Cameroon Mountain Library Project
I have recently accepted a proposal from the director of the secondary school in my village of Makong to help them build a public library. Though the library is especially needed for the school, it would serve the whole rural community of Foto (a large group of villages of which Makong is only one). Currently there is no library anywhere in this area.
As the director stated himself, reading is key to education, and education is key to development. Yet currently, the only books available to students are much too expensive for them to consider buying.
I have already started a small library in my house in Makong. Every time I go to the big city of Douala, I buy magazines like "Jeune Afrique" and bring them back to my house to loan out to the students I tutor in the evenings. The students devour them as if they were starving for reading material (which, I guess, they are) and then bring them back to share with the next person.
We're not yet asking for donations for the library. Right now, we're applying through the Peace Corps Partnership - a program that will allow my friends and family to make tax-free donations through the Peace Corps specifically for this project, which will then be funnelled onto me and the school.
If the project is approved, the school and the community will be contributing 25% of the expenses, and we will be looking for outside funding for the other 75%. But we won't be asking for donations of books, because we want to build an Francophone, Afro-centric library and support the Cameroonian economy, and will therefore be buying our books here in Cameroon to the extent possible (however, if you happened to have Afro-centric books lying around written in French or better yet Yemba... we could use those :)
While we are applying and waiting for the response from Peace Corps Partnership, we are already starting to build the the library - from the inside out. We are finding and buying books and using my house as a make-shift library until the new one can be built.
If you want to support us at this early stage, there will soon be a way for you to do that. I'm working with local Dschang artisans to make their products available online to US customes for a holiday sale that will benefit both the artisans and the library project.
Check back soon for more details.