Packages full of new dreams

Small parcels arrive every couple of weeks from Monitor friends--three or four used books, carefully chosen.

The preschoolers eye my basket as I rattle at the gate. "Look, the lady with the stories is here," says Mai D. There's delight in her voice.

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I'm shown along a rocky path, through a tiny veranda, and into a living room with black-and-white photos of Mai D's elaborate wedding in 1960s Zimbabwe hung proudly over the dresser.

"We loved the last stories you brought, didn't we, children?" says Mai D. Shelter, Victor, Tecla, and Nga nod their heads excitedly. Ruwarashe (her name means "God's flower" in the local Shona language) pirouettes in her princess-pink jacket. They clamor eagerly to be allowed to recite poems. Tinashe ? who giggles when I tell him my own child shares his name ? executes a particularly smooth rendition of "Little Puffer Train."

I sit on a tiny wooden chair, Goldilocks-style, and pull books out of my basket.

"They're not from me," I remind Mai D, the preschool teacher who runs this informal playschool. "They're from America."

The book project wasn't my idea. At least, not in the first place. Back in February, I wrote in the Monitor about a policeman who stopped my husband and me at a roadblock in Zimbabwe's remote Marange diamond fields. I thought he wanted a bribe: In fact, what he wanted was a book. (See: "Hungry for a read," Feb. 21.)

In the article, I reflected about how difficult I'd found it as a book lover to live in a country where books were hard to come by. I knew I was better off than most: I had friends back home in England who sent me novels. Sometimes we had spare cash to buy used books at the flea market. For many of my Shona friends during Zimbabwe's lean years, books were a luxury they had to do without.

After all, if you had to choose between buying a book or food for your child, which would you choose?

Shortly after that article was published, my editor forwarded me some e-mails. Readers said they'd been touched by my story: Wasn't there some way they could get books to book-hungry Zimbabweans?

One e-mail came from the headmaster's secretary at a school in California. In it, Marilyn referred to an article I'd written a month earlier in which I mentioned a child named Rufaro whose school library hadn't had a new book for three decades.

"I was wondering if there was any practical way that books could be sent to the school," she wrote.

Hesitantly, I formulated a plan.

Small donations, I urged my correspondents. No more than four books per packet. Secondhand is perfect. Oh, and they'll probably take weeks to get here.

Now, eight months later, a parcel arrives every two weeks or so. My mother-in-law collects them from the post office in downtown Mutare, a city in eastern Zimbabwe. We sort them into piles: some for Mai D's preschool, some for the Grade 4 class at Rufaro's school. I've taken magazines to the offices of the government's adult literary program. Others I give to friends.

This month, a human rights worker told me about a primary school near Marange with a struggling English program.

"My wife's a teacher there," he told me. "They need our help." So into a bag and off to Abraham's wife went "Six by Seuss," "Things With Wings," "Why the Emu Can't Fly," and "Ranger Rick's Storybook."

Thirty-two months after a coalition government brought a degree of stability to this beautiful but bitterly divided country, textbooks are also gradually finding their way back into schools. Until now, 10 pupils often shared one outdated textbook. So a recent announcement that Zimbabwe's education ministry will distribute 8 million textbooks to schools in November was delivered with understandable triumph.

The books Monitor readers have painstakingly packaged and sent are extra books, not formal textbooks. But I like to think of them as texts that give both students and adults places to dream about, whether they are glossy copies of National Geographic magazine or (as just arrived this morning) J.K. Rowling's "The Tales of Beedle the Bard."

This book project is small and informal. I find it wonderful that readers will wait anxiously for weeks to hear that their parcels have arrived "intact" and then trust me to deliver them to people who'll appreciate them.

Trust me (and Shelter, Victor, Tecla, and Nga), they do.

Last year I found a copy of Markus Zusak's "The Book Thief" in a Harare market. I love that title. But on the days I putter around this city with my basket full of books, it occurs to me that I'm privileged to be the very opposite: a scatterer of stories.

So thank you Patricia, Nancy, Bobbi, Donna, and Marilyn of Clairbourn School in San Gabriel, and other generous readers. Thanks for inspiring the vision.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/qG9DQpFvwyI/Packages-full-of-new-dreams

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