Masiphumelele Library & Park


	The library which we built in 2003 and extended in 2005 has become the hub of our community work and it has also become an important center and information resource for the community. Next to the Library we have built a green park with a playground for the children.

We supplement the City budget (which would only allow the library to be open four mornings a week) so there are programs going on every week day. We cater to small children (all the day care centers bring their pre-schoolers to be read to), to school children (who come to read, play chess, be read to, to do their homework) and to adults (who come to learn how to read and life skills like how to answer the telephone).
Why is it a success? It begins with the building - a space where all this can happen. .


	After that it is because of the people who run it. Sue Alexander of the Fish Hoek library (right) has taken responsibility for making it work and has appointed a first class local staff led by Noluthando and Veronica.


	Left to right, Jill, Pam, Noluthando, Sue, Elize,and Veronica meet upstairs in the library


	Noluthando (left) is the Head Librarian of the Masiphumelele Library. She coordinates the running of the library and Veronica (right)backs her up.

Milli (right) is the Volunteer Coordinator for the volunteers who come in to help in the afternoons. She also runs the Lap Reading program. Nontsikelelo works for the library as a cleaner. The children ( including HOKISA children who are AIDS affected or AIDS orphans) are taught by Zoliswa, newly appointed and proving to be a very dedicated worker. She also visits the nursery schools in the township. We also have nursery school visits every Thursday morning.

Mriri (left) works 2 hours every afternoon. helping people with computers. She helps people obtain email addresses so that they can go online and browse the Internet on the Smart Cape System.

We offer tutoring in the afternoon for high school seniors in English, Biology, Accounting and Science. The teachers are all volunteers from the surrounding communities. and stimulate children at home .

We have a cross cultural play group in which mothers from surrounding (white) communities bring their young in to play with Masiphumelele kids (see left)

Play groups may have nothing to do with books or learning, but are nevertheless an important part of our mission to enable cross-cultural collaboration in the communities surrounding Masiphumelele.

The library is a “safe space” so people who would otherwise never enter Masiphumelele will come in for volunteer activity and even bring their children. Thus slowly, slowly, the barriers of apartheid are broken down.
To pursue our vision of the library becoming the central information resource for the community, in July and August, with the help of a number of volunteers, we will compile the first Masiphumelele Directory of Services listing every (legal) establishment in the township (shops, churches, day care centers, community groups etc.) and offering each some free advertising in the Directory.


	We have installed 10 computers upstairs in the library. Friends from CSC in the US gave the first class (see left). We have formed a partnership with a local organization that teaches the ICDL (International Computer Drivers’ License), and are running courses that will provide Masi people who have an aptitude for computers a chance to obtain employable skills.
		Gerding Fund Thank you to Kate Gerding who was a World Teach volunteer working in Masi in July and August 2006. She donated money she had left over from her trip for the students she worked with to take the ICDL course. She hopes to add to the Gerding Fund for others to do the same.


	Next to the library is the Park complete with a children’s playground and benches to sit on; the only patch of green in the otherwise barren landscape of the township. Eyethu Park means Our Park.

In addition to the library and the Park, we support a number of Community organizations such as HOKISA which cares for AIDS-affected children. In South Africa about 5000 people a week are dying of AIDS; in Masiphumelele we do not know how many are infected because many who are sick do not present themselves for testing, such is the stigma of the disease. As parents die and children must be looked after, the economic burden on the surviving family is often too much to bear. So AIDS brings down not only the infected but also the survivors. HOKISA takes care of both to the extent of its ability in the face of the overwhelming numbers affected by this pandemic.