Library

In the three weeks that I am staying at the teacher’s compound of the school, I am helping out and working in the school’s library. Don’t let the name library fool you too much, as it is more of a library/tool shed /computer lab/office, but the school received quite some books from an Australian organization that collects old primary school books and donates them to Fijian schools, so it has a bit more potential than just being a tool shed with books. The donation of old books is pretty generous and kind, but it also leads to pretty funny situations where there is a complete mismatch of book and location. For example, Skiing Techniques for Beginners, Golf Tactics for Pro’s and the golden discovery: The Day My Bum Went Psycho & Space Bums From Uranus. Pretty cool children’s books with childish humour to get children to pick up books and read. However, maybe not perfectly fit for a pretty conservative Christian village school. The teachers I showed these two books to could enjoy it and laugh about it, but insisted that we should not put them on the shelves but burn them. This is not as extreme as it sounds (but I like the idea of holding book-burning ceremonies for the sake of it, ever got a chance to burn books in a socially acceptable manner?), as everything that is thrown away here is burned because there is nobody who collects the trash in remote villages.

Well, furthermore I have been placing library cards in the books and cleaning the whole mess that we want to become a library and computer lab up, of which I am pretty sure I can keep myself busy with until next week. I will be staying here in Naivicula until next week Saturday, after which I will probably go to the small backpacker island of Mana for 4 nights, and then Kim and I will go to Taveuni (another, you guess it, island. They seem to like those around here).