Visit the The Camel Book Drive site to see how you can help, and what others have done.
Book donations for the Camel Library can be mailed to:
Garissa Provincial Library
For Camel Library
Librarian in Charge, Rashid M. Farah
P.O. Box 245
Garissa, Kenya
The actual Camel Bookmobile brings books to semi-nomadic people in Northeastern Kenya who live with the most minimal of possessions, suffering from chronic poverty and periodic drought. I visited the region during a period of drought and made several hours-long walks through the African bush with the bookmobile. I cannot describe how moving it was to see the people, particularly children, crowding around as the traveling librarians set up straw mats under an acacia tree and spread out the books. The excitement is palpable.
The Camel Bookmobile books are primarily in English. The children are taught the language in outdoor “classrooms” under acacia trees for the younger students, indoor classrooms for the older students. They particularly like children’s storybooks, though all fiction is also sought-after, as well as books about math and astronomy, biology and other sciences. As you can imagine, the camel library always needs more books — the trip is hard on books and, as these are a semi-nomadic people known as pastoralists, not all volumes are returned.
This area, Northeast Kenya near the unstable border with Somalia, is definitely a region in transition. Due to years of drought and famine, the elders (many of whom still feel romantically attached to their nomadic lifestyles) are recognizing that their children must be educated, so the demand on the camel library is growing. Illiteracy rates in this region are put at 85 percent. Among adults outside the towns, my guess is that it is higher than that. We in the West have so many books; just mailing a single one to the camel library, if done five-hundred times, would have enormous impact.
The Camel Bookmobile librarians told me their patrons also really appreciate the sense of connection they get when a book is signed from a particular place and person. It widens their understanding of the world. So send a favorite book or two, sign your donations with your name and city, and add a note if you wish.
Please email me if you decided to participate by donating books, time or money, so I can thank you. Participating book clubs: email me to arrange a speakerphone conversation with your group. THANK YOU.
A percentage of all sales from The Camel Bookmobile will be contributed to the actual camel-borne library.
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“These books of yours,” Jwahir was saying, “are too foolish, even for the children.” Matani managed – just – to stop himself from interrupting to clarify that the books were not actually his. “Kanika translated one for me.” Jwahir pronounced the next words in slow, stilted English. “A cat. On. A hat.” She shook her head, switched back to her own language. “If such a book held facts for how to hunt a leopard, then perhaps – although even then, it’s better for the knowledge to pass from father to son. But a book about a creature who, what? Sits on a head covering?”
“In a hat,” Matani said absently, distracted by Jwahir’s mention of father and son, wondering if it was off-handed, or intentional, perhaps a subtle female way to show that her deepest desire matched his own. Too late, he realized that he had corrected his wife, so he leaned closer, reached for her shoulder, hesitated and stroked the air above it. “It’s only because I am a teacher,” he said apologetically.
His beautiful Jwahir glared. An apology had never been enough to soothe her temper. And on this topic of the Camel Bookmobile, she routinely displayed more thorns than the acacia.
“On or in doesn’t matter. Either way, it’s a story from the space between one’s teeth,” Jwahir said. “But the true ones are yet worse. I saw a book with pictures of what they called food. Food? How can they call that food? It is we, Matani, who should be teaching them what is important – not the other way around. Even the colors were unimaginable. And the lists of ways to prepare them – pshhh!” She pursed her full lips, almost as though she were readying for a kiss, though her irritated open eyes made it clear that love, unfortunately, was not on her mind.
“Recipes,” Matani said, using the English since his tribe had no word for that.
Jwahir ignored him. “How many separate foods are wasted to make one?” she asked, and waited a moment to see if he would be foolish enough to try to answer. “Ten, sometimes fifteen. How much time is spent on such a project? A full morning? More?” She opened her palms to the ceiling, her shapely fingers extended. “What use is such a book, when maize mixed with camel blood and baked over open fire is a treat for us?”
Wistfulness had slightly softened her indignant tone, and Matani slipped into that opening. “Perhaps the books’ gifts are in what they let us imagine,” he said.
He considered, then, telling her everything he believed about the sole topic besides her that made him passionate. How the Camel Bookmobile offered the only chance of survival for this collection of half-nomads with only one toenail in the future, how the children had to make friends of written words if they were ever to have prosperous grandchildren. How until the books, he hadn’t really felt himself to be a teacher – his only supplies, after all, had been a few pencils, which quickly disappeared, and not even any paper. But now he knew he could do it, he could help create a generation where, instead of one man going off to study in Nairobi – as his father had first, and he had next – there would be ten, or twenty, who would then return to help their people. He didn’t hope to be remembered as a father of his tribe, nothing so grandiose as that. He wanted to be thought of simply as one who helped shape the future and encourage his peoples’ dreams. Like a father who would teach his own sons. And for that, the traveling library was crucial.
– excerpt from The Camel Bookmobile
