Lavender Hill - the follow up

As you may recall, when we all went out to the Lavender Hill High School last week, we were unable to stay to see the opening of the new library.  Yesterday, Randall volunteered to drive Subina and I out there again. It seems as if I have mentioned how difficult getting around in Cape Town is.  Teach with Africa does not rent vehicles for us to use, plus they do not allow us to take the trains, nor use the mini-van taxis for transport.  It puts us in the ackward position of having to find rides from the LEAP bus drivers, or from nice people like Randall.  I suppose that we could rent our own car, but there is the money side of that and I just don't want to spend my available funds that way.

But I digress. :)

Lavendar Hill is about a 35 minute drive from the LEAP campus. It is a black township, not one of the worst and not one of the best.  Housing is in the multi-story apartments that you see in this photo instead of the informal housing structures that you saw in the Kalkfontein photos.

For some reason, palm trees are common here.

We met with the School Librarian, her name was Jane and I did not catch her sir name. Jane was very animated about the library.  She told us the story about how it has taken a year under the Equal Education program to get the library in place.  The High School houses 1,200 students with an average class size of 40.  In the early 1990's there was a library, but that was closed down long ago.  The South Africa Department of Education will not fund libraries.  Not one dime.  If a school wants a library (and most of them do and most of them do not have them), then they need to find the space and the resources to do that.

That is Randall, Subina, and Librarian Jane in the new Lavendar Hill library.  All of the books came from Papa Chris' shipping container The Bookery.  The bookshelves were donated by Rotary International.

And a special surprise while we were there - do you see the black chairs?  The plastic patio chairs?

While we were standing there, the plastic chairs were taken out of the room and brand new conference-type padded chairs were brought in.

It is such a warm and inviting space, I just wanted to sit down and spend the day reading. 

As I was looking at the book titles (because I could hardly resist), this one jumped out at me ....