Liberia RPCV Ann Easterly creates libraries in Africa
In 1965-66, Easterly was a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia. She returned in 1976, but the Liberian civil war prevented her from another trip until 2004. Her time in Africa and her love for the continent inspired her literacy project. “I knew the need,” she said. A combination of donations from individuals and from her former school district allowed Easterly to send the first shipment of 17 boxes of books to Nigeria in 2001. Since then, she’s conducted library training and provided aid toward building libraries in several African countries, and Monday she sent her fourth shipment of books, about 96 boxes or around 4,000 books, to Monrovia.
Tess Horan's family traveled to Tonga to carry out her dream of establishing a library on the island
They visited the school where she had taught, met the other volunteers in her Peace Corps group and visited the tiny house where she had lived. They took a boat to the spot in the ocean where she had been attacked by the shark and scattered her ashes and flowers over the water. Prater said she was touched by the reverence with which the villagers treated the family and the respect they seemed to have for Horan. "She had made notice of her integrity, intention, and sincerity so immediately in this small village,'' Prater wrote in a journal she kept of the trip. "In a way, she had lived there a lifetime, as far as they were concerned. The first day she arrived at her site, she went to every house and introduced herself to 60 different households.''
When Joann Reichling's grandson Kehl Mandt e-mailed that he needed books for a public library in the Philippines, where he's stationed with the Peace Corps, she started sending them
The group called the project "Bucks for Books." "We have books, but we always need more," Hirsbrunner said. Now, they need money cover shipping costs. A fund-raiser will be at 2 p.m. Oct. 15 at First Banking Center, Darlington. Reichling already shipped about nine boxes of books, many culled from libraries in Wisconsin, to her grandson. The original project, a children's library in the small village where Mandt works, eight hours north of Manila, is complete. Now, the books are headed for school libraries in the Philippines.
Peace Corps Volunteer Elizabeth Pugh has worked to collect more than 3,000 books in Almogordo for a public library in Lesotho
After a story ran in the Daily News on Oct. 4, 2005, about the village's need for books, the Alamogordo community responded by contacting Yanalcanlin and donating more than 2,000 encyclopedias, college textbooks, fiction novels, children's materials, magazines and classic literature.