Elms’ library extras headed to Uganda
By Kathleen Folkerth
WEST AKRON — Several hundred books are making their way to a school in Uganda thanks to the efforts of one local woman and Our Lady of the Elms High School.
Jessica Nape, a graduate of Highland High School and The University of Akron who attended a global summit in Uganda a year ago, spearheaded the effort along with another fellow summit participant.
Nape had met many young Ugandans during her stay there in 2006 and has kept in touch with many of them.
“I had spoken with a Ugandan participant who is a teacher in the north of the country,” Nape said. “Through conversations, he had expressed they had a need for books.”
Nape finished her graduate studies at the University of Wyoming last May and came back to the Akron area for the summer, when she started working on the project in earnest.
“While I was home, I made calls to anybody I could think of in the Akron and Medina area,” she said.
She called many local school
districts, but she didn’t have any success until
she contacted Our Lady of the Elms.
“They had just gone through
their library and they had many boxes of books that
they were clearing out of their library to make room,”
Nape said. “They said, ‘Come on over because
we have tons of boxes of books.’”
Tim DeFrange, Elms’ campus
media specialist/librarian, said the high school library
was reorganized in 2006 because the students were using
computers more and books less. He said he pared down
the library from about 11,000 books to 6,000 books.
Some of the books were first
editions or old enough to be valuable, so the school
sold them. With the rest, DeFrange wasn’t quite
sure what to do.
“The vast majority were
perfectly good but a little on the old side or on a
topic that’s not in our curriculum any more,”
DeFrange said. “I boxed them up.”
When Nape went to the Elms,
she was pleased to see that the books were packed up
and grouped by their Dewey Decimal System numbers.
“There was a wide variety
of books — history, fiction, nonfiction, a few
dictionaries, a full set of the World Book encyclopedia,
and textbooks on science,” Nape said. “We
felt pretty comfortable with this.”
The variety fit the bill perfectly.
“In talking with the teacher
in Uganda, I asked what type of books he needed, and
he said, ‘Anything you can send us will help,’”
Nape said.
Nape and her friend were able
to secure grant funding through an organization to pay
for shipping of the 700 books she selected to send.
It cost about $700 for the shipment of 11 boxes, she
said.
The boxes were sent out via sea
freight carrier Dec. 28 and will take six to eight
weeks to get to their final destination,
Nape said.
The Elms community is happy to
have played a part, said Lisa Massello, principal of
the high school.
“You just hate to throw
away books, so to have someone use them was wonderful,”
she said.
“The Africans will enjoy
the books,” said DeFrange. “They were in
good shape. I am so glad they are going to a good home.”
Nape said she would like to do
the project again, but for now she is readying to depart
for Guinea, in West Africa, for a two-year stint in
the Peace Corps.
“It felt so great seeing
the books in the boxes and seeing them go off,”
she said.
Okello Kennedy Kosko is a teacher at the Lwani Memorial School in Uganda and the recipient of a book shipment coordinated by a Highland High School graduate and Our Lady of the Elms High School.
Photo courtesy of Jessica Nape
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