The Library

Matholeng Primary’s classrooms each have a small library of books, obtained, I think, from the African Library Project through the hard work of the volunteer who lived in this area before me. The students are very enthusiastic about using these books, and as a fellow lover of books, I was very excited to let them at it. It turns out that we have a profoundly different view of books. This isn’t going to be a post about how the students descended upon the library in some kind of odd feeding frenzy type maneuver I’d previously not seen outside of Shark Week, or how they managed to disorganize and disorder the entire library in about three minutes, or how children in general are essentially agents of entropy. This is a post meant to highlight just one slice of that sequence of events, which was the line of students who came up to me saying “sir!” and holding their books up to me while flipping the pages rapidly, a look of disgust on their faces. I didn’t realize what they were doing until one said “no pictures!” Then it sort of became funny, as their attitude basically said “What is this, sir? You said you call this a book? You know that’s funny, because around here we call this a joke. Why don’t you let us know when you’re ready to get serious and give us the real stuff.”