The Reading Room

Our main project of the week has been to create a reading room for the children in the OVC program to use. The OVC program had a storage room full of donated books. Yesterday we went through them all and sorted them into subjects, reading levels, and languages. We could tell that those books had been sitting in the storage room for forever. They were covered in dust, rodent pooh, and bugs. Gross. Hello hand sanitizer.

Today we cleaned out the room that will be used for the reading room. Next we cleaned off all of the books—what a task! We then set them up on tables. Through the whole process today, I made some very adorable friends! In the morning while I was walking some books to the room I saw a group of five or six year old children who were waving at me, and so I smiled and waved back. A little later on, the same children were hanging out closer to our room, then eventually they were peaking their heads in. They looked so curious. I gestured them in and pulled a picture book of a table and handed it to one of them. They darted for the middle of the room and sat down in a circle, all hovering over the book. A few minutes later when they looked bored with that book, I handed them another, and they all got so excited. They eventually started walking around and checking out the books for themsevles. As I was walking back and forth from the reading room and the storage room transporting books, I found one little boy follow me into the storage room. He watched diligently as I started picking up the books and copied me. This tiny boy insisted on carrying over the biggest and heaviest textbooks. When we returned to the reading room with the books, the other children had seen what he had done. The next trip back to the storage room, the other children followed. They all started carrying over books. They looked so proud. Their smiles lit up their faces when I would say “thank you”.

They disappeared for a little while, but came back and continued helping us by organizing the books onto the tables. Work time soon turned into playtime. Although I could not communicate to them through language (they only know Setswana), we sure could give high fives. More children flooded in. It eventually became the playroom. There was one little boy who was organizing all of the games. I had no idea what was going on, but they just pulled me around and put me into my positions. They kept coming in and out of the room, but whenever they would walk by, they would stop for high fives. At one point they each had some cookie type of treats and they were very generous to keep putting them in my hands. What started off as three children waving at me from across a distance, turned into about ten children hanging on me. What a day. Best day I’ve had here. Oh yeah, we got the reading room set up.