Latest Happenings in SA

This past weekend down toward Cape Town was the 20th annual Hermanus Whale Festival. 
Hermanus/Walker Bay area is reputed to be the best land-based whale watching area in the world. Every year at this time the Southern Right Whales return to this area for the spring/summer season.  It is estimated that 200 whales will come to the bay and the Festival brings 150,000 people to watch.  If we are here next year I would definitely like to go.

I am still volunteering at the Diepsloot Combined School. I am up to 3 mornings per week right now as we have added a new project, which is cleaning up the library and getting it to a point where it is usable.  The school hasn't had a librarian for over a year, in which time the library has fallen into a mess of unpacked boxes, stacks of periodicals, and stacks of unshelved books.  At some point there was a drive in the white community to donate used books to the school library (which serves students in all 12 grades).  These boxes have been collecting over the year and have simply piled up, unopened.  We estimate there are over 100 boxes plus stacks and stacks of magazines.  There are also unopened, still shrink-wrapped school-purchased books, novel sets and teacher resources that are sitting in a corner collecting dust.  Three of us started last week unpacking and sorting the used books by general subject or topic: fiction, non-fiction, history, math, science, etc.  Sadly, many of the donated books are useless to the students here.  It is obvious that people just cleaned off their bookshelves of unwanted books (medical texts from the 1960s is one example) and so after unpacking them, we repacked them to ship them to the local prison library.  Our ultimate goal is to get all the books unpacked, sorted, Dewey Decimal numbered and shelved.  Then we would like to start having classes come through for a library orientation and train students, teachers and volunteers how to keep the library in working order and to ensure the library functions as a useful resource for students and faculty. We estimate it will take 6 months or so to do this.

Hope all is well with everyone. Please stay in touch!  Jody