Monday Morning Plans

We don't have a second teacher planned for Monday, so during each session I will take a group to the "national" library. We went to visit it yesterday. The building is pretty nice. There's a large room and two smaller rooms to the side. The books only take up a small portion of the two smaller rooms, and the large room has a few tables. The books are mostly old (a few new childrens books in English, and the early 1980s seems to be the most recent of the books in French- The rest were from the 1930s-1960s.) The room with the childrens books and mysteries was locked with a sign that says "Employees Only."

So we're going to take a field trip with the professors, followed by a brainstorming about what can be done. There are plenty of resources available, if a group is willing to prove its interest and commitment. The challenge is that there's a cycle here. Not a lot of people think to read very often, so the demand for books stays low, so there's no build-up of books, so there's no enticement to start reading. And some of the best books end up disappearing into the homes of directors and members of the Ministry. I can't help but think, though, with the right personality running the library, or a group interested in improving the quality and quantity of resources and activities, the library could become a strong center of culture and research. We'll be having the brainstorming session at the library itself (No, there's no one there, so we won't be disturbing the other readers.), which may hopefully have the effect of inspiring the director, or maybe making him just nervous enough to take some initiative. Or, more likely, just make him nervous. Still, it would be nice to have a small enough project that the teachers could tackle and succeed with, to see that they are actually able to work to solve problems they see. We'll see what tomorrow produces.