Join the Movement

We are Surina and Keisha. We are 14 and 12, and we live in Nairobi.

We have always had books. Loads of them. The kind you finish at midnight
because you cannot put it down, and the kind you read again even though you
already know what happens.

Then we went to Kathonzweni, where our dad grew up. We met children our own
age. We talked about school and football and what we want to be when we are
older. And then we asked them what they were reading.

Nothing. Not because they did not want to — because there was nothing there.
Their headteacher told us that most of her students had never read a book that
was not a textbook.

We thought about that the whole way home.

Here is what we could not get out of our heads. Our shelves were full of books
we had already finished. Books just sitting there, doing nothing. And four
hours away were children who would have read every single one of them.

So we asked our friends a question: instead of giving one child one book,
what if we made a place where hundreds of children could share them?

That turned into a library. A real one, in a classroom nobody was using. We
collected books and carried them there. We covered them and wrote out the
labels with the students. Our friends Yara, Keya, Sianna and Kayaan raised
money for the shelves. Our parents drove us back and forth more times than
they probably wanted to.

On the day it opened, children queued at break to borrow something. Some of
them were holding a storybook for the first time.

We have helped build four libraries now. We want to get to ten.

And this is the part where we need you.

If you have a book you loved and have finished with — send it. Somebody your
age will read it next, and to them it will be brand new.

If you are at a school — ask whether you can run a book drive. One box from
one classroom becomes a shelf.

If you work somewhere that could help build a library — please talk to us.

We did not wait until we were grown up to start this. You do not have to
either.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end.