Continuing to provide targeted services for Zambia's vulnerable Youth
I would like to share some of the highlights of the past month: - The Lubuto Outreach team is gaining the trust of the girls at Vision of Hope and our visits there are becoming increasingly vibrant. A couple of weeks ago we discussed Human Rights and read the book I have the Right to be a Child together. Before reading the book, the girls really struggled to understand the concept of 'rights' - after all, when living on the streets, this is something which does not really apply. But after we read the book, they really began to understand and started to ask lots of questions about what their rights are, how they might exercise them - and about the rights of their own young children and how to protect them.
- Eleni and I went to buy some new local language books from the wonderfully named Insaka Press, and these have been added to the collection at Ngwerere Lubuto Library. Stephen, the Library Manager there, put them on the shelves yesterday morning, and of course they were taken straight off again by hoards of children wanting to read in their mother tongues! It was a wonderful sight seeing groups of children reading from proper books in their local languages, possibly for the first time, and carefully sounding out the words.
- I have been busy creating activity sheets for the children in the libraries - colouring, literacy activities, an alphabet matching game and dot-to-dot pictures, and next on my list is to write some word searches and mathematics activities. I wasn't sure how popular these would be but as soon as I bring the worksheets out, they disappear. Yesterday the queue at Ngwerere Lubuto Library was leading out of the door!
- I had a wonderful, if slightly quieter time working with one of the boys at Fountain of Hope Lubuto Library. He came to me and asked me if I was not too busy to help him to write down some songs that he had been writing. I told him that a librarian is never too busy to help anybody with anything! As the afternoon progressed, a small crowd gathered and he was able to perform some of his work. One of the lines in one of the songs was "Thank you to Lubuto Library, without you I would be nothing!".