During the first term of the school year one of the school’s classrooms was used as a boys’ dormitory. Sometime during March the school was informed that technicians from Windhoek would arrive by the end of the month to set up the school’s computer lab using the computers being held in storage. The boys were asked to leave their room and move into tents on the ground, but the technicians never came. My HOD (head of department) Vilo and I decided that it was time to see if we couldn’t plug the machines in ourselves, but the Principal asked us to wait because he had just been told that technicians would be coming sometime before the end of the term in April. They never came.
So for approximately two months a classroom from which learners were evicted sat empty and unused; it bugged me. During the examinations, when learners stopped coming to school regularly, and lessons basically ceased, I decided to busy myself with converting the empty room into something productive. After acquiring keys to unlock storerooms I had learners help me carry boxes of books (fiction, non-fiction, textbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, books on tape, that had been collecting dust for years - plural) across the school blocks into the new library. Other teachers and I unscrewed shelves that stood bare in different offices and placed them next to the library walls instead. Each night I loved going to the library to sit at my computer alphabetizing and cataloguing all of our books while playing hip-hop music at just slightly above a reasonable volume. The light in the room must have given away my habits because I was once asked by another teacher, “What time do you wake up and what time do you go to sleep?”
Included in the pile of things rotting in storage were 11 unassembled computer desks. I enlisted Vilo’s help to spend a few good hours lifting and hammering pieces of wood, and by the end of the night the library was outfitted with some pretty sharp looking workspaces. That night just so happened to be the most rewarding, and best night’s work I had ever performed.
At the start of term 2 I adorned the shelves with signs and the walls with posters, printed a library contract, and in the first few weeks of the term I took classes into the library one by one to receive a library orientation (“Fiction means False”, “be nice to the books because they are your friends”, etc). As classes learned how to use their new resources the library opened in the afternoon and in the evening with different classes having different scheduled times for them to use it.
Some things that the learners did in the library were quite frustrating, but I had to keep reminding myself that these kids had no idea what to do because they had never been in a library in their whole lives. For example, when I originally shelved our magazines I divided them into piles based on subject matter. Then within categories I had magazines alphabetical by title, and then within titles I had them in chronological order. It took maybe two nights before I realized that just keeping like magazines in a pile together was sufficient. The kids’ disorganization was partly due to an immature messiness and also partly due to the fact that many of them didn’t even recognize that the piles were organized in the first place.
As the library found its rhythm I decided it was time to start opening computer boxes – and time to stop asking permission to do so. Plugging in the computers wasn’t exactly difficult, certain cords can only fit in certain holes, but I hadn’t the foggiest how to connect them as a network or to manage a server. A Peace Corps volunteer I had befriended who lived in a town nearby was nice enough to pop in one day and set-up a mini-network for me with the school’s server and three client computers, and she gave me a crash course on how to be the server administrator myself. Another WorldTeach volunteer from town was also willing to come by a few weekends later to spend an evening with me listening to hip-hop music at nowhere near a reasonable volume, hooking up the rest of our computers, and zip-tying all of the cords together (a crucial step). That so happened to just surpass my night with Vilo to become the best night of work I have ever completed.
So Oshikunde now has a full-fledged media center, and the kids have become so accustomed to it that I can sit at my desk typing this blog while they read and only have to utter the occasional “Quiet please”. Computer lessons at first were exhausting, running around making sure no one broke anything and repeating myself over and over again. To give you an idea, in lesson one it took every class a full forty minutes to simply turn on and then turn off their computers. But just this afternoon I had a full computer lab with learners doing everything from flipping through encyclopedia software to playing mouse practice games and using typing training programs while we all listened to a local Kwaito (a Namibian form of up-tempo hip-hop) musician at a reasonable volume.
In conclusion, which is a way you should never conclude an essay, I just wanted to mention some other pieces of the library. The library has more substance than just desks, computers, shelves, and books. It also has all sorts of educational posters (world map, dinosaurs, marine life, my skeleton, etc). It also has cuts of traditional Owambo cloth patterns that protect the machines from dust after hours. It has a clock above the blackboard (something quite foreign to your average Owambo). It has a CD-case full of local and international music, speakers, and headphones. It has board game box sets complete with chess, checkers, and what has proven to be the crowd favorite, snakes and ladders. All of these items were purchased using funds that were donated by my faithful readers, and I have only spent about half of what was raised. So on behalf of everyone at Oshikunde I wanted to say thank you.
One night my principal observed as learners lined up outside the library door waiting for it to open and then filed in quietly, took out books and began to read and study. I could not have been more proud of the “libulali” that you helped me build.
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