NiQi helped me on Sunday afternoon to move most of the books over to the library which was a flippin' sweaty job. All that is left now, are the boxes under Johan and my bed, but I will leave them till this coming weekend. They have been stored under there for so long that I am a bit nervous to pull them out, just in case a spider or something has made itself at home there. NiQi and I did transport a frog over already and as I put the box down it jumped out so we had to catch it and put it outside before we locked up.
It has been almost a year since we proposed opening a library in our area and it has been a long slow process but eventually we will get there. I am excited for the day that it will eventually open and in the meantime 'moi' is doing everything...or so it seems, to make it happen. We have had many donations of books thus far, mostly coming from the KZN area, and all English We have had a decent number of Afrikaans books too, donated by people in and around our area, but many of them are really old...although as they say, the cover of a book may be old but the content is often new, so there you are. When we have our next meeting I will again ask for volunteers to help me and see where we go from there....
I really hope that others will gain pleasure from the library and if they don't already have a passion for reading that they will develop one. I have loved reading for as long as I can remember and still today it is for me a 'guilty pleasure'. If I sit and read I always feel that I should be doing something else.....when we first moved to South Africa my Grandad used to send us comics in the post. They came rolled up together with brown paper around them and I remember us all in our respective places pouring over them and reading from cover to cover. Each of us received a different comic and when we were finished with our own, we would swap with each other until we had read them all. Every time I would have my siblings moaning at me because I read so slowly, but it didn't bother me, I just carried on reading.
When our children were small I decided that I was going to read to them every night to try and broaden their imagination and instill in them the same love of reading that I had. There is a 6 1/2 year gap in age between Matthew and NiQi and I read until NiQi was in grade four...there was many a night that Matthew would be listening whilst doing his own homework, even though he was by that stage way to big to be listening to children's stories. I remember that Matthew's favourite story was 'The Ugly Duckling' and every time we read it he would cry for the duckling that no one loved. Mark's favourite story was Hansel and Gretel and it was read so often to him that if I skipped a word or a page he would pick up on it, tell me so and correct me. Sadly our children have taken after Johan when it comes to books and reading, although I do believe that these days Matthew is prone to picking up a book to read when he finds the time.
AAAAH yes, the wonderful world of books...each with their own story, both with the words inside and their journey as a whole....
packed in the kitchen for the time being
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