Steve's New Library

I spent the past week at Steve's site. He's another Peace Corps volunteer who came at the same time I did and asked for help with his project. I cannot even describe the task at hand and do it justice, but I'm going to say a bit about it. He had 3000 books donated to his school by an air filtration company in South Africa. There were about 20 volunteers from the company that came to help for 2 days. We set aside 1/3 of the books to send to a different community. Then we sorted the rest of the books into a high school library using the Dewey Decimal System, a primary school library, and an intermediate library. For every book, we stamped it with the school's stamp, put a check-out pocket in the back, labeled the spine for cataloging, numbered the book for a master database, entered it into an electronic data base, and put it in the done pile. Holy cow was it a lot of work. We didn't finish. It's a HUGE task. We were at 2800 entered into the computer by the time I left today. (I guess their 3000 books wasn't so accurate of a guess.) WOW!!! Makes one really appreciate the US libraries and librarians! I think I do not really want to start such an extensive library here. Cheers to Steve and all his hard work!