Friday 2 November 2018

The little things we do at the GOAB library


You guys remember a while back, we shot a youtube video with Emmanuel Ohw - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHtlDaePsFA and ran an online crowdsourcing campaign #giveokwarohabook to help kids in my village build a community library.
And you helped us collect 700K KSH and some 7K books. And then Henry Ndirangu put in a good word for us at the Safaricom Foundation and the generous folks at the foundation granted us funding to buy computers. And Atkins Otieno Oriko mobilised children in Dubai to collect us more books.
Well, we opened up the library this week on Monday. I just received pictures from our team setting things up down there.
What I have seen has warmed my heart and welled my eyes with tears.





You see back in 2010, while at the University of Birmingham, taking a break over the Dissertation, we had a conversation with a Brit friend of mine who could not believe me when I told them I wrote my bachelor’s degree dissertation by hand on foolscaps and spent nights using Fatma Nassir’s computer, one of the few available on campus then, to type it up. 
It bothered me that I was up there, counting myself lucky to have had the opportunity to read at a good Brit school, yet I was there competing with folks who had the privilege of access to good learning environments that many of my ilk back in my village in Kenya didn’t. So in 2014 when we shot the documentary, it continued to bother me, and wondered what I could contribute.
Well as someone said, if folks cannot leave the village to get opportunity, we must bring opportunity to the village.
Seeing the little girls and boys scrambling over a laptop to watch a documentary and stream in daily, over school holidays to come learn something new at the GOAB library has made my day.
This rather long post is to tell you all how happy and grateful I am. All of you who have helped us along the way. Those who bought the GOAB T-shirts, those who contributed money, sent us books, put in a good word for us, liked our page and in every other way. Asanteni sana.
We have just begun. If you can help us connect those computers to the internet – tutashukuru sana. If you can help us get more books, magazines, newspapers, TV subscription, whatever you can. Tutashukuru. #giveokwarohabook 

And to folks like Junior Owuor your reward is sacrosanct.