Of books and friends: building a library abroad with donated books.

• Author: Hogan, Denise C.
• Position: Emily Dickinson

THIS IS A STORY OF FRIENDSHIP, joining an American woman in fast bond with a Kenyan man, and of books, which are the frigates that sail between them. As Emily Dickinson observed, "there is no frigate like a book, to take us lands away".

Even as we embark on our separate voyages, Harrison and I always return to the secure berths of our respective homelands. Together in spirit, we have been happily coursing the high seas of the printed word for the last eleven years.

It all began when I first visited Kenya in 1995 and reunited with a young man who had been a student during the years I spent with my husband at the University of Maine at Presque Isle. His African name is Kilonzo; I know him as Harrison. He graduated with honours in 1991 and took his business degree home to Kenya. By the time we connected four years later, Harrison was employed in Nairobi, married and the father of two sons.

It was a joyful reunion. We were invited to visit his home village, where we were warmly received by his large extended family, and to me it seemed that we were greeted by the entire village. All day long, from the time of our arrival in the morning until our departure in the early evening, people drifted into the family compound to greet us. A goat was roasted in our honour--a sumptuous feast--a warmhearted expression of traditional African hospitality.

Harrison took us to a small building, half of which he had been renting for use as a bookstore. He was able to make available limited quantity of school supplies, such as pencils, pens, notebooks and a few texts, to children attending the rural school. In most African classrooms, the teacher alone possesses the text for the day's lesson. With this in mind, Harrison asked if I might manage to secure used textbooks for shipment to Kenya upon my return to the United States.

My first effort in that direction yielded 13 "M bags" (capacious canvas bags used for international shipping) containing all sorts of books donated by the school system of Danbury, Connecticut, where I lived at the time. Word about my project spread quickly to the surrounding towns, and we were deluged with different kinds of books: describing the world's geography, rivers, seas and mountains; dealing with the celestial systems; relating to animals and plants; and children's books, including a well used set of the Americana Encyclopedia. Such abundance became a storage problem on the campus at Western Connecticut State University, and loads...