'm also hoping to go on a longer sunset game drive into the night, and farther into Kruger than I've been going, and maybe seeing a couple of big predators too.