The bright red shipping container shown above is now the home of the Our Reading Spaces Program at Kenya’s Thika Primary School for the Blind and Kairi Village. Individual donors in the United States and Books for Africa contributed over 22,000 books. Volunteers from Georgia came together to sort and pack these books for children and families in Kenya.

While it is easy to celebrate the Library today, the fate of these donated books was in doubt just a few years ago when a Delta Airlines flight from Atlanta to Nairobi was abruptly canceled.

We didn’t know where to begin, but we needed to act quickly because the schools and entire community were already waiting for the shipment of books. Fortunately, the Safaricom Foundation came through with a large grant to ship the books.

This new Our Reading Spaces Program now has a plethora of wonderful stories to share. It’s a welcoming environment for the children who visit the library on a daily basis, as well as the community’s senior citizens (70 and up) who stop by frequently to pick up a book or learn to read. Even college students who cannot afford to buy new textbooks visit to obtain computer books for their classes.

Now that our Kairi library has a permanent home and is open for business, we can take a moment to reflect on the impact of our collective hard work and efforts as we continue to expand the Our Reading Spaces Program.