The children are very enthusiastic and happy when they see the camel coming. 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.'įarah said: 'Most of the people around here need books but cannot afford them. And this is the 'well off' part of town.īeyond the clatter of an old typewriter at the Garissa Provincial Library is the humid office of Rashid Farah, the librarian in charge. 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. The thread of possibilities such work offers children who otherwise have nothing was evident last week near Garissa. 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 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. 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. 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. 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'.
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