Kitengesa Community Library newsletter gives the news about community library in Uganda.

1. Kitengesa Community Library August 2018
There are almost always childen to be found in the Kitengesa
Community Library. These ones are from the Muslim
Primary School in Kitengesa trading center. Their
clsssmates were involved in a football match, and these, left
out of the match, decided to use the time by coming to the
library. It’s what the children of the area now do when they
are at a loose end.
But the library doesn’t only serve children. In July 2018 our
big project was with adult women. We were fortunate
enough this year to receive a grant from the Heidi Paoli
Foundation, under the New York Community Trust, to
operate a week-long health camp in two successive years, the
purpose of which is to teach village women about cancer.
The Heidi Paoli Foundation supports projects to help cancer
patients and their carers, and when we began research for our
proposal we found that cancer has become the biggest killer
in Uganda, surpassing even malaria. Yet there is little public
discussion of the disease, making our small project a
significant innovation in public health—as the District
Health Officer and the Director of the Marie Stopes Clinic in
Masaka town have told us.
The camp lasted from Monday 23rd
to Friday 28th
of July,
with the morning of Saturday 29th
given over to a closing
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ceremony, in which the participants displayed what they
had learned. Not all the time was spent in serious
discussion, though. The participants played games
designed to reinforce the information, and they worked
on locating websites that provided pictures and further
explanation. So while learning about health they were
also developing their literacy skills.

2. exams with the help of tutors, because Kitengesa
Comprehensive Secondary School couldn’t give
him the experience to pass the chemistry and
biology practicals; and Moses Namwanja wants to
take a university degree in social studies. We will
contribute to their tuition costs and try to get the
books they need.
We keep trying to think of ways in which the
library itself can make money. The latest idea is to
use the new projector that the Heidi Paoli
Foundation has enabled us to buy not only for
health camps but to show films for a small fee. We
don’t yet know whether this will work. Meanwhile
we must pay salaries, fees, and tuition—and buy a
few books to replace the children’s stories that have
been read to pieces and to provide Mohammed,
Moses, and others with the information they need
for their further studies. Please consider making a
donation if you can; it will be much appreciated.
Kate Parry
Director, Kitengesa Community Library
We plan in December to organize another health camp,
this time for young teenagers and focused on HIV-AIDS.
We have held such a camp four times now, and it is
always popular. The graduates of the camp have formed a
Youth Leadership Group focused on growing nutritious
foods for their families as well as passing on information
about AIDS. In these teenager camps we are able to focus
more on reading because a number of good books have
been published about HIV and, being secondary school
students, all the participants can read English, which
many of the women cannot.
Meanwhile, the regular work of the library goes on—
recording the books left on the tables and presumably
read; shelving the books; cleaning the library; helping
clients to find information.
Much of this work is done by our seven library scholars,
whose secondary school fees we pay in return for
working in the library. They are supervised by the head
librarian, Dan Ahimbisibwe, and by two library
assistants, whom we recruit from library scholars who are
about to leave school. It is the library assistants who keep
the library open for nine hours every weekday and four
on Sundays, and all for a tiny salary. We try to
compensate for the salary by helping the assistants with
their further education. Of the present two, Mohammed
Ssebuuma wants to retake his Higher School Certificate
Ways to donate
1. Send a check, in dollars, to FAVL
(Friends of African Village Libraries),
P.O. Box 90533, San Jose, CA, 95109-
3533, U.S.A. Please write Kitengesa on
the memo line of the check.
2. Go to FAVL’s website (www.favl.org),
and press Donate with Paypal. You can
use either a Paypal account or a credit
card and can make the payment from any
country. Please add a note that it’s for
Kitengesa.
What your donation will buy
$5 will buy one or two small storybooks
$10 will buy a school textbook or a flip chart
$15 will pay the night watchman’s salary for
a month
$30 will pay one of the assistant librarians
for a month
$50 will buy a modem stick so that the
librarians can access the internet
$100 will provide for one library scholar for
one year
$600 will pay for newspapers (two in English
and one in Luganda) for one year.
$1000 will support further education for one
library assistant.
$1500 will cover the costs of a one-week
long health camp for twenty people.