Rosemary Harris blogs a Chalula library update

We spent the next two days in Dodoma meeting new friends from the PEN Trust, handling library business, and buying water and provisions for our stay. Then we were ready for the last leg of the journey, a one hour drive on a dirt road to Mvumi Makula. This time we were joined by Ricky, another vol who was just finishing up a month in the village but welcomed the opportunity to go back for one last goodbye. The Chalula Community library has been open for close to two years now. There have been ups and downs -including our librarian's serious bout with malaria, and sand-encrusted solar panels - but for the most part things are going well. The collection is growing, albeit slowly, and every day that we were in the village, dozens of children came to read and be read to by the older children and the volunteers. Housing for us and the vols is a small mud brick building with three bedrooms and a common room for eating or socializing. The rooms are furnished with foam mattresses, mosquito nets and whatever the volunteers bring. For my husband that was a flashlight and a stack of New Yorkers. For me it was a canister of Moist Wipes. Don't leave home without them. The two suitcases of books and school supplies we brought were soon catalogued and added to the small collection as were two big boxes brought by our new friends Mungwe and Andrea, the founders of PEN Trust, The Poverty Eradication Network. www.pentrust.org Their help was invaluable on this trip and I am optimistic that this will be the start of a beautiful friendship! I spent half a day using clear plastic packing tape to rebind the ones that we'd left the last time we were there and I don't doubt that we will need to rebind them again the next time we visit!