We’ve spent the past several months collaborating with local students, teachers and village leaders to create a library for the commune of Belaoka-Marovato/Andapa.

The photo above is of one of my students from the environment summer class I taught at the local college (Anisa 13 yrs) in our new natural sciences and language library. It took months of organizing, scrubbing bare cinder block walls, painting and fixing with the village carpenter, bookcase building, bamboo map-framing, book inventorying, stamping and community agreement drafting, but is finally done and in-use (apart from the community garden we’ll plant outside and the outer wall mural that has yet to be painted).

Our community library is the only public place with books in the Andapa region, aside from the Alliance Francaise. Here, Anisa is sitting at the reading table in front of our French Natural Sciences and Fiction section (we also have a Malagasy-French-English Dictionary, Malagasy Agriculture & Environment, Wordless Book, French Fiction, English Fiction, English Natural Sciences, and Malagasy & English magazine sections).

I walked into the village college yesterday on my way back from Ambodigavo (where we’re coordinating the womens income-generation workshop right now) and saw that every child in the classroom had a matching WWF VINTSY environmental education magazine in front of them. I’d never seen a book used in a class before in my village (apart from the teachers’ manual).

In the next classroom over, the teacher was using a world map that he borrowed from the library (National Geographic magazine fold-out that we had framed in bamboo). Just last week when I visited the school, he was teaching geography from a map he had roughly drawn on the blackboard and was having all the students copy in their cahiers, in which Madagascar was drawn the same size as South America.

Everyone in the community is so proud of their new library!

Sincere thanks to the Norvig family for their magnificent contributions of books and supplies.

Samy Tsara e!
Rachel