Africa News

Kenya's children of the desert find that knowledge comes on the back of a camel

In poor, remote villages, books are hard to come by. In the second week of our appeal, David Smith reports from Garissa on how those hungry to learn depend on a library with four legs.

Sunday December 4, 2005
The Observer

Rukia, aged 14, leaps forward excitedly at the books spread on the floor. She is orphaned, survives on a diet of tea, bread and maize and lives in the African bush in a home built of twigs and dried grass. Books give her a reason to hope.
'I want to be a doctor when I leave school,' she says in flawless English. 'I want to help people who are sick. My parents died from tuberculosis when I was six. I hope they would be proud of me.'

Picking Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by the African writer Edward Muhire, Rukia Adhan knows that literacy is fundamental to achieving her ambition, and besides, 'reading is more interesting than anything else here'.

Her ramshackle school set amid the flat pine trees and red-brown sand of rural Kenya suffers a shortage of books, but every two weeks Rukia and her friends gaze out expectantly to the arid wilderness for an unusual saviour. It is a camel, which would be nothing extraordinary in this desert but for its cargo of 400 books for the children to borrow, enjoy and learn from.

The Camel Mobile Library Service lends more than 7,000 books to nomads in Kenya's impoverished North East Province, often because camels are the only means of crossing the inhospitable terrain. Many of the books are supplied by Book Aid International, the charity which gives more than half a million books a year to some of the world's poorest countries - and is supported this year by the Observer Christmas Appeal.

The thread of possibilities such work offers children who otherwise have nothing was evident last week near Garissa. Five hours' drive from the capital, Nairobi, it is a place of rubbish-strewn streets, stenches, fetid swamps, watchful vultures, HIV street signs ('Abstain from indiscriminate sex'), shreds of binliners hanging from trees, homes patched up with rags and scrap metal, and carts pulled by emaciated donkeys. And this is the 'well off' part of town.

Beyond the clatter of an old typewriter at the Garissa Provincial Library is the humid office of Rashid Farah, the librarian in charge. The scale of his task is spelt out by a notice on the wall: 'The North Eastern Province has an illiteracy level of 85.3 per cent compared to the national figure of 31 per cent.'

Farah said: 'Most of the people around here need books but cannot afford them. The children are very enthusiastic and happy when they see the camel coming. It is now part of their lives. But we have almost exhausted the supply of books and we need more.'

Each morning three camels - one carrying two boxes of books, one loaded with a tent and one spare - set off from the library to one of 10 drop-off points in the predominantly Muslim province, where few adults ever visit a permanent library. Many are farmers forced into a nomadic existence by drought or famine: where their camels and goats go in search of pasture and water, they must follow, forcing their children to abandon school.

It was the turn of the village of Marmtu to welcome the camel mobile library last Tuesday. Life here has followed much the same rhythms for millennia: there is no electricity or running water and, although Kenya's mobile phone network offers a better signal than that in parts of Britain, no one has a handset to receive it. The houses, or manyatta, are tiny structures of dried grass and tree branches which can collapse in the rainy season. Women in vividly coloured robes draw water from a well and carry it in a jerry can on their heads or roll it forwards beneath their feet.

The children at Marmtu Primary School are visibly malnourished and not all can afford to buy from the mango seller who calls at lunchtime. The school, with 550 pupils aged from six to 16, needs basic tools if the cycle of poverty is ever to be broken.

Younger pupils are forced to share one textbook between four, while the older children have one between three. They are often in classes of 55 pupils to one teacher in rooms with bare concrete floors, or in crumbling mud brick huts where only crooked sticks supported the corrugated iron roof.

The school receives government funding of £400 a year. Wayu Kofa, the deputy head, said: 'We don't have enough books because the money we get from government is not enough to cater for all our needs, and parents are too poor to help - they struggle to pay for school uniform and see books as the last priority.'

Despite their circumstances, these children were not so different from any others as they gossiped, scrapped, kicked a football and chattered in Swahili, Somali or English.

There was excitement when the library camels appeared on the horizon, refusing to be hurried from their patient progress. The animals set down their cargo, and the staff from the Garissa Provincial Library assembled the tent, laid down mats and unpacked the books.

For the children who have no television, music or computer, the sight of a book offers the promise of escape and self-improvement. Soon they were scrambling over each other to get the latest delivery of titles ranging from How Pig Got His Snout, The Orange Thieves and Shaka Zulu to the more prosaic Practical Primary English, Comprehensive Mathematics and Improve Your Science and Agriculture

Among those eagerly queuing was Mohamud Abdi, 12. 'I get books from the camel as it's difficult to find them in school,' he said. 'I like reading because I want to be educated so I can get a job and help my family. My parents keep goats but don't have many. I want to be a teacher.'

Books save lives. Worldwide, it is estimated that this year alone failure to reach the United Nations' 2005 goal for educating girls means that more than a million mothers and children will die. These mothers are unlikely to find out about safe contraception and drinking water, or how to avoid disease in childhood.

The gender gap is stark but the camel mobile library is for both sexes. Eunice Okwero, 15, who was holding a copy of Motherless Baby, said: 'I like stories that tell me what happened in the past. When I leave school I want to join the library.'

The camel scheme is overseen by the Kenya National Library Service, a partner of Book Aid International, which supplies around 50,000 books to the country each year. Their joint activities also include training teachers to be school librarians, an Aids information awareness service and assistance for the visually impaired. The national library's acting director, Deborah Nyabundi, said: 'It's a painful experience when I look at these children. They want to eat, but they have nothing. They want to read, but they have nothing.

'I believe it is our moral duty to help them. They have high ambitions and we don't want to kill those ambitions, but how will they become doctors without education? The best we can do for them is give them more, give them more. Do parents buy books when they can't afford meals to eat? No. That's why we're appealing to Observer readers for donations for books.'

Nyabundi summed up the philosophy of aid which helps people to help themselves. 'If you give a child a fish, you feed him only once. If you teach a child to fish, he is fed for ever. Book Aid International teaches you to fish so you are fed for ever.'

· The Observer has teamed up with Book Aid International this Christmas to raise money for projects supporting reading and learning across Africa and Palestine.

The charity donates a huge range of books and learning materials to libraries, schools, hospitals and refugee camps, helping individuals realise their potential and contribute to the development of their communities.

Every £1.50 ensures that one more book reaches a reader - be it a child refugee gaining education for the first time or a midwife seeking advice about how to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV/Aids.

You can donate to the Observer Christmas appeal in two ways:

1 Call 0800 013 2360 (from outside UK dial +44 (0) 28 9128 6756)

2 Online at observer.co.uk/bookaid

3 Go to www.bookaid.org