After we became friends with Mary Vandi, the Headmistress of St. Monica’s School, she told us how much the school needed a library. Collecting children’s books in the Quad Cities was easy. Getting them to Sierra Leone was another matter. Getting the shelves made and installed was an adventure that took much longer than necessary. The shelves are high on the wall to make sure rodents won’t reach them. We dreamed of kids sitting under trees reading books. What a joy it was when library dedication day came.
A few years ago we shipped a large number of books to Sierra Leone through Books for Africa, which has shipped containers of books to schools in Sierra Leone for several years. Many of our books went to the University of Makeni. We saw the Books for Africa books being catalogued when we visited the library there.
More recently we shipped five barrels of books and clothes collected by Understanding Works. The children’s books were distributed to schools in Freetown and in rural villages. Our thanks to friends in the Quad Cities who donated books and to the Galva, Illinois Lion’s Club and United Methodist Church that sent playground equipment along with the books.
