Kochi :

In less than a month Panchatantra, Aesop’s fables, Gulliver’s Travels and Oliver Twist will reach the remote village of Kichangani in Tanzania, thanks to Somy Solomon and her social media friends. Hartal or no hartal, her team of 50 is busy categorizing the 7,000 odd books -collected from all over India and abroad- at SH School of Communication on Saturday. Around 50 volunteers from the college and Cusat turned up to categorize the books before shipping. The sorting works will be completed by Sunday and the books will be shipped before March 22.

Kichangani Library, which received social media attention since October 2014, is not just a library, but a learning centre for the villagers. “Such a learning centre came to my mind after I reached Tanzania in 2012 after my marriage. Education is a luxury that most people cannot afford. And for the same reason, they are exploited and most kids go for domestic work at a young age. I feel a learning centre would be the first step to help them,” said Solomon, mother of two-year old Pachu. The envisaged centre will also have a reading room, a video room and computer training centre.

While the space for the centre was provided by the Kichangani village chairman, books were donated by people across India, Singapore, Sharjah, Dubai, Germany and the US. The cost of packing and shipment was sponsored by an IT firm based in Kochi and the transportation is being done with the help of a non-resident Malayali based in Tanzania.

The contributions were books and CDs in English and Swahili, including language and literature, general knowledge, biographies and diaries, dictionaries, atlases, geography and history texts, art books etc.

The learning centre, which Solomon hopes to extend to other villages, will have a drinking water facility. “Water scarcity is one of the major problems here. We hope to set up a drinking water facility at the centre for which the people have to pay as per the law of the land. The money collected will be used to run the library,” she said.

Solomon has begun a non-profit organization named ‘Ubuntu Reads’ to get government recognition for the library project. Twelve kids from the village will be given training to run the library. “This is to ensure that even if I leave the place, the movement will still go on,” she said.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Kochi / TNN / March 15th, 2015