The Shipping Container has Arrived in Ghana!

John, Cathy and Vida size up what
half a container looks like

Vida Asomaning Amoako, Executive Director of Street Girls Aid  reports that the container with the books from Books For Africa books to fill the sponsored Little Free Libraries  (which were also included in the shipment) has arrived and is now being housed at the Ghana Book Trust. Plans are underway to begin sorting the 12,000 books and begin distributing them to the sites where the Little Free Libraries are being installed by Street Girls Aid as part of the capacity building grant that Rotarians and friends just completed in

There's how many books in there????

Ghana.

Many thanks to all of our friends at Books For Africa, Rachel Brady and Patrick Plonski who organized and shepherded the container to Ghana, Ghana Book Trust's Genevieve Eba-Polley, Executive Director and John Acquah who cleared the container through the Tema port and safely got the shipment to the Ghana Book Trust  site, and of course, Todd Bol who initiatied this portion of the grant by requesting that we bring the sponsored Little Free Libraries to Ghana. Todd Bol, the Executive Director of Little Free Library was featured in the latest issue of The Rotarian Magazine   who inspired the  Little Free Libraries portion of this grant by developing a program that sponsors libraries that are assembled, built, installed and maintained by non-profits in other countries as a means of supportive income. More about this program later, as Street Girls Aid provides assessment and feedback about viability and mission-driven fit.

John and Genevieve with Vida and Cathy and the
Burt Award for African Literature Books

While we were visiting the Ghana Book Trust Ghana Book Trust, Genevieve and John told us about the Burt Awards For African Literature. The Burt Award for African Literature is a literary prize that recognizes excellence in young adult fiction from Tanzania, Ethiopia, Ghana and Kenya. Sponsored by CODE and made possible by the generosity of William Burt and the Literary Prizes Foundation, the Award addresses an ongoing shortage of relevant, quality books for young people in Africa, while at the same time promoting a love of reading and learning.

A display at the Ghana Book Trust
of past Burt Award recipients

Vida and Cathy looking through
books at the University bookstore

The Ghana Book Trust is instrumental in distributing the books selected for the Burt Awards to their non-profit and educational partners and added Street Girls Aid to that list during our meeting with them - and the exciting news from that was that Vida was given several full sets of books that had won previous Burt Award to add to the Street

Burt Award Winners

Girls Aid Little Free Libraries. You can imagine how excited we were to find additional copies of previous winners at the University of Ghana Bookstore, where Vida took us to purchase other books by local authors for the grant.

We bought as many books
as we could carry

What a fun day filling our bags with books to fill the Little Free Libraries, knowing that the books were relevant, locally written and filled with colorful pictures and native stories that the girls and their children could see themselves in and relate to - what a great way to boost literacy.

The following week, the team focusing on the Little Free Library portion of the trip returned with Vida to select 1,000 books in anticipation of the container's arrival.

 

Thank you so much Ghana Book Trust for letting our volunteers visit and select books from your vast warehouse as a "loan" against the container which did not arrive in time for us to process those books and libraries. Vida and her staff now get to have a ton of fun sorting through the books that are now safely in Ghana - it makes me want to get back to Accra just to play and interact with all of those beautiful books!!! Alas, we will have to leave that up to our friends on the ground to help Street Girls Aid sort, transport and deliver all of those fantastic books from Books For Africa/ and fill the Little Free Libraries!