We began our morning by meeting Kathryn Shindoll and Clay Hughey from Family Legacy Mission Zambia. Please check out their website as they do way more amazing things than I can explain in this short post. Through Books for Africa, Family Legacy was able to receive a container full of books for the many classrooms they oversee.
Kathryn explained that before the container arrived, they had no books in their classrooms. Today, when we visited three of their schools, every classroom we saw had a bookshelf with books on it!
At the first school we visited for the day, teacher Alicia explained that when the children were asked if they liked their books, they exclaimed, “We LOVE our books! And we can read them!”
In addition to the books in each classroom, the plan is to have a school library at each school. At their largest school, a village for street children called Tree of Life, they are building a library right now. “Come back in a month,” Head Teacher Dennis Kunda said, “and these shelves will be full of books!” We saw boxes of books with Books for Africa logos as well as others ready to fill those shelves.
Family Legacy has a yearly theme for all of their schools; this year’s is “Reach for the Stars!” As Dennis so aptly put it: “We look at these children as the stars of tomorrow and believe that one day, they will really shine in this world.”
Each time a student does something admirable in class, like read in front of everyone, the kids clap and sing “You Are A Star!”
And to every employee at Better World Books,
And to every library that donates books to Better World Books,
And to every customer who buys a book from Better World Books (automatically donating a book to someone else),
We say, “You Are A Star!”
You really should have connected with the Lubuto Libraries while you were there to see what they are doing.