Here's another update of how things are going with the biblioteca de Punta Banco:
Clothing Sale
First of all the clothing sale we held in the beginning of December. That went really well. We had lots of clothes donated by tourists and some of the expats that live around here. Even though it felt to us that we didn't get as many customers as we expected, we raised about $400 that weekend!
Activities
We did a lot of fun stuff with the kids in December, like baking X-mas cookies, making X-mas decorations, organizing an afternoon with activities that all revolved around Morocco (because a friend who lives there visited).
In January we returned to the usual schedule of reading, coloring, working on the picture-dictionaries and playing bingo. Last week we could add watching kids videos in English (Diego, Backyardigans, Blues Clues) to that since someone sent us a whole bunch of DVD s and we bought a DVD/boombox with a screen to watch them.
Location
We are still located in the lunchroom of the school, but we have been talking to the people of the school committee since the school has a house that formerly was meant to house the schoolteacher, but is not in use for that purpose at the moment. We are waiting for the committee and the teacher to make a decision about whether we can use this space for the library. Since the summer-holidays are here (and we are in Costa Rica) this is taking a while. We'll wait and see and meanwhile the library will still be in the school lunchroom Mondays from 1 to 4 o'clock.
Donations
In the meantime we get more and more donations: books, art supplies, CD s, DVD s, clothes and money. By now we have about sixty children s books, but of course we can always use more, so keep on sending them! I will publish a list of the books we have on this blog. We are also extending our book collection with adult books in Spanish, of which we have about ten at the moment. These books we are lending out, where as all the children s books are to be read only in the library. We would also like to add learning on the computer to our activities, so if anybody has a working laptop that he/she would be willing to donate, please send us an email!
Thank you, thank you, thank you again to everybody that supported us by sending or bringing books, supplies or clothes and/or volunteered during clothing sale or library days!
Sassy, Britta and the community of Punta Banco.
