My contribution to the library was working on the arts and crafts room

A few weeks back I talked about going around Strand, Gordon’s Bay and Somerset West trying to collect books for the ACJ library. Well, Sunday was library day so all those books that we have been collecting and were finally supposed to put them in the library yesterday. There were about 50 GVI volunteers from all over. Mostly coordinators from different parts of the world. Richard, the CEO of GVI was there as well and on my team. We were in charge of the arts and crafts room and we were the lucky ones who got to clean up poo. Yeah, we found poop in our room so our first step was to clean that up and bleach the floor to get rid of the smell. That was first than we cleaned the walls and gave the walls a fresh coat of paint. This actually ended up taking quite some time because of limited supplies so spending lots of time searching or waiting for different things and then limited people. We originally had about four and we kept on losing team members. One of the learners had to go to another group and then Richard had a flight to catch so he left early. It was ok though. We got more helpers after lunch with was held at the orphanage. It was really good but it took forever. We were supposed to eat at 1 and we didn’t eat until two. I helped put food on the plates which apparently has to be done in a very particular way. It was fun though and the weather was crap so that meant we had to run back in forth from where the food was being prepared to where everyone was waiting.

Once lunch was done, it was back to work and we got more people to help which was good but it also made things very chaotic. I worked with Catalina on the words “arts and crafts” which you wouldn’t think would take very long but it certainly did. It looks really good though and the others worked on the rest of the walls drawing animals. I really wanted to do spatter painting though but no one else seemed to think it was a great idea LIt would have been so much fun. So the end result where lots of animals and other random things on the walls and we actually didn’t finish. Today at school some of the learners were finishing up…..They worked during break and then they were supposed to come back afterschool but I don’t know if that actually happened. Currently the arts and crafts room is still sort of a mess. There are a lot of random drawings on the walls but we do have plans to fix it up. Overall, it was a great day because ACJ now has a library to be enjoyed by all the learners!

Part of the brand new ACJ library